JaneAusten

For anyone who thinks our own media is not misogynistic, I rest my case:

This may have been posted already, but David Brock is now funding the start of a Breitbart for the left. I'm no fan of Brock's by any means, but David Sirosta I hope can be a controlling force. I know Sirosta was scathing on Hillary but it might be good having someone at the help with an opposing view. We'll see. Obviously I am skeptical but it's sadly something needed. The left also needs more media outlets so the message can get out to the non urban areas. http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/20/media/true-blue-media-david-sirota/

So I just got back from the rally in Chicago. Mega amazing. 150,000 people. There were people of all ages, colors, genders. People brought their pets, babies, kids and it was a very uplifting event. They had to cancel the actual march because of the unexpectedly large turnout. But much of the crowd elected to march anyway. Only thing that does sadden me a bit is not a lot of black women and I can understand why. We white women have a lot of work to do to earn their trust back and justifiably so. I don't even know if it's possible. Not to say the crowd wasn't diverse, but it was something I observed. But the white women in the crowd were schooled by a 75 year old white woman who was a civil rights activist and worked on the equal rights amendment in the 70's. She rattled off the percentage of European centric Americans who voted for Trump included the 53% of white women. It's obvious it made many in the crowd uncomfortable. She acknowledged it would, that she was pissed about it, but went on to challenge them and to charge the crowd up again, but especially that group. It's odd to hear me talking in the third person as I am one of them. Not one of the 53% but a white women and know there is more I can do. It feels like such an overwhelming task until you realize the Tea Party started in 2009 and made huge election inroads in 2010.

They lead by example. They love the poorly educated.

This is true but disingenuine. This march originated from Pantsuit Nation, the group started on Facebook to support Hillary Clinton and it was a place for women to share their stories, especially those being targeted. That evolved into A BLACK WOMAN from Ft. Lauderdale saying we should have a march. Then a few women got together, formed the committee and started organizing and guess what, not one WOC as part of the group. They got slammed and finally added a couple but I have to say it's disingenuous to an extent, only. BUt one of the original organizers is a Bernie supporter who has been on the defensive for weeks as women, men, finding it offensive that the woman who was the original inspiration for the group doesn't get recognized but the woman who was the first green party VP candidate does. THey are even using the phrase Hillary marked "Womens rights and human rights" as their call. I mean seriously. And the excuse was we didn't think the timing was right and no reconsideration. Much of the bickering again is being propagated by the extreme left "Bernie Bros", who themselves are sexist and racist. I doubt any of these people are going to be at any of the marches. Their rights are not in danger. But this is their goal. Chaos. But as a result, the women who know best about resistance, persecution, being targeted, black women have been turned off by the arrogance of saying the woman who inspired the group who herself suffered targeted harassment on the political stage like no other, who they supported, is not good enough to at least be recognized because of a few women at the top of the organization think adding her name to a god damn list would be divisive. What happened to marching and being inclusive like your talking about. This wasn't really intended to be a political march per say, but a show of unity. Yet even it seems we still have women, you know white women - the 53% of the population who voted for Trump, saying unity is important except when they don't think it is.

Considering many of those MP's supported Brexit, I would have expected a bigger turnout. I think Theresa May at least finally gets how screwed they are. But twisting the knives on the Scottish as she's trying to do is not going to help.

It's a shame that our new Fuhrer is not listening to this repeat of Reagan's second inauguration speech. He talks about nuclear weapons and our desire to work with the Soviet Union to eliminate them due to their capability to kill millions of people in a moment and how it's a no win. Well Donald would just claim Reagan was weak. Dan Gross @DanJGross Crowd count is in: Trump 2017: 250,000 Obama 2013: 1,000,000 Obama 2008: 1,800,000

Now for something uplifting, https://www.obama.org/ The Foundation the Obama's have setup is going to be based on the south side of Chicago and...well watch the video with the President and his wife and let them tell you.

@BarackObama I think is his main account regardless. I think this is the one that was started up when he decided to run for president. It's still active and managed. That one has 80 million followers.

So intercepted communications and ties with Trump campaign and Russia being investigated by intelligence, FBI, and criminal investigation unit with the Treasury Dept.So word is this leaked so the investigation doesn't get shut down tomorrow. Obviously if they do it makes them look guilty. According to Michael McFaul former ambassador to Russia the FISA warrant is a big deal and apparently something they applied for months ago, were turned down, and had to reapply for with more evidence. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html?_r=2

Don't forget Decades TV Network. Constant repeats of all of the televised inaugurations, Eisenhower to Obama. I watched Carters and GWB's first today and both brought tears to my eyes. First thing Carter did was to thank President Ford for leading our country back through the dark times to a place of integrity. Imagine seeing that today. And even GWB's first address thanked Gore for a spirited campaign and an ending which gave meaning to the words dignity and honor.

So it's being reported that at the concert tonight 10,000 people showed up. Compared to Obama 2009 where the weather is miserable as anything, 400,000 attendees

So immigration raids will start and be covered by the media to deflect attention away from what is really happening. This is to give the base their red meat. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-trump-immigration-actions-20170119-story.html

Good but not good. Frankly as a women in her early 40's, I've never seen this kind of desire to get involved. No I wasn't around or remember enough about what happened years ago - my family who were around then tell me, not the same. My dad talked about Watergate and he said he's seeing a lot of similarities except that Nixon was obviously a more seasoned and effective politician. But even with the divisiveness of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the turmoil that started with the Kennedy assassination, there was still a sense that there was some level of unity across political parties. He believes that was due to the fact that you had people involved who were from the WW2 generation and still remembered the war that united many Americans. One of the local progressive radio station hosts was giving a talk on resistance efforts at a local library in the North Suburbs of Chicago last week. Lily white area. Normally he said these types of events draw maybe 25 to 30 people. THat event. 350 people. The fact is I think a lot of people want to get involved and help yet have no idea what to do or how to go about it. Leading to leadership and the leadership gap. We don't really have that gap in Illinois on the democratic side. But there is a gap nationally. I like Keith Ellison but I watched the DNC debate last night and I have to say Tom Perez is impressive and was on fire. If people could give him a chance he could turn out to be an effective leader for the DNC. The problem he faces and it's the same with Ellison is both are likely considered bearers of who they supported. The Bernie people won't like Perez and the Hillary/Obama may not like Ellison. Both are right. I like the approach ELlison laid out in re-executing a 50 state strategy, but the passion in which Perez talked about fighting back and their first priority being tackling voter suppression was kind of inspirational. I also think there is a bench of potential leaders now that I have seen more of these people during the hearings. Impressed with Booker, Hassan, and Franken in particular. I know the hearings are an exercise in futility but it does provide a chance to get a closer view of the democrats who go on to serve. I'm trying to stay positive. Today was hard and I cried for 15 minutes this morning after I read that farewell President Obama wrote to the American people. But tomorrow is another day as is the day after and so on. OT: Anyone who wants to watch an inauguration. Decades TV is running nonstop the inaugurations of the last several presidential inaugurations starting with Eisenhower ending with Obama's second, nonstop today and tomorrow and continuing to re-run them both days.

Stories from my grandparents, Eleanor Roosevelt was crucified when she was first lady. For many people she could never do anything right, but a lot of what she did, was because her husband couldn't do it. People never knew at the time why and FDR himself used to joke about his "missus" being on another one of her trips away when talking to the press. So she took the hits for him at that time. She was also his conscience in some ways. Now we can look back and read about her and see what a remarkable woman and trailblazer she was. Back then not so much. Hopefully history will be kinder to Hillary Clinton also.

NOOOOOOOOO!! Ok just kidding. Well not completely. I can see how the comparison could be made. TR was blustering with a larger than life presence and in his own way, craved to be the center of attention. But he didn't have to crave it. He just was. But that's where it ends. He was intelligent, adventurous, a brilliant student at Harvard, and brimming with intellectual curiosity. He was also a trail blazer in many ways and became the perfect president to lead this country at the turn of the century. I don't know that I would call him a populist though. And he was very much responsible for putting the United States onto the world stage. He basically ended isolationism. That's kind of the opposite of our incoming Fuhrer Agent Orange.

Amen I read something today - someone commenting about how they didn't like her from day 1. And you have to wonder why. For all the "genuineness and realness" people wanted her to project, when she did that early on she was massacred. I remember how she was slammed for the cookie baking comment, the Stand by you Man comments, etc. And by the way I still love that Hillary best. The brazen, outspoken, tell it like it is person. Except people didn't like that Hillary. Even as first lady she was made to retreat to be more "first ladyish". Ever since then, while I still believe in her sincerity in wanting to serve and help people, we never saw the real Hillary, the one I loved early on and the permanent mask went up. I also do believe when Bill spoke at the DNC about her and her life, career, family, all she's done, it was the very first time many people saw that part of her. I honestly don't believe other than listening to Bill and spending that needed time in the rust belt, there was anything they could have done differently that would have mattered. And yes I do believe her gender was the biggest factor because face it, people still expect perfection from women where men can screw up, be grossly incompetent, and somehow they are still qualified(looking at you GWB and incoming Agent Orange).

They want to ignore the reports that have been coming out, the pleas from the HC industry, the fact that repealing this will likely cost over 2 million jobs, and they will be the ones responsible. I tend to concur it's not going away. They have no better plan. Maybe they can get those premiums back to being affordable if they start paying the insurance companies what they actually owe them versus undermining the law. OT: I'm watching President Obama's last press conference in tears. He's such a classy, distinguished, articulate, and yes elegant man. We have been lucky, regardless of some of his failures, to have this man lead us. People don't realize how much he's going to be missed. And this is the last normal press conference we will see for years if not ever. And with someone who may be guarded with them but certainly not combative.

I'm a career changer and started teaching about 8 years ago. Taught in Chicago Public Schools for my first 7 years. Vouchers are no answer IMO. There are a lot of challenges, many being how understaffed and funded and overpopulated schools in urban areas are and how under funded schools in rural areas are. I have a couple of friends who are both Lutheran school teachers in rural areas and honestly they aren't that much better off in terms of funding. And many primary and secondary parochial schools across the country have closed also. I agree about the quick fix. You can ask 10 education professionals and you'd likely get 10 different answers on where the problems lie and how to fix them. No Child Left Behind has been a failure, Core Curriculum, while a nice idea, does not have widespread support and has challenges also. But if we had people leading us who truly believed public education was important and were more concerned with that versus trying to privatize public schools through the failing for profit Charter model, we might actually make progress. European schools are facing many of the same problems we are barring Finland. The Asian students are beating us out but their culture is also a lot different. Our own diversity while a plus, does present unique challenges that many other countries don't necessarily have to face. My own opinion, is looking at our college educational system, we are starting to see a lot of similar problems surface. 25 years ago Harvard University was graduating about 2% of it's students with straight A averages. Now it's 15%. Not one person can convince me our students are that much smarter, particularly when you look at how well public schools have not performed. Some of that is likely students attending our universities from countries outside of the US but that's not all of it. Part of the problem IMO is too much catering to students and parents who believe their kids are smarter or perform better than they actually do. I never really experienced it in the urban school environment, but in suburban schools parents basically dictate to the teachers how to teach and put pressure on school administrations to over reward their children. School boards are filled with inexperienced people who think they know more than education professionals and tend to cowtow to this pressure. It's not the entire problem, but it accounts for more than people realize.

So list of items from Betsy DeVos hearing: -Betsy DeVos has no experience managing student loan programs, never took out a loan & never had a child who did -Guns in schools so kids can protect themselves -Betsy Davis got her foothold in Education by weighing on people's willingness to experiment with black kids. See the disaster Detroit public schools are -Is against common core(not a bad idea IMO) but offers no alternative -Has no idea what IDEA is And so on https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/08/a-sobering-look-at-what-betsy-devos-did-to-education-in-michigan-and-what-she-might-do-as-secretary-of-education/?postshare=2231484709657187&tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.e93990be2581 I can't decide who is a worse choice she, sessions, tillerson, price, oh so many more.

Fortunately much of education is controlled at the state level. Lots of us in Chicago who work or worked for CPS really hated Obama's pick of Arnie Duncan because of his advocacy for Charter Schools and some of his decisions in closing public schools in Chicago. But AT LEAST he actually knows our public education system. This woman also said she wouldn't be against allowing guns in schools. Seriously?

So I saw a clip of part of the confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos. She was being questioned by Maggie Hassan, new senator from NH who has a disabled son. Apparently DeVos has no idea that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act exists. ANyone want to know why the public education system in Michigan is destroyed look no further.