Elizabeth Warren gets key speaking slot at Dem. convention

Source: AP/Boston Herald

Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren has been given a primetime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.

Warren, who is hoping to oust Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, will address the Charlotte, N.C. convention on Sept. 5, just before former President Bill Clinton delivers his speech.

Warren is a popular figure among more liberal Democrats

She headed the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the committee that examined the bank bailout. Warren was also the leading advocate for a consumer financial protection agency created under the 2010 overhaul of financial regulations

Read more: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20120730warren_gets_key_speaking_slot_at_dem_convention/

Steven McGovern, son of former South Dakota senator George McGovern, dies at 60

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/steven-mcgovern

By Associated Press, Published: July 29AP SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Steven McGovern, the son of former South Dakota senator George McGovern, has died. He was 60.

The statement said McGovern died on his birthday in hospice care.

His sister, Ann McGovern, said in the statement, “Steve had a long struggle with alcoholism. We will all miss him deeply, but are grateful that he is now at peace.”

Funeral arrangements are pending


Read more: ABC News

Will Asian voters swing the election?

from salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/28/will_asian_voters_swing_the_election/

In 2010, Asian immigrants outnumbered Latinos, and many of these newcomers haven't chosen between Romney and Obama

By Thomas Schaller

According to an April poll by Lake Research Partners, Asian Americans tilt Democratic and favor Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, but nearly a quarter of them remain undecided about the presidential race, and a much larger share of Asian Americans report never having been contacted by either presidential campaign — leaving many of them up for grabs. “Asian-Americans have, in the minds of the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates, gone from a marginalized community to the margin of victory,” California congressman and Democratic National Committee vice chairman Mike Honda recently told the Hill. Honda’s district is 49 percent Asian American, the largest such share of any district outside Hawaii.

As for their politics, Asian Americans preferred George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole over Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996, but have voted majority Democratic and steadily more Democratic in each subsequent presidential election. Ong says many Asian Americans initially felt more connected to the GOP because the Republicans were viewed as strongly anti-Communist, but that with time and generational replacement this connection has weakened — a trend they share with Cuban Americans. Today, Vietnamese Americans still lean more Republican than other subgroups, with Filipinos and Japanese and Indians tilting heavily Democratic.

Compared to the general public, a higher percentage of Asian Americans (55 percent to 41 percent) prefer a bigger, more active government. They are also “more ‘liberal’ on abortion and gay marriage than the general population,” notes Ramakrishnan, though he cautioned that the recent Pew results showed Asian American opinions to be closer in line with Americans overall on these issues. As with other groups, whatever their racial or ethnic background, he noted that “religious identity matters,” with Catholic Asian Americans less likely to identify as Democrats and thus less likely to support abortion. Still, Ramakrishnan emphasized that “these issues are very low priority for Asian Americans.”

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that their concentration in reliably blue California limits their potential clout, the Asian American swing vote is growing in importance. Like 2008, this year’s presidential focus will again be on the 19 combined electoral votes of Nevada and Virginia, the two swing states with the largest Asian American population shares: 8.4 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively. Obama, who boasted about his Hawaiian and Indonesia connections in a speech this past May to the 18th Annual Gala for the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, could amass 270 electors without winning either state. But it’s very unlikely that any winning combination of states for the president will exclude both.

Depending upon how competitive the Obama-Romney contest is in Nevada or Virginia — and if Asian Americans are able to overcome their historically low turnout rates, perhaps with a boost from additional outreach and invested resources from the Obama campaign — 2012 could finally be the year Asian American voters and congressional aspirants finally get their due.

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/28/will_asian_voters_swing_the_election/

Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes was seeing psychiatrist at university before massacre

Source: Washington Post

By Carol D. Leonnig and Brady Dennis, Updated: Saturday, July 28, 5:18 AMThe Washington Post

The shooting suspect in the Colorado theater rampage was seeing a university psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia in the weeks before the July 20 attack, according to court records released Friday.

James Holmes was seeing Lynne Fenton, the director of student mental health services at the University of Colorado and a medical school professor. Holmes was a first-year graduate student in a neuroscience Ph.D. program.

Holmes sent a notebook to Fenton, his lawyers said in motions to the court Friday. The notebook included crude drawings depicting a mass killing, according to news reports, but it remains unclear when the notebook reached the university.

Holmes’s lawyers at the public defender’s office have asked the judge overseeing the case to find out who leaked information to the media about the notebook and its contents, arguing that Holmes’ privacy and constitutional rights have been violated.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/colorado-shooting-suspect-james-holmes-was-seeing-psychiatrist-at-university-before-massacre/2012/07/27/gJQAsTwHEX_story.html

Letters to Adolf Hitler show how Germans idolised leader (but some did dare to criticise)

Correspondence includes adulatory and critical letters from 1924 to 1945
Letters were found in Russian archive
They have now been translated into English and published in a new book
Letters show how 'shaky' Hitler's hold on power was at times and how unpopular the Second World War became among the German masses

They show how the popularity of Hitler's National Socialists party was carefully managed as support grew among the German population - and beyond.

Chillingly, the British editor of a book publishing the correspondence, Letter To Hitler, claims the collection shows how a similarly totalitarian regime could emerge today

.Dr Victoria Harris said: 'Some letters from people who idolise him are totally fawning, but you get the impression from the others that he could easily lose his approval.'The biggest lesson I learned was how shaky his popularity was and how the regime had to work hard to maintain popularity.'What is chilling is that you can see how he built his support and how you could see it happening elsewhere.'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178229/Letters-Hitler-written-ordinary-Germans-revealed-time.html#ixzz21khFJmEg

Colbert Report: Mitt Romney's Anglo-Saxon Connection

Do you usually feel sad for most perpetrators of heinous crimes?

Of course this recent event at the cinema in Colorado comes to mind - but other heinous crimes as well - be they serial killers, child rapist or other perpetrators of equally horrible deeds. For the purpose of poll we will be talking about "crazy" crimes - not crimes with financial motive or acts such as political terrorism. It goes without saying that we all feel sad for the victims. But do you also usually feel sad for the perpetrators?

Unleash our kids: Crime is at a 40-year low, but nervous parents are limiting their kids' freedom

By Will Doig for salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/21/paranoid_parents_kill_cities/


(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)

When Lenore Skenazy was growing up in Wilmette, Ill., in the 1960s, she routinely walked the four blocks between her home and her kindergarten all by herself. She knew to stay safe near traffic and not go anywhere with a stranger. And to help her cross the street was a friendly crossing guard — a sixth-grader named Joey. “For the record, I ended up marrying him,” she laughs.

In the time since Skenazy walked off to kindergarten alone, the number of children that can be found in public without supervision has only diminished. In one survey, 85 percent of mothers said they allowed their kids outside unsupervised less frequently than they themselves were allowed. In Britain, the average age of children allowed to play outside adult-free has risen by more than a year since the ’70s, and 25 percent of 8- to 10-year-olds have never played outside without an adult. One study diagrammed the shrinking distances that four generations of one family’s kids were allowed to stray from home: six miles in 1919, one mile in 1950, half a mile in 1979, and 300 yards today.

But the shift is also cultural. The UCLA study also details the differences between how kids get to school in Japan and the United States. Whereas half of all American kids now get dropped off by private car, that practice is banned at public schools in Japan, and even school buses are rare. Instead, the money is spent on crossing guards and an enviable pedestrian infrastructure. Children as young as 5, in a choreographed daily routine, arrive at each other’s homes, one by two by three. Once a critical mass has formed, they walk the route as a group (in adorable yellow hats, no less).

Compare that to the U.S., where the anecdotes about unsupervised kids being caught in the net of paranoid parenting are as laughable as they are depressing: the Davidson, N.C., school that ended its long tradition of fifth graders walking to the village green over “concerns about safety”; the Pittsburgh dad who was charged with child endangerment for letting his 9- and 6-year-olds play in a park; the Florida community that banned anyone under 18 from being outdoors without a chaperone.

It says something that we perceive walking down the street to be a greater risk to kids than speeding along in two tons of steel and glass, when in actuality, four-fifths of kids killed by cars are in those cars. No parent, however, is going to be accused of endangering their child by driving them to school, but the parent who lets them walk might be — the fear of being judged by other parents looms large. As does the fear of liability on the part of these schools and cities. “Our belief in our communities has been eroded by fears of lawsuits, insurance companies whaling on the schools, the constant din of horror story tonight at 6,” says Skenazy

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/21/paranoid_parents_kill_cities/

Michele Bachmann’s hateful cronies

She's taken the heat for her Muslim witch hunt, but what about the other congressmen who signed her letters?

By Alex Seitz-Wald

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/michele_bachmanns_hateful_cronies/


Clockwise from upper left: Louie Gohmert, Trent Franks, Thomas Rooney and Lynn Westmoreland (Credit: AP)

Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona who signed onto Bachmann’s letter, joined three colleagues in 2009 to launch a similar witch hunt against Muslims on Capitol Hill that drew calls of McCarthyism. The four lawmakers alleged that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a major mainstream Muslim group, was planting “spies” in lawmakers’ offices. Their evidence came from a book called “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Franks suspected that Muslim interns and junior staffers placed by CAIR were conspiring to kill the Patriot Act. “One of the target policies that they might be concerned about is the Patriot Act itself — those things that give us the greatest tools to be able to surveil those conversations outside of this country … and I think organizations like CAIR would like to diminish that,” he said.

As with Bachmann’s witch hunt, the lawmakers went public with their accusations before going to the authorities. “We have not received any request at this time,” a spokesman for the House sergeant-at-arms, who is responsible for keeping members safe, said at the time.

Rep. Louis Gohmert, meanwhile, was making up his own Muslim conspiracy theories before he signed on to Bachmann’s. The colorful Texas Republican, who is closely aligned with the Tea Party movement, took to the House floor and Fox Business in 2010 to warn the world about a flood of terrorist babies invading our shores from Muslim nations. “It appeared they would have young women who became pregnant [and] would get them into the United States to have a baby. They wouldn’t even have to pay anything for the baby,” Gohmert said on the floor in June of that year. “And then they would return back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists. And then one day, 20, 30 years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life,” he explained.

Gohmert’s source on this explosive accusation was a retired FBI agent whom he met on an airplane, or at least someone who said she was a retired FBI agent. In a heated interview with Anderson Cooper, Gohmert lost control as he admitted he hadn’t contacted authorities about the terror babies. A former FBI official debunked the claim.

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/michele_bachmanns_hateful_cronies/

Which Democratic Party nominee since 1964 comes the closest to representing your beliefs?