In addition of Aspartame, MSG, meats, fats and sugars everyone is concerned about the chemical sodium fluoride found in our tap water...




Opposition to water fluoridation arises from concern over the lack of quality research demonstrating its efficacy and safety, evidence that it may cause serious health problems, and a general resistance to the idea of compulsory 'mass medication' which takes away an individual's right to choose...

Fluoride is commonly used as a rat poison!

HEALTH PROBLEMS CAUSED BY FLUORIDE:

Fluoride Exposure During Pregnancy Links to Learning Disabilities Attention Deficit and Behavior Disorders - Dr. Phyllis J...

Mullenix
Toxicology Department, Forsyth Research Institute, Boston, MA


OSTEOPOROSIS AND ARTHRITIS:
Scientists at EPA in Washington have declared that there is every reason to believe that the increasing numbers of people with carpal-tunnel syndrome and arthritis-like pains are due to the mass fluoridation of drinking water. On July 9, 1998 the Manchester Guardian reported news of fluoride poisoned water in Central India, from untested wells drilled in the 1980s, causing severe arthritic damage to tens of millions of people -- a national disaster. Fluoride is the most bone seeking element known to mankind. The US Public Health Service has stated that fluoride makes the bones more brittle and dental enamel more porous...


HIP FRACTURE:
Drinking fluoridated water will double the number of hip fractures for both older men and women. Extremely low levels of water fluoridation 0.1 ppm still produced statistically significant increased hip fractures. (Bordeaux Study JAMA 1994). According to Dr. J. William Hirzy (vice-president of the NFFE LOCAL 2050, the union representing all scientists at the EPA, Washington, D.C.) there have been 5 epidemiological studies done since 1990, in three different countries, all showing a higher increase in hip fractures in fluoridated communities. Some studies have indicated a 87% higher risk of hip fractures to the elderly in areas where water fluoridation was even below 1.5 ppm...



CANCER:
Fluoride was found to be an equivocal carcinogen by the National Cancer Institute Toxicological Program. Further studies by the New Jersey Department of Health have now confirmed a 6.9 fold increase in bone cancer in young males. Earlier studies had found a 5% increase in all types of cancers in fluoridated communities. In 1981, Dean Burk, for many decades Chief Chemist at the US National Cancer Institute, testified at congressional hearings, reporting that at least 40,000 cancer deaths in 1981 were attributable to fluoride. 40,000 cases that could have been prevented simply by NOT putting industry waste into the public water supply. Burk stated that fluoride causes more cancer, and causes it faster, than any other chemical...





INFERTILITY:
Infertilityin women was found to increase with water fluoridation. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists reported a close correlation between decreasing total fertility rates in women between ages of 10 and 49, and increasing fluoride levels. They also reported that a review of all of the animal studies done to date shows that fluoride adversely affects fertility in most animal species...





BRAIN DAMAGE:
Fluorides lower the intelligence capacity of humans, with children, again, especially susceptible to early fluoride toxicity. IQ levels were significantly lower than children not exposed to fluorides in all age groups listed. (Li,X.S.,Zhi,J.L.,Gao,R.O.,"Effects of Fluoride Exposure on the Intelligence of Children", Fluoride;28:182-189, 1995) Further studies proving the neurotoxicity of fluoride in rats have also been conducted by Dr. Phyllis Mullinex. In 1995 Mullenix and co-workers showed that rats given fluoride in drinking water at levels that give rise to plasma levels fluoride concentrations in humans, suffer neurotoxic effects that vary according to when the rats were given the fluoiride - as adult animals, as young animals, or thorugh the placenta before birth. Those exposed before birth were born hyperactive and remained so throughout their lives. Thoses exposed as young animals displayed depressed activity. In 1998 Guan et al. gave similar doses as used by the Mullenix group and found that several key chemicals in the brain - those that form the membrane of brain cells, were substantially depleted in rats given fluoride, as compared to those who did not receive fluoride. Partly based on these findings, the union representing all EPA scientists in Washington have now filed a grievance demanding fluoride-free bottled water for their offices. (Note: this also explains a recent University of South Florida study relating fluoride intake during pregnancy to the yearly 1% increase in learning disabilities found in children...) Studies proving that fluorides transfer through the placenta are well known. (Meanwhile, Dr.Weil, Internet's Health Guru, advocates fluoride supplements for pregnant woman in his book "8 Weeks To Optimum Health"...)



ALZHEIMER DISEASE:
There are also several studies linking aluminum with fluoride, showing that the bioavailability of aluminum is increased in the presence of fluorides, causing aluminum in the brain to double in treated animals. According to an October 28, 1992 Wall Street Journal Article about a study conducted by Varnier JA, et al.: "Rats fed the highest doses developed irregular mincing steps characteristic of senile animals.... Post mortem examination of the rat brains disclosed 'substantial cell loss in structures associated with dementia -- the neo-cortex and hippocampus'." (Note: Alzheimer's Disease, first diagnosed by Dr. Alois Alzheimer in 1907, is now the 4 killer for every person over 60 in the US. Every 2nd person over 70 will develop Alzheimer's.) Environmental fluoride is implicated in this...

more on Alzheimer disease and natural recovery

THYROID DISORDER:
It is only in the last two decades during which endocrinology has progressed so rapidly, that now over 150 symptoms and associations can be identified in hypothyroidism. Almost all(!) correlate with known symptoms of fluoride poisoning. Most of the double-blind test results of fluoride poisoning found in Moolenburgh's study on water containing 1ppm of fluoride - which led to the ban of fluoridation in Holland - are now recognized symptoms of hypothyroidism...


1PPM is the standart level used to fluoridation used in tap water, consider "safe" by EPA...


4PPM is the UNSAFE level...

Reading the Wheatgrass Book today from Ann Wigmore



I want to share with you this incredible discovery :

----

Page 62
Chapter " ARE YOU PROTECTED FROM THE HAZARDS OF MODERN LIVING? "

"A few years ago, I ( Ann Wigmore ) asked Dr. GH Earp Thomas of the Bloomfield Laboratories in High Bridge, New Jersey, to do an experiment for me. He placed a small amount of wheatgrass juice in a jar of regular tap water and he tested it for fluoride and other chemicals present in the water...
Both of us were surprised by the results!

He concluded, " Fluorine rapidly combines with calcium phosphate and other kinetic elements to lose its toxic properties, and harden teeth and bones. that is why fresh grass would act as a catalyst to speedily change the acid fluorine into a beneficial component with a positive reaction...

By using wheatgrass, which is comparatively rich in calcium phosphate, it would remove any free fluoric acid and change its negative charge to an alkaline calcium phosphate fluoride combination with a positive reaction"

I was amazed ( Ann Wingmore )

not only did wheatgrass neutralize the toxic effect of fluorine but it converted it into an ally in maintaining healthy bones and teeth! (-note from Bobby I believe wheatgrass may help neutralize the harmfulI effects of flouride but i dont buy that (flouride)- toxic metals used as a rat poison are converted into an ally with weatgrass-I personally recommend a reverse osmosis filter or using distiled water-and add a teaspoon of mineral rich sea salt to remineralize the filtered water))
I don't recommend that you drink tap water, though; prure spring or purified water taste better and is much better for you. But if you cannot obtain spring or purified water, pour a little wheatgrass juice into regular tap water, and it will make it more healthful...
"

----


At home, I use Living Water II by EcoQuest International
(http://www. ecoquestintl. com/customers/product_guide/water/living_water_IIs. asp )


I have put 1/4 once of wheatgrass juice in this water jar and took that picture for you to see what it would like. Of course the water taste incredibly good after the ozone and UVX lights purification from Living Water but the wheatgrass gave it a new lifeform and free of the negative effect of fluoride, something i couldn't get rid of because with my state-of-the-art purification system...





I hope you enjoyed this wonderful tips on how to protect yourself and your family against fluoride in your water...


Think about it also for cooking and washing your veggies ;-)


Healthy Living and Longevity!
Shawn-Thierry of *EcoLovers*

Helping Girls Navigate Sexualization in the Media
By Joyce McFadden, Huffington Post
Posted on May 1, 2008, Printed on May 2, 2008
http://www. alternet. org/story/84155/

It needs to start in the home. Our daughters' best defense against the skewed sexual saturation of our culture is for us to support them in the healthy development of their own sexuality.



As I wrote in "What Huff Post Women Had to Say" women still experience discomfort in educating their daughters about menstruation. If our own discomfort gets in the way of that, imagine the unspoken, often unconscious, fear of teaching them about their sexuality -- which would by extension also be teaching them about ours.

How can we expect our daughters to hold their own against unrealistic images of sexuality in the media when they sense our own impairments to being sexually comfortable in our mother/daughter relationships?

Maybe we're so afraid of having to go into the "naughtiness" of sexual detail that we're missing the simplicity of what our daughters most need from us: our blessing of their sexuality as normal and healthy.



Esther Perel, sex therapist and author of Mating in Captivity, a book exploring the sexual complications within marriage, wrote in her Huffington Post blog that it isn't usually the mechanics of sex that bring couples to her for help, but rather their desire for "the poetics of sex." I think as Americans, our fixation with the taboo of sexuality causes us to overlook its poetry and its greater meaning in our lives, and then we pass this limited view of sex onto our children.



It's difficult for women to teach their girls how to celebrate being alive within their desire; but it's commonplace for women to teach girls how to devalue their bodies in the quest for physical perfection. A mother, over the years, even in the most seemingly innocuous statements like "I was good today; I skipped lunch." or "I was bad today; I had cake" erodes herself in front of her daughter, and in so doing, systematically erodes her daughter right along with her. This is the crisis.

Why do we readily and consistently, consciously and unconsciously, dispense messages of self loathing that will harm them in every way by undermining their confidence, even as we shy away from teaching them how to protect, delight in, and express love with their bodies?

It will be harder for our girls if we only engage in seeing them as sexual once they're adults. We need to be there with them from the beginning of the journey.



Here are some questions we can ask ourselves to help us consider the possible impact of our reluctance to speak openly with our daughters.



We want our girls to grow into women who can be happy and experience love, but how do we imagine them arriving there? We want them to be in relationships, but do we really see our daughters as sexual? When we think of them being in love, do we stop at a love that's more to do with friendship and reliable companionship? How do we hope our daughters learn and measure what they find sexually arousing? Do we indirectly hope our daughters have unfulfilling sex? Do we feel too embarrassed to somehow give them, and ourselves, the support needed to lead full, open lives?

If the sexual lessons don't come from us girls will search elsewhere. This week it might be Vanity Fair's tutorial on Miley Cyrus.

While it's healthy for girls to individuate from their mothers, does our fear of discussing sexuality push them even farther away than we intend? Do we inadvertently influence them to find other role models who unrealistically represent girls and women?

What of our sexuality do we allow them to know? Girls might come to learn through observation that "real" women can express their sexuality only through the smaller victories of erotic pleasure, such as finding it quite normal that women in restaurants or at the Thanksgiving table will openly tilt their heads back, close their eyes and moan unabashedly ... over a piece of chocolate ... with the full support and understanding of all onlookers.



It's hard to feel genuine and alive when we're taught to hide half of who we are. Being more open in revealing ourselves, mother to daughter, might offer our daughters a greater chance to feel more complete in an authentic sense of sexuality, as opposed to only donning the facade the media holds out to us.



Women of all ages in my study repeatedly reported wanting to know more about their sexuality, they just didn't know how to go about it because guilt, shame, discomfort and propriety precluded their taking the risk. There were important things about sexuality that they hadn't been taught by their mothers, and this gap in learning resulted in both a reluctance to confide in other women the sexual content of their lives, and an ambivalence about providing their daughters with a sexual contextualization of life.



What are we teaching our daughters about being female? And what are we withholding from them that might be useful for them to know?

If we choose not to ground their sexuality in a sense of home, they're more at risk of grounding it wherever the media directs them.



Joyce McFadden is a certified psychoanalyst with an MSW from Columbia University and five years of postgraduate training. She's a faculty member, training analyst and clinical supervisor at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology, and author of the ongoing anonymous web-based Women's Realities Study.


© 2008 Huffington Post All rights reserved.


View this story online at: http://www. alternet. org/story/84155/

The Year in Hate
Active U.S. Hate Groups Rise to 888 in 2007

USA (By David Holthouse and Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center) March 12, 2008 — Sheriff’s deputies gunned down by "Aryan" gangsters in Bastrop, La. Tax protesters with bombs arrested in New Hampshire. Gun-toting white supremacists marching in Jena, La. A police officer murdered in Salt Lake City. Nativist leaders demanding sniper teams and mines along the Mexican border and forcibly sterilize Mexican women after a first child. Calls for assassinating politicians, immigrants and Jews. Rapidly spreading racist conspiracy theories.

The end of 2007 brought to a close another year marked by staggering levels of racist hate in America. Even as several major hate groups struggled to survive, other new groups appeared, and the radical right as a whole appeared to grow.

The latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that the number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888 last year, up 5% from 844 groups in 2006. That capped an increase of 48% since 2000 — a hike from 602 groups attributable to the exploitation by hate groups of the continuing debate about immigration. And it comes on top of some 300 other anti-immigration groups, about half listed by SPLC as "nativist extremist," formed in the last three years.

At the same time, FBI statistics suggested that there was a 35% rise in hate crimes against Hispanics between 2003 and 2006. Experts believe that such crimes are typically carried out by people who think they are attacking immigrants.

Although there were some signs that nativist hatred may be starting to abate, you wouldn’t know that by listening to the furious rants of many groups. "America is being destroyed from within by a modern version of Genghis Khan’s army," the Emigration Party of Nevada, listed by the SPLC as a hate group, said. The group’s leader, Don Pauly, wants to send government "sniper teams" to the border and forcibly sterilize Mexican women after a first child.

"If the Jew government waits, and hell breaks out here in the USA, our citizens will not be asking to see any documentation," added Michael Blevins, the Florida state leader of the neo-Nazi American National Socialist Workers Party. "They will go after anyone they think an illegal alien based on race first."

The growth of these groups is being helped by conspiracy theories and other racist propaganda about immigrants that is being spread by mainstream politicians and pundits. While theories about a secret plan to merge Mexico, Canada and United States into a single country began in radical groups, for instance, many key figures have endorsed them. Indeed, 18 states’ houses of representatives have now passed resolutions opposing the "North American Union" — an entity that does not exist and has never been planned, but nonetheless inhabits nativists’ nightmares.

Promoting such theories, coupled with a history of ties to white supremacist groups and ideology, is what caused the Southern Poverty Law Center to add a major anti-immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to its list of hate groups last year. FAIR has also promulgated the theory that Mexico is involved in a secret plot to "reconquer" the American Southwest.

"You need to understand we are at war right here in America," is the way another nativist group, the Nebraska-based United Citizens of America, put it. "We are being invaded by a foreign country and we are being betrayed from within. Our government, from top to bottom, is being controlled by global elites. They have infiltrated our government at ALL levels."

Here’s a more detailed look at several sectors of the radical right:

Neo-Nazis

While the number of neo-Nazi group chapters increased over the course of 2007 from 191 to 207, this rise was largely due to a shake-up within the National Socialist Movement (NSM). Although the NSM remains the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country, with 73 chapters in 34 states (down from 81 chapters in 36 states in late 2006), it suffered a mass exodus of high-profile members last year, most of whom quickly either founded new chapters of rival neo-Nazi groups or established their own new spin-offs.

The NSM’s troubles in 2007 began last February, when it was accidentally revealed during a public court hearing that Florida state leader David Gletty was a paid FBI informant. Discontent over the group’s finances, tactics and internal security began to swell among rank-and-file members as well as officers. Last October, several NSM heavy-hitters abruptly quit. These included Ohio division commander Mark Martin, Storm Troop leader Tim Bishop, Washington state leader Justin Boyer, NSM presidential candidate John Taylor Bowles and computer expert and business manager Jim Ramm, all highly visible and active NSM members.

Bowles, along with another disgruntled NSM officer, Nick Chappell, formed a new group, the National Socialist Order of America, based out of The Redneck Shop, a hate memorabilia store in Laurens, S.C., that is owned by Chappell and had been the site of many NSM gatherings.

Ramm launched a website, "NSM Watch," where he posted a list of 111 ex-NSM members who, according to Ramm, had either resigned or been kicked out. NSM "commander" Jeff Schoep countered that he was merely pruning "troublemakers and drama queens." Then, last November, Schoep issued an open letter to NSM members in which he branded Ramm and other defectors "oath breakers and race traitors" and accused them of "working for the enemy."

The following month, Schoep announced that he was leaving his common-law wife and six children in Minneapolis to move in with a new girlfriend in Detroit, where he was relocating NSM’s national headquarters. Rumors abound in the neo-Nazi movement that Schoep’s new flame is non-white, and that he’s using NSM money to support her in a supposedly extravagant lifestyle.

"In 2006 NSM did over $110,000 in sales, and … current projections for 2007 are around $180,000," Ramm claimed on his website late last year. "NSM Records, the group’s hate rock music company, is a business that doesn’t report total profits to the members, who are expected to just smile and hope the Commander is spending the money wisely."

The greatest beneficiary of the NSM’s internal strife was the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), a neo-Nazi group led by another former NSM stalwart, neo-Nazi gadfly Bill White. White boasted he’s accepting "the best of the best" NSM castaways and, indeed, ANSWP chapters more than doubled from 13 to 30 last year.

Two former powerhouses of the neo-Nazi scene, Aryan Nations and the National Alliance, were in states of more or less suspended animation last year. Aryan Nations still exists but is barely active. In early 2007, two of the group’s leaders, Clark Patterson and Jonathan Williams, quit to form a new Christian Identity group called the United Church of YHVH after complaining Aryan Nations had forgotten its roots in Identity, a theology that says people of color are soulless non-humans and Jews are biologically descended from Satan.

The National Alliance, a West Virginia-based group that has declined precipitously since the death of its founder in 2002, showed signs of life last May when it held a Holocaust denial conference that drew 75 attendees, nearly three times as many people as have attended Alliance "leadership conferences" in recent years. But in August, the Alliance suffered a major setback when Chairman Shaun Walker and two other Alliance members were convicted of federal civil rights violations in a string of three racially motivated assaults in Salt Lake City in 2002 and 2003. Walker was sentenced to 87 months in federal prison, while his underlings received shorter sentences. Former Chairman Eric Gliebe, who had stepped down amid much criticism earlier, re-assumed leadership of the troubled group amid swirling rumors of drug use and a pending divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife, former stripper Erica Gliebe — a woman who now calls herself "Hollycast," an apparent sarcastic reference to the Holocaust.

Finally, the National Vanguard looks to be all but finished. Its leader, Kevin Alfred Strom, pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and is facing up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in April.

Racist Skinheads

Racist skinhead gangs, or "crews," are unstable and often transient by nature, making them difficult to track. However, over the course of 2007, it was possible to identify 90 racist skinhead outfits operating in the United States, up from 78 in 2006. Five of the new chapters are reactivated or recently established divisions of Hammerskin Nation (HSN), a once-mighty coalition of skinhead crews whose power waned earlier in this decade but is now clearly resurging. In addition to the five new domestic chapters, HSN also now claims active crews in at least 10 foreign countries, including Australia, Hungary and Switzerland.

Last September, the leaders of HSN and the Vinlander Social Club, a rival skinhead coalition in the Midwest, unexpectedly announced they had reached a peace agreement, ending a blood feud of nearly 10 years. The following month, Hammerskin Nation celebrated its 20th anniversary at Hammerfest 2007, a hate rock festival held near Portland, Ore., and hosted by the Northwest Hammerskins, a regional affiliate of HSN. The Portland-based, neo-Nazi skinhead gang Volksfront provided security. Members of the neo-Nazi group White Revolution and the white nationalist organization Women for Aryan Unity were in attendance. One of the speakers was Michael Lawrence, a prominent member of the Confederate Hammerskins, another HSN affiliate, and the founder of the Christian Guard, a major Christian Identity organization.

Ku Klux Klan

Although most Ku Klux Klan factions continued to exploit the roiling national immigration debate in 2007 by holding anti-"illegal alien" rallies (rather than their more typical "anti-black crime" fare), last year was a relatively quiet one for the KKK. The number of Klan chapters dropped to 155 last year from 165 in 2006, marking the second straight year of decline after five years of rapid growth.

One important development in this sector came in August, when the National Aryan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, LLC, merged with the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. National Aryan Knights chapters in Louisiana resisted the merger by forming a new splinter group under the banner of the National Aryan Knights.

The Imperial Klans of America (IKA), meanwhile, declined from 23 chapters in 2006 to just 16 last year as a case filed last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center against IKA chief Ron Edwards, five followers and the group itself neared trial. The lawsuit seeks damages for a boy who was attacked and severely beaten during an IKA recruiting drive at a Kentucky county fair.

Black Separatists

The death last May of black separatist cult leader Yahweh ben Yahweh (born Hulon Mitchell) coincided with the ongoing rebirth of his Nation of Yahweh, a notorious religious sect that has preached violence against "white devils." Nearly 500 Nation of Yahweh members, many of them conspicuously flaunting material wealth in the form of expensive cars and jewelry, attended the funeral of Yahweh ben Yahweh, who shortly before his death was released from parole after serving 11 years of an 18-year sentence on federal conspiracy charges related to 14 murders committed in South Florida in the 1980s.

Formerly moribund Yahweh websites flared with activity following the funeral. In Rochester, N.Y., a white man who started a nonprofit food pantry for the homeless said that a Yahweh member who joined the nonprofit’s board in 2004 orchestrated a campaign to push him out of the organization shortly after she returned from the funeral. The man says that he now fears for his life and that the Nation of Yahweh has taken over the building housing the organization.

The New Black Panther Party, a racist group unrelated to the original Black Panthers, was also highly active in 2007. Although Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz was barred from entering Canada last May because of his radical ideology, Shabazz did successfully organize a major rally for a black hate crime victim in West Virginia, made a public show of force in Jena, La., and held an Atlanta "Black Power Summit" last October that was attended by about 100 party members from across the country.

 Arizona Slams Door on Immigrants

"What I love about what Arizona is doing is we don’t have to rely on the federal government," said state Rep. Russell Pearce, a Mesa Republican who has authored most of the toughest measures. "It has truly woken up the rest of America that states can fix that problem."

The campaign has had an effect: Illegal immigrants complain it’s impossible to find good work and are leaving the state.

It has also taken a toll on some U.S. citizens.

Juan Carlos Ochoa, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in an upper-middle-class subdivision near Phoenix named Laguna Hills, can’t find a job because a government database classifies him as a possible undocumented immigrant. Pauline Muñoz, a 39-year-old mother of six who was born in Phoenix, has been afraid to leave her apartment since being held by sheriff’s deputies for 15 hours for a driving infraction — an example of what she believes is racial profiling.

And businesses that cater to immigrants both legal and undocumented report a huge drop in sales, increasing the drag on the state’s already troubled economy.

"There used to be so many people they would fight for parking out there," said Omar Flores, 31, manager of La Mexicana market in western Phoenix. Now the grocery store is mostly empty.

Economist Dawn McLaren of Arizona State University said that part of what’s pushing immigrants out is the collapse of the state’s housing-based economy. In the construction sector, which employs many immigrants, 10% of jobs have vanished over the last year as home prices have plunged.

The economic woes are magnified by the employer sanctions law, which has led some businesses to say they won’t expand in Arizona, McLaren said. "It exacerbates the downturn," she said.

No one knows how many immigrants have left the state, and the most recent government figures show Arizona growing robustly — as of July, Maricopa was the fastest-growing county in the nation.

But enough immigrants have left that the government of Sonora, the Mexican state bordering Arizona, has complained about how many people have arrived on its doorstep.

Pearce says the overall effect has been undeniably positive for Arizona. "Smaller class sizes, shorter emergency room waits," he said. "Even if [undocumented immigrants] are paying taxes — and most of them aren’t — the cost to taxpayers is huge."

The biggest effect has come from the new employer sanctions law, which took effect in January.

The law is fairly straightforward.

Any business caught hiring undocumented immigrants is put on probation. If it is caught doing the same thing again, the state revokes its business license.

The only defense for an employer is if it used E-Verify, a federal pilot project to allow businesses to confirm the legality of their laborers.

The law did what it was supposed to with Jorge Hernandez, a 32-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico. He had been working in a Phoenix tire shop for years when in December his bosses told him they’d have to let him go because of the new law. Now he struggles to support his family by working as a day laborer and is thinking of leaving.

"I’ve been in Arizona for 11 years," he said. "This is the worst one. For those years I worked every day. I had money, I had a car."

Hernandez dreams of moving to New Mexico, where friends have told him the economy is stronger and sentiment against undocumented immigrants weaker. "They don’t have E-Verify there," he said in Spanish.

E-Verify has at least one significant flaw — its treatment of naturalized U.S. citizens.

Between October 2006 and March 2007, about 3,200 foreign-born U.S. citizens were initially improperly disqualified from working by E-Verify. Their status was later corrected.

Because many did not register their citizenship with the Social Security Administration, they are often listed as possible undocumented workers.

That’s what apparently happened to Ochoa, 47, who became a citizen in 2000. He quit his job as a car salesman at the end of last year and got hired by a local Dodge dealership in February. Days later, his new employers called him with bad news — E-Verify classified him as a possible undocumented immigrant. He only had a couple of days to convince Social Security that he wasn’t.

He had lost his naturalization certificate, so Ochoa took his U.S. passport, Social Security card, driver’s license and Arizona voter identification card to the local Social Security office. He was told he’d have to request new papers from the Department of Homeland Security, which could take up to 10 months.

"I love this country, I’m happy in this country," said Ochoa, a father of two, who escaped eviction this month only because a church group paid his rent. "The guy who made this law, I don’t know him. He’s started destroying a lot of families."

Katherine Lotspeich, acting chief of the agency that runs E-Verify, said officials will introduce a number of changes, starting in May, to make it easier to fix the problems that Ochoa and other naturalized citizens have encountered.

"The last thing we want is to have people who are naturalized citizens deal with this cumbersome process" to get paperwork, Lotspeich said.

She added that Social Security should have accepted Ochoa’s passport as proof of citizenship.

Local law enforcement efforts, meanwhile, have drawn complaints about racial profiling.

For the last two years, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been testing how far a local law enforcement agency can go in combating undocumented immigration. His deputies and trained volunteers have detained more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants, many of whom were stopped for minor infractions and then asked about their immigration status. State legislators this month moved toward passing a law requiring all local police departments to start fighting undocumented immigration.

"I believe that if you get tough," Arpaio said, undocumented immigrants "will disappear."

Immigrant-rights groups and attorneys have complained that Arpaio’s attack on undocumented immigrants leads to Hispanics constantly being asked about their citizenship status. Some cite Muñoz’s case as an example of perils to Arpaio’s approach.

Muñoz was held for 15 hours after being stopped on a speeding violation in Phoenix in December. Deputies discovered she did not have a driver’s license. She was placed in a van with several arrested undocumented immigrants, taken to jail and held for several hours of processing before a judge released her.

"It’s only because of the way you look," Muñoz said. "Even though I’m from here, I don’t feel safe to go out and do anything."

Sheriff’s Capt. Paul Chagolla, a department spokesman, said Muñoz was detained for driving without a license. She was kept with the undocumented immigrants because "when we run an operation we don’t always have transport" for individual suspects, he said.

Arpaio said that there have been few specific complaints of profiling and that his deputies ask suspects about immigration status only when they see a possible crime committed.

He has no apologies for his tactics or their contribution to a flight of undocumented immigrants from Arizona.

"The more who leave, the better," he said. "They shouldn’t be here in the first place."

Ronnie and I have gotten ourselves involved in all kinds of different creative projects. Lucid Nation. The Skrumps. Mommie Dearest the Musical. The Gits movie. Those are success stories you’ll be hearing more about. But there have been failures, and the worst was A2Z Software.



A2Z was started by the guy who started Cinebase, the digital backdrop for all Hollywood. This amazing software would have allowed kids to retest for higher grades instead of being branded for life because teachers don’t have time to retest slower learners. Kids would have had their home pages, including dream journals, from Kindergarten on.

How cool would that be?

BBC donated all their stock footage to help create a digital city kids could explore. Each boulevard was a domain of learning like science or history. Each avenue an era. You get the idea. You could go into a building called English Romantic Poets and open the door William Blake. That’s how I got involved. I was Art Editor at Newtopia then. They recruited me to recruit passionate scholars. For the William Blake room we got Randy Roark, Allen Ginsberg’s assistant for twenty years.



The text book publishers gave their licenses to A2Z. Cisco and SBC sponsored them. Teachers at L.A. School District wept when they saw the test module demonstration they were so excited and relieved. The 21st Century was finally going to reach American kids.

Can you imagine a better way to change the world?

What happened? A crooked soul got the job of Chief Financial Officer. I didn’t like him from the start. He was one of those extreme Catholics and a rabid Republican. They hired him because he had major influence in the Ohio school districts. Why did he destroy the company? To steal the IP? Or just to sabotage the future? I don’t know how he sleeps at night.


Tamra


Question: What do Baltimore, Cleveland and Indianapolis have in common? Answer: Some of the Worst Graduation Rates in the Country
by Kristina Gupta, Policy Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

The EPE Research Center released a new report about the high school graduation crisis in our nation’s largest cities. The report examines graduation rates in the principal school system (largest and most central school district) in the largest 50 cities in the country. According to the report, only about half (52 percent) of students in these districts complete high school on time with a standard diploma. This is way below the national graduation rate and below the average graduation rate for all urban school districts in the country. The worst offenders were the principal school districts in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis – shockingly, fewer than 35 percent of students in these districts graduate.





The report also examined differences between urban and suburban school districts in the metropolitan areas of these 50 cities. About 58 percent of students in the urban districts in these metropolitan areas graduate, compared with 75 percent of students in the suburban districts in these metropolitan areas. Baltimore, Columbus, Cleveland, New York, Denver, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis have the largest urban-suburban graduation rate gap – for each of these cities, the suburban graduation rate was more than 30-points higher than the urban graduation rate.





In more positive dropout prevention news, the Department of Education announced that it will finally begin to require all states to report graduation rates and dropout rates the same way. Hopefully, this step will address some of the most egregious methods states have used to inflate graduation rates (for example, until this year, New Mexico reported its graduation rate as the percent of 12th graders who went on to graduate, conveniently ignoring all of the students who dropped out between the 9th and 11th grades).





But all of this news points to the continuing and critical need to take proactive steps to address the alarming dropout crisis. While reporting dropout rates uniformly is a necessary first step, we can’t stop there. Among other things, schools and policymakers ought to be looking at which interventions and supports will be most effective for different groups of students. The Center’s prior research has shown that gender makes a difference in the reasons students drop out and the impact of intervention strategies.





We need to do a better job for all our students, both boys and girls. When faced with the dismal statistics revealed in the EPE report, we can’t afford to wait.




http://nwlc. blogs. com/womenstake/2008/04/question-what-d. html

Sexual Abuse Fueled by Abusive Immigration Language
By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check
Posted on April 7, 2008, Printed on April 7, 2008
http://www. alternet. org/story/81275/

In all the furor over rising immigration rates in the U.S. -- often disguised as concern over "illegal" immigration -- one story in particular demonstrates that contrary to scare stories about the effect of immigration on this country, the reality is that this country is often a scary and oppressive place for immigrants. And immigrant women, having drawn the double whammy card, are especially vulnerable. A 22-year-old immigrant from Colombia exposed her immigration agent using the threat of deportation to rape her, using her cell phone to tape the assault. Unfortunately, as is all too common with these sorts of stories, most reports describe the event as sex, even while making it clear that the sex is question was coerced, and should be more accurately described as rape.



The story has hooks most likely because it’s about how a common crime -- sexual blackmail against immigrants and other women marginalized in society -- became more difficult to hide and ignore because of new technologies. But despite the dubious reasons why this story hit the mainstream news, the activist community can still seize this opportunity to make two very important points: 1) Immigration is a feminist issue and 2) The distinctions between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants is red herring to distract from the fact that it’s immigrants, full stop, who face oppression under a tidal wave of anti-immigration sentiment.



This woman’s story demonstrates the way that the cut-and-dry distinctions between illegal and legal immigrants touted by the Lou Dobbses of the world tend to turn shades of gray when examined closely. Or actually, shades of paperwork. The rape victim entered the U.S. legally on a tourist visa and overstayed, but managed to enter the system to get her green card by marrying a citizen, which all but the worst mouth-breathers accept as a legitimate way to get a green card. Her story shows why it’s front-loaded and racist to describe a human being as "illegal," especially when her illegal actions were misdemeanors such that they didn’t even raise the ire of the law when she got her paperwork in order. I’ve managed to drive a car before after letting my inspection lapse, and then got the ticket straightened out by renewing my inspection sticker, an equivalent crime. No one describes my very being as illegal, though. Though rape, on the other hand, is not a minor crime and is earth-shattering enough that it’s acceptable to describe the people who commit that crimes as "rapists," I suspect that rapists get called by that moniker less often than immigrants without their paperwork in order get called "illegals.

"

Words like "illegals" dehumanize immigrants, whether or not they have their paperwork in order, and that dehumanization makes immigrant women juicy targets for assorted sexist oppressors, from anti-choicers to wife beaters to rapists, as this woman’s story shows. One Honduran immigrant faced charges after trying to self-abort with an ulcer medication, an attempt that failed to induce abortion, but was linked to her giving birth to a premature infant who passed away. The same article notes that a 22-year-old Mexican immigrant living in South Carolina was put in jail for inducing her own abortion with the medication at home. That immigrant women often resort to self-abortion should surprise no one. Not only is safe, legal abortion financially daunting for a number of women, the atmosphere of dehumanization of immigrants makes many women understandably eager to reduce their encounters with authority figures of any type, including doctors.



Green card manipulation isn’t just a trick practiced by immigration officials wanting to control and dominate women, either. According to the Family Violence Prevention Fund (PDF), many domestic abusers use threats about immigration status to keep women in relationships with them. Whether married to citizens or non-citizens, the quasi-legal status assigned to immigrants means that many victims of domestic violence fear seeking help; consequently, the rates of domestic violence are significantly higher for immigrant women than women at large. Congress stepped in to create the International Marriage Brokers Regulation Act, which gives immigrant women the right to leave abusive marriages without being deported. It also requires that men who go through "marriage broker" services to disclose their domestic violence histories to potential brides.



If you ever want to despair of the human condition, Google the term "IMBRA" -- the vast majority of the results returned are authored by men outraged at these entirely reasonable measures that keep men from beating their immigrant wives and using green cards as leverage to perpetuate the violence. Strangely, few of these websites argue that men should be given the direct right to beat women, but it’s hard to imagine what other worldview they could be operating under, when they think that it should be perfectly legal for a man to threaten his wife with deportation if she leaves him after a round of beating. If you are under the incorrect impression that sexism is dead and feminism isn’t needed anymore, I recommend listening to the howls of men who think the government owes them the right to treat immigrant women like a population available for their punching bag and sexual assault needs. That goes double for you if you’ve ever sneered at the term "intersections of oppression," because I can’t think of a better example myself.



Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.


© 2008 RH Reality Check All rights reserved.


View this story online at: http://www. alternet. org/story/81275/

The number of ethnicity-based hate crimes in San Diego County doubled between 2005 and 2006. Local law enforcement estimates that 75% of all hate crimes committed in 2007 were against Latinos, and a North County coalition of Latino rights groups has had enough.

penasquitos_28jan07_72dpi...

The Minutemen are "benevolently" giving back! So they think. According to LA Times' Richard Marosi, the Minutemen were recently approved by the California Transportation Department to adopt a two mile stretch of the 5 Freeway near San Clemente, CA. As part of the program and agreement to collect rubbish within the specified area, Caltrans (State of California Transportation Department) has posted two signs along the freeway that read "ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY- SAN DIEGO MINUTEMEN". (Although, there are female members, apparently there was no need to include the Minutewomen.)

Plan México moves forward

.. media -->

.. link included -->

Soon after Felipe Calderón pointed out that in México 'there is no dirty war,' the plenary of the Chamber of Deputies met to approve generally the Reforma Judicial. This was done in the name of 'combating delinquency,' and will serve to legalize a police state – elements of which have already been imposed. Included in the Reforma are provisions for the legal execution of breaking and entering houses, arbitrary detention, access to confidential data of the accused, and holding defendants without the ability to communicate, among other things. The importance of this is not only the annulling of important guaranteed individual rights, but also that it is a path towards a type of repression where human rights and justice, bit by bit, slide further away from the already dispossessed.

Plan México, or the Mérida Initiative, continues to advance by way of the discourse concerning national security; its implementation is borne of a politics of fear. In spite of the fact that some see it as a 'win,' in theory, that social movements would not be considered 'organized delinquency,' recent experiences (in which the State criminalizes protest and social inconformity) indicate the contrary. It is enough to mention the response of the police-military front against popular movements: in Atenco, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Guerrero, and Chiapas. As is the aggression against defenders of human rights, so is the forced disappearance of people with connections to armed organizations.