Monday, January 27, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day


Arizona GOP censures John McCain for 'liberal' voting record – NBC
By Terry Tang, The Associated Press

The Arizona Republican Party formally censured Sen. John McCain late Saturday, citing a voting record they say is insufficiently conservative.
The resolution to censure McCain was approved by a voice-vote during a meeting of state committee members in Tempe, state party spokesman Tim Sifert said. It needed signatures from at least 20 percent of state committee members to reach the floor for debate.

Sifert said no further action was expected.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers declined to comment on the censure. But former three-term Sen. Jon Kyl told The Arizona Republic that the move was "wacky."
"I've gone to dozens of these meetings and every now and then some wacky resolution gets passed," Kyl told the newspaper on Saturday. "But most people realize it does not represent the majority of the vast numbers of Republicans."

Kyl also defended McCain's voting record as "very conservative."
McCain isn't up for re-election until 2016, when he will turn 80. He announced in October that he was considering running for a sixth term.

According to the resolution, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee has campaigned as a conservative but has lent his support to issues "associated with liberal Democrats," such as immigration reform and funding the federal health care law.
Several Republican county committees recently censured McCain.

Timothy Schwartz, the Legislative District 30 Republican chairman who helped write the resolution, said the censure showed that McCain was losing support from his own party.

"We would gladly embrace Sen. McCain if he stood behind us and represented us," Schwartz said.
Fred DuVal, a Democrat who plans to run for Arizona governor, called the censure an "outrageous response to the good work Sen. McCain did crafting a reasonable solution to fix our broken immigration system."

McCain has been dogged by conservatives objecting to his views on immigration and campaign finance, among other issues, since he first ran for Congress in 1982. Republican activists were also turned off by his moderate stances in the 2000 presidential race.

McCain was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and won his Senate seat in 1986.



Not surprisingly, I like McCain for being a deep-thinking and individualistic voter, rather than being one of the Republican sheep, following the more aggressive leaders as the party becomes ever closer to the far right. Some of those people would reenact the bad old days of the 1950's or even the 1930's. The repeated attempts to discipline its members for voting with Democrats on some issues is making the party ever more restrictive, and causing gridlock in the Congress and Senate. I hope McCain switches over and becomes a Democrat the way Governor Crist of Florida did in the last few years. He would be welcomed by many, I think.





Frustrated Obama's message: I'll go it alone – NBC
By Tom Curry, National Affairs Writer, NBC News


When he stands before lawmakers Tuesday night for his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama will have a message for the divided Congress that has largely stymied his agenda for the past three years: Fine, I’ll go it alone.

“I’ve got a pen,” Obama has said in the weeks leading up to the speech, “and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.”

Many of Obama’s big policy goals have ended up stranded in limbo between the Democratic-controlled Senate trying to advance his agenda and the Republican-led House bent on stopping him.

And, heading into a midterm election year, he faces lame-duck status unless his party can regain control of the House this November.

Frustrated with the Capitol Hill quagmire, the president is increasingly turning toward the power of the presidency to try to solidify his legacy. Obama has pledged to act, saying, “We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need.” 

"The president sees this as a year of action, to work with Congress where he can and to bypass Congress where necessary," White House press secretary Jay Carney told ABC News Sunday.  

This rhetoric is not new for Obama. He said last June that climate change is “a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now.”
The president has also warned that he “has a phone,” to rally the county around his ideas and entice businesses and non-profit organizations to help shift the political winds.

Here are three areas where President Obama can act on his own or at least can operate with a great degree of leeway

Appointments
Now that Senate Democrats have eliminated filibusters for nominations other than to the Supreme Court, the way is clear for Obama to fill vacancies in executive branch agencies and especially to life-tenured posts on the federal appeals courts. 
Nominees can now be confirmed by a simple majority vote. Democrats have 55 votes in the Senate, which allows Democrats in conservative states or who face tough re-election races in 2014 to not vote with Obama on his contentious nominees.

Last month, three red-state Democrats, including Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas who’s up for re-election this fall, voted against Obama appeals court nominee Nina Pillard, who’d made controversial comments critical of anti-abortion protesters.

There are now 16 vacancies on the federal appeals courts around the country. So far Obama has sent nine nominees to the Senate for these open posts.
Thanks to the abolition of the filibuster in the case of most nominees, Democratic-appointed judges now dominate the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit which handles many EPA and other regulatory cases. Obama and Bill Clinton have appointed seven of that court’s 11 active judges.

Executive orders and directives
Based on what Obama and his aides have said in the run-up to the State of the Union, it’s likely that he will seek to test the limits of what he can do through executive orders and directives to federal agencies.

An example of one Obama directive done by presidential memorandum: last June he directed the Interior Department to approve enough renewable energy capacity on federal lands to power more than 6 million homes by 2020.

But congressional Republicans are on a high state of alert for what they see as Obama intrusions on congressional law-making power.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., warned Sunday that “when the executive branch tries to assume the legislative powers, that that's a form of tyranny.”

in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last month, Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, who served in the Justice Department during the Bush administration, criticized “the president's decision to enforce the immigration laws as though the DREAM Act had been enacted when in fact, it has not.”

He said that even though Obama favors the DREAM Act, “Congress repeatedly declined to pass it. So the president simply announced that he would enforce the Immigration Nationality Act as though the DREAM Act had been enacted.” 

Regulations
The coming year will be crucial for the climate change agenda which Obama announced last June.

Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental advocacy group, told reporters last month the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been developing new rules for fracking -- hydraulic fracturing to increase natural gas and oil output -- under federal leases for areas that “serve as major sources of drinking water for metropolitan areas like Washington, D.C. and the Denver metro area.”

The NRDC, she said, thinks BLM’s fracking policy “is much too weak,” so environmentalists will be closely watching Obama’s nominee to head the BLM, Neil Kornze, who is a former advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The BLM may not be well known to most Americans, even though it administers 245 million acres, an area larger than New York, Florida, Minnesota and California combined. And Kornze, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, isn’t a household name. But the decisions that he and other regulators make will have enormous real-world consequences, even though the debate over these policies won't usually be taking place on the Senate floor and certainly won’t be broadcast in primetime as will Obama’s speech Tuesday night



I guess we'll see how far Obama's issues can go using his signature pen only. The Republicans will probably find a way to fight him. I'll keep my eyes open for news about those things. If this is the only way to get things like environmental issues put forward, so be it.






Opportunity rover finds fresh signs that ancient Mars was life-friendly – NBC
Alan Boyle, Science Editor NBC News


Ten years after it landed on Mars, NASA's Opportunity rover has hit pay dirt again: This time, the rover's scientists are reporting new evidence that garden-variety life could have thrived on the Red Planet billions of years ago.

Not long after Opportunity bounced to the surface in 2004, the six-wheeled rover came across geological formations that were formed amid standing water, suggesting a sort of habitability on ancient Mars. But back then, the evidence indicated that the water was salty and highly acidic — making for an environment that would have been suitable only for the hardiest organisms on Earth.

Now scientists are fleshing out a scenario that's more in tune with what NASA's Curiosity rover, a more recent arrival, found at a different site thousands of miles away. That suggests that life-friendly conditions could have existed for hundreds of millions of years.

"The punch line here is that the oldest rocks Opportunity has examined were formed under very mild conditions — conditions that would have been a much better niche for life, and also much better for the preservation of organic materials that would have been produced," said Ray Arvidson, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Arvidson is the lead author of a research paper on the results, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The findings come from Opportunity's study of Matijevic Hill, an area on the rim of 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater. 

Clues seen from orbit
The six-wheeled rover has been surveying the crater's rim for more than two years, but readings provided by an instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed to a rocky patch on Matijevic Hill as a potentially new frontier. The orbiter's CRISM instrument picked up hints of iron smectite, a type of clay mineral that's typically formed in the presence of water.

When Opportunity arrived on the scene, it ground into the rocks with its abrasion tool and analyzed their composition with its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, or APXS. It also took a close look at berry-shaped spherules embedded in the rocks, plus fractures that were filled with calcium sulfate. All those lines of evidence pointed to a formation process that took place in the presence of neutral or mildly acidic water.

"The fractures had more water going through, and the conditions were mild," Arvidson told NBC News. "If I were back there in that period, and I wanted to make a well for my summer home, I would have driven it down into those fractures because it'd be drinkable water."

Curiosity found signs of similarly mild conditions in Gale Crater, not far from where it landed in August 2012. The site that Curiosity explored is thought to have been a water-filled lake as recently as 3.6 billion years ago. The rocks examined by Opportunity are significantly older than that, and certainly older than Endurance Crater itself — perhaps 4 billion years old. That suggests that areas of Mars could have been habitable over a span of several hundred million years.

"These mild aqueous conditions extended over a long period of time, and over an extensive area," Arvidson said. "Mars probably had a number of habitable environments, and then it went into this drying-out period, and the whole system went into the deep freeze."

Arvidson and his colleagues discussed some of their findings last year, based on their analysis of a rock on Matijevic Hill that was nicknamed Esperance. The Science paper fills out the picture with additional samples and geological context. 
Video: Intended to last just 90 days, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, far exceeded their warranty. Spirit lasted roughly six years, and Opportunity is still going. NBC News’ Mike Taibbi reports.

Questions remain
Opportunity can't run tests that are as detailed as the experiments that Curiosity can run, so it can't detect the kinds of organic chemicals that Curiosity can. But it can check out the surroundings and help scientists figure out more precisely how the ancient rocks were formed. Did they start out as volcanic ash deposits, or were they laid down as river sediments or lake sediments? Further investigation is likely to answer that question.

Arvidsen said he and his colleagues also want to continue their study of a strange rock that popped up in Opportunity's field of view this month and has been compared to a jelly doughnut. They're intrigued by the preliminary readings returned by the rover's instruments.

"We've never seen this composition before," Arvidson said. "It's high in sulfur, manganese, phosphorus, iron. ... It represents pretty substantial deposition of salts and oxides."

The findings about Mars' once-drinkable water and the jelly-doughnut rock demonstrate that Opportunity can still do useful science after 10 years, even though it has a gimpy wheel and an arthritic robotic arm. A decade ago, the rover science team anticipated having the rover in operation for only 90 days — so are they now starting to run out of things for Opportunity to do?
"Holy smokes, no," Arvidson said. "Not at all."



These rovers are really high quality pieces of equipment. It would be great if they can dig deeply enough to find some bacteria in the soil or in rock crevices, as have been found on earth. Numerous Internet sites tell of buried water ice that has been found not only at the poles, but in other locations as well. Can the Rover dig down to those sites and test for bacteria there? Also, would there be enough water ice on Mars for astronauts to tap into it for drinking? Maybe we need to send up another exploratory device to see.




­

For Persian Jews, America Means 'Religious Pluralism At Its Best' – NPR
by Davar Ardalan
­
Code Switch has been writing about some overlooked cultural interactions that have helped shape what Jewish identity is today, and we continue the series with a post by Tell Me More Senior Producer Davar Ardalan on Iranian Jews.

Judaism has a rich and millennial history in Iran including the era 2,500 years ago when the first Persian ruler declared religious freedom. But during the Islamic Revolution, as the last Persian monarch left Iran — 35 years ago this month — thousands fled to the United States in search of a new home.

Roben Farzad and his family fled Iran for America at the end of 1978. The Farzads hailed from Shiraz, the city of poets and gardens. In the 1950s, Roben Farzad's uncle changed the family's last name from the Persian Jewish surname Sarahkhatoon, meaning "Lady Sarah," to the more common surname Farzad. The last name Sarahkhatoon had gotten his sons beaten up in grade school.

After leaving Iran, they settled in Miami, where Roben's aunt was in medical school. The cultural transition wasn't easy.

"I spent much of those first few years in the States watching Nightline* with my parents," Roben says, "and witnessing Dad freak out women at the supermarket. You see, he liked holding hands of complete strangers to get his heavily accented point across: 'Hi. Would you geeve to me a date?' He was trying to buy pitted dates."
Roben went on to graduate from Princeton University and Harvard Business School and has been a contributor to Businessweek, PBS and NPR. Today he lives with his wife and two children in Richmond, Va. — an Iranian Jew in the former capital of the Confederacy. Roben takes pride in the fact that his son, whose father and grandparents fled persecution abroad, is now taught by the great-great-great granddaughter of an escaped slave.

Legacy Of Iranian Heritage
History is a defining force for Jews in Iran and their diaspora. Many Iranian Jews trace their lineage back to the beginning of the Persian Empire in 539 B.C., when Cyrus the Great captured Babylon.

In 1879, a British archaeologist unearthed a clay cylinder in Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq — that was made following Cyrus' conquest. The cuneiform script mandates cultural and religious tolerance, respect and equality within his kingdom.

Author and scholar Houman Sarshar says the Cyrus Cylinder "is a great source of pride for me as an Iranian. As a Jewish Iranian, I find a deep emotional connection with that cylinder, because it marks the event that liberated Jews from Babylonian slavery on Oct. 29, 539 B.C. and subsequently led my forefathers to settle in Iran."

An exhibit last year featuring the Cyrus Cylinder was one of the most popular on record for the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, where many Persian Jews now live.
#IranianJews seem to have blossomed in the US in ways that our great grandparents generation couldn't have dreamed of. Proud 2b part of it

— Houman Sarshar (@Khoopy) January 5, 2014
Sarshar, who was interviewed on NPR in 2002, says classical Persian art and music was kept alive for centuries by Persian Jews. After Shiism became the dominant creed of Islam in the 16th century, he says, all non-liturgical music was banned in Iran.
Eventually, many Jews became practice-for-hire musicians, "in part filling the void left behind by those who had either fled or simply elected no longer to play music," Sarshar says. For the next 400 years, Jewish musicians performed at various life cycle ceremonies throughout Iran.

Creating An American Persian Community
With the onset of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, thousands of Persian Jews fled to the United States.

Light And Shadows
A current exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York called "Light and Shadows" explores the artistic and cultural experience of Iranian Jews through rare archaeological artifacts.

Saba Soomekh, author of From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Iranian Jewish Women Between Religion and Culture, was born in pre-revolutionary Iran, where her father would recite songs to her from Persian poets like Rumi and Hafez.

Saba and her family fled Tehran for Los Angeles in 1978 — and they weren't alone. "I know of one school that asked parents to not speak Persian on campus because the non-Persian speaking parents felt excluded," Saba says. At her high school in the early 1990s, "our teachers were taking Persian language classes in order to understand what the students were saying to each other."

In 2010, the Los Angeles City Council officially named the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue "Persian Square."

Soomekh is now a lecturer at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches religious studies. She says there is tremendous diversity within the Persian Jewish community. Some Iranian Jews have found more liberal ways to express their religion, but others have become much more traditional since coming to America. For Soomekh, this is religious pluralism at its best.

"In Iran, you only had one type of Judaism: traditional," she says. "Iranian Jews found themselves in Los Angeles and now they can pick which Jewish movement they believe aligns best with their religious practice."

* Nightline was especially significant to Iranian immigrants because it had its beginnings when revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took Americans hostage for 444 days. Nightline and its host Ted Koppel provided ongoing coverage of the crisis.

For further background, archival content and behind the scenes interviews, check out our Flipboard magazine.
As part of our series, we also wrote about Latin-Jewish cooking and music. Share your ideas on Jewish cross-cultural interactions with us. Send your thoughts to Emily Siner or tweet at Code Switch.




I think there is nothing more stimulating than the ability to sample food, music, writing or folkways from other cultural groups. When I get to know people who are different from me I broaden myself, and I generally learn to like them. I am grateful that the USA, though some people fight it tooth and nail, is a mixed bag of influences. We grow from that and develop emotionally and spiritually.

The church I go to is the Unitarian Universalist Church, and we have no dogmas, just a set of spiritual goals and principles, and the people who join come from a variety of backgrounds. I love that. It's like when I made it to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. People of all kinds were in my classes and professors taught broadly rather than preferring that we memorize the textbook and parrot out a given set of answers in class. It opened up my mind, and I've never gone back to the narrow-minded ways of the old South.



­

When King And Johnson Joined Forces To Fight The War On Poverty – NPR
by Andrew Small
­
When President Lyndon B. Johnson met at the White House with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on Jan. 18, 1964, the two men were near the peak of their powers and the country was in a maelstrom.

Johnson had been President for less than two months following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ten days before the meeting, in his State of the Union address, Johnson said: "No memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought." And, as if that wasn't enough, just two weeks before he had launched a war on poverty.

The Reverend King, in turn, had just been anointed "America's Gandhi" by Time magazine, which pronounced him man of the year. The magazine explained the selection:
"The U.S. Negro, shedding the thousand fears that have encumbered his generations, made 1963 the year of his outcry for equality, of massive demonstrations, of sit-ins and speeches and street fighting, of soul searching in the suburbs and psalm singing in the jail cells."

Six months before the meeting, King had delivered the now-famous "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington. Four months had passed since the bombing of the street church in Birmingham and the murder of four little girls.

The two men had already signaled their trust in one another. Johnson and King spoke three days after Kennedy's assassination. The President told the preacher he wanted to let him know "how worthy I'm going to try to be of all your hopes." King, in turn, had told Time magazine, "[The President] means business," King said. "I think we can expect even more from him than we have had up to now."

Johnson solicited the advice of King and three of his allies — Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young and Congress of Racial Equality National Director James Farmer — in formulating his legislative agenda for the year.
In a recording of the call where LBJ arranges the meeting with Wilkins the president eagerly asked "When are you gonna get down here and start civil rights?" He encouraged Wilkins to persuade the press to give them "equal time" on television to promote passage of the proposed civil rights bill. And in the call he pushed Wilkins and requested, "a little direction. These boys are pretty theoretical down here, and if I get it passed, I'm going to have to have more practical plans."

King, Young, Farmer and Wilkins (a murderer's row of nonviolent activists) showed up for the White House with specific proposals and facts.

Though the 90-minute meeting was not open to the press, The Chicago Daily Defender published the four activists' comments to the media outside the White House in an article headlined "LBJ Meets With Negro Leaders; All Five Worry About Poverty."
The civil rights leaders said the discussion with the president revolved around how to address the fact that poverty afflicted blacks far more than whites.

King walked out of the White House having agreed to help Johnson's anti-poverty agenda but emphasized that blacks would not accept "any watering down" of a civil rights bill.

So Johnson and King left to build coalitions in Congress and the streets respectively.
As the House of Representatives passed the civil rights bill in February, King went with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to subdue segregationist violence in St. Augustine, Fla.

After months of enduring violence and arrests for civil disobedience, King left St. Augustine in June after local businessmen promised to desegregate.

Shortly after, the Civil Rights Act would be approved by the Senate.
Johnson invited the four activists back to the White House to witness the signing of the Civil Rights Act. They accepted. On July 2, in the East Room of the White House, Johnson signed the provision into law. Less than six months after the January meeting. The president gave King the pen used to sign the bill. King described it as one of his "most cherished possessions."



Lyndon Johnson was one of the most controversial presidents due to some of the things he did, like picking up his beagle by the ears in front of the news cameras and pulling up his shirt to show his appendectomy scar. I didn't like that, but he was right on target as far as the need for Civil Rights legislation and the “war on poverty.” He was sometimes crude, but very sophisticated in his ability to get laws through Congress. It was a period of optimism for me and other young liberals. I look back on those years with fondness.




­


Billionaire Compares Outrage Over Rich In SF To Kristallnacht – NPR
by Elise Hu
­
Class tensions in the San Francisco Bay Area got even hotter this weekend, over the public musings of Tom Perkins, a prominent venture capitalist and co-founder of the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The billionaire wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal comparing the class tensions between the San Francisco middle class and the tech-affluent to one of the most horrific events in Western history — Kristallnacht, or "Night of the Broken Glass," a series of coordinated attacks against Jews in 1938 Nazi Germany.

The context here is that in recent years, some Bay Area residents have become increasingly outraged over rising income inequality, housing prices and how newly rich tech entrepreneurs are changing the city and its culture. (We explored this from several angles in December; look back on the series here.) The simmering resentment has erupted in louder calls for housing policy changes and protests over the private buses that take tech workers to Silicon Valley headquarters, like those of Google. And some protesters have even stalked a Google employee to his home and blocked him in.

The events have clearly frustrated Perkins, a "Silicon Valley pioneer," according to his bio. In his letter titled "Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?" Perkins attempts to draw a line between the "demonization of the rich" in San Francisco and the assault on Jews by the Nazis at the start of World War II — an assault that led to 91 deaths and 30,000 jailed in concentration camps. Some excerpts from Perkins' brief letter:
"I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'

"From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these 'techno geeks' can pay.

"This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent 'progressive' radicalism unthinkable now?"
His firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, already seems to be distancing itself from its namesake partner, with a tweet saying it is "shocked by his views":
Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree.
— Kleiner Perkins (@kpcb) January 25, 2014

And Perkins has been blasted on Twitter, as you might have expected. New York Times journalist Steven Greenhouse put it this way:
As someone who lost numerous relatives to the Nazi gas chambers, I find statements like this revolting & inexplicable http://t.co/d1fWej0y4u
— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) January 25, 2014

We're trying to get a response from Perkins and will update this post if we hear back.



As long as there are people who need to protest high rental expenses and other legitimate poverty related issues, I think protests and letters to newspapers, etc. are justifiable activity on the part of those who are suffering. It's interesting that this article said it is a Middle Class protest. The liberal movements of the 1970's were also largely by the Middle Class. They are the only ones with the hope and energy to protest. The poorest of the poor mainly just survive in a minimal way.

Without the push from the people underneath them, the rich can become so callous and thoughtless that they take complete control. When I see people like Justin Bieber getting worse and worse in his behavior as the months go by, largely because he has too much money for his own good, I am simply disgusted. I don't have much sympathy for this tycoon Perkins, either, though if mobs of people have pursued a man to his house and interfered with his life that is not an acceptable thing for them to be doing.

I do think that if newspapers are talking against the rich, that is their right unless they commit slander. I'm glad to see it's happening. I thought the attempts to improve the situation of less wealthy people in the US were over after the movements of the 1970's died down, but when I think of this, maybe it's going on again. When I saw the “Occupy” movement it seemed so unfocussed that I didn't pay much attention to it. Maybe I was wrong.