Sean Penn - YES!

Mega congratulations for Sean Penn who did a tremendous job playing Harvey Milk in Milk.

"You commie, homo-loving sons of guns," Penn began in accepting the prize. "I did not expect this and I want it to be very clear that I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me often."

"How did he do it?" fellow Oscar winner Robert De Niro wondered in introducing Penn. "How for so many years did he get all those jobs playing straight men?"

Milk was the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the United States when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. The following year, he was shot to death along with Mayor George Moscone by board colleague Dan White. But during his life, he inspired gays and lesbians to stand up and come out, helped turn the Castro neighborhood into the gay Mecca it would become and roused crowds with impassioned speeches that often began with the words, "My name is Harvey Milk and I am here to recruit you."

In wrapping up his own speech, Penn mentioned the protesters who lined the streets of Hollywood near the Oscar festivities, holding anti-gay signs: "We've got to have equal rights for everyone," he said.

Backstage, when asked what he would tell those protesters if he could speak to them, Penn responded: "I'd tell them to turn in their hate card and find their better self."

Oscar

I've loved Hugh Jackman for some time and am really enjoying him in the Academy Awards tonight. The opening number was quite alot of fun.

I've been most touched by Dustin Lance Black, winner for Original Screen Play of Milk. It's an incredible movie about an incredible man but Dustin's remarks were very moving...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mv35SN3ctU

"When I was 13 my beatiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk and it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life. It gave me the hope one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married. I want to thank my mom who has always loved me even where there was pressure not to, but most of all if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago I think he'd want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches and or by the government or by their families that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyone tells you , God does love you and that very soon I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours. Thank you and thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk."

A-men

$790 Billion Deal: School And State Aid Saved, Tax Credit Cut

AP DAVID ESPO February 11, 2009 at 02:28 PM WASHINGTON —
Moving with remarkable speed, key lawmakers and the White House reached for final agreement Wednesday on a $789 billion economic stimulus measure designed to create millions of jobs in a nation reeling from recession.
"Time's getting short," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, one of a handful of Senate moderates whose votes are crucial to the bill's passage.

The winds of change

I am ecstatic that we have a new President to guide our nation and our people. A man who knows how to excite people to rally behind our nation instead of dividing us.

I pray that we continue toward unity. Solutions for the economy will not be easy and will take time but I believe we can do it. Like others, I believe that in times of distress, a real leader needs to call us to give of ourselves. Franklin Roosevelt rallied the people to make sacrifices and the people did so.

Central Florida has also sent the riff raff packing from Congressional Districts 8 and 24. Ric Keller (8) can hit the road and Jack Abramoff's buddy, Tom Feeney (24) in his own words "got licked"! Thank goodness!

My only sadness on this otherwise historic night is that 62% of the people of Florida chose to put outright discrimination into the Constitution of the State of Florida. For several years it has been statute that "marriage is between one man and one woman" but those who perpetuated Amendment 2 decided that it should be part of the constitution. I do hold out hope that President Obama will be able to further push toward "liberty and justice for all" in our country.

dg

FCAT (Florida's Conspiracy Against Teachers) (and children)

I received this today and must share it...

Date: May 21, 2008 3:46:55 AM EDT

Subject: 3rd Grade FCAT Scores Today

The day of the 2008 release of the third-grader’s Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) scores is a good time to step back and take stock of what has simply come to be known as the test in the Sunshine State.

Looking back, the FCAT appeared in the public schools for the first time in the final year of Governor Lawton Chiles’ term in office. But Jeb Bush is married to the FCAT in the minds of most Floridians. And he seems to embrace that idea. Bush often cites the test as the cornerstone of his legacy as the self-proclaimed “education governor” and he did raise the FCAT stakes to point that it now hangs over the state’s public school landscape like a dense fog.

The now former Governor Jeb Bush is the scion of a dynastic American family of incomparable political power and great wealth. The Bush family boasts two President’s of the United States! The family enjoys a huge fortune based on its dealings across the financial spectrum from the Rockefellers to the Saudi royal family. There can be no argument, an extremely powerful man made the FCAT his baby and guided the State of Florida to this system of public school accountability.

For those unfamiliar with the FCAT, it makes children accountable for tested reading skills when they reach the age of eight or 9-years-old. If a child fails to meet the test standards—that child is severely punished. The child is publically humiliated! The child is forced to repeat the third grade while classmates move ahead to the forth grade. The architects of the FCAT believe that holding these children up to shame and ridicule will become an incentive to master the tested reading skills and there is little doubt the approach does increase the pressure on the little ones. There are widespread reports of children becoming physically sick on test days—throwing up on the test, urinating on themselves.

Several years now of administering the test indicate that children living in poverty feel the lion’s share of the FCAT ‘s punitive force. Because a disproportionate number of poor children are African-American and Hispanic and recent immigrants, something the educational bureaucracy calls “the achievement gap” is now all the rage. However, those bureaucrats are adamant that poverty will not be used as an excuse. The children must be punished, they must be held accountable! It is worth noting here that Florida’s white children living in poverty, in rural Jefferson County for instance, do not fare well with the FCAT either.

For a while, a couple of years ago, South Florida had a precious little FCAT success story named Sherdavia Jenkins. She came from the heart of Miami-Dade’s Liberty City and gave the test a whoppin’ worthy of Muhammad Ali in his prime. Ali was someone, by the way, who would have had great difficulty with the FCAT as a child but he did ultimately lecture at Harvard University several times as a grown man and recorded some success in life. Anyway, Sherdavia earned the best FCAT score at Lillie C. Evans Elementary. The justifiable pride Sherdavia must have felt lasted just a few weeks before the violence endemic in her depressed neighborhood claimed her life. She was shot and killed outside her home.

The whole tragedy raises certain questions. Who was ready to step up and be accountable for the all too brief life and violent death of the FCAT whiz? Should Sherdavia have packed up and gotten out of Liberty City? Maybe, but it’s hard out there for a nine-year-old on your own. FCAT supporters often mention the importance of parental accountability. And we may have to settle for blaming Sherdavia’s mother and father for allowing her onto the front porch to play with her dolls. Because not one of Florida’s most powerful and influential public figures even acknowledged that Sherdavia Jenkins’ death was a problem that needed their attention.

Although the level of public school funding and graduation rates in Florida rest at or near the bottom of the national barrel, another layer of FCAT accountability lands on youngsters if they survive into and through high school. This year 26,997 high school seniors who dutifully completed their coursework, did their community service, and fought off all the negative influences toward dropping out will be punished for the sake of FCAT skills. At their upcoming graduation ceremonies, some of these students will pretend to their classmates to be receiving a diploma. But they will walk across that stage to be lashed by their FCAT masters and handed a worthless piece of paper.

At the conclusion of the movie Spiderman, Peter Parker comes to terms with his superhero status and he remembers his uncle saying, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” The creators and the administrators of the FCAT live by another rule. For them it seems to come down to, “With great power, comes great impunity.” Under the FCAT regimen, all the accountability is heaped on the shoulders of children living in deprivation and adults living in comfort accept none.

Jeb Bush had the means to keep his own children in private schools and he always did. The private schools are a haven from incessant testing because parents like Jeb and Columba Bush want their children truly educated and prepared for the future. Yet Gov. Bush, as a matter of public policy, always held that the FCAT was good for the public schools. And to prove it Bush used his power to retain tens of thousands of children in the third grade, he withheld high school diplomas from thousands more, he used the test to stigmatize the schools that serve children living in poverty as failing schools.

But while he was governor, Jeb Bush never ever held himself accountable for anything. In 2002, the state’s short-term investment and pension funds lost $334 million as Enron collapsed, three times the loss of any other fund in the nation. Jeb Bush invested Florida in Edison charter schools when the stock was valued at $37 and got out when it was worth 14 cents. Another $500 million of the public’s money was lost to enable his other corporate adventures.

Former Gov. Bush still doesn’t believe in accountability except for public school children. It has been reported that after leaving office Bush got a new job with Lehman Brothers. The Wall Street investment banking firm paid him over $400,000 to take a seat on their board of directors. Shortly thereafter, Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool and the Florida Retirement System purchased $842 million in bad investments from Lehman Brothers.

At ceremonies as Rep. Marco Rubio was ascending to Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Jeb Bush gave Rubio a sword. The gift was a sign that Rubio was pledged to defend the Bush legacy, including the FCAT. And Speaker Rubio has been faithful to his mentor’s charge, seeing to it that the burdens of accountability remain squarely and exclusively on children and off powerful men like him. A recent news report has Speaker Rubio’s Miami-Dade home inexplicably increasing in value a month after he bought it. Another story describes a home equity loan to Rubio from a bank run by politically connected allies. Then Rubio was accused of slipping language into legislation that allowed Max Alvarez, who describes Rubio as “like a son”, to keep a multi-million dollar turnpike fuel contract.

Even with Marco Rubio presiding in the House, the Florida Legislature did make changes to the FCAT. Sadly these changes turned out to be among the most cravenly self-serving “FCAT reforms” imaginable. This powerful governing body left untouched all the FCAT punishments for children after gutting public school funding by $2.3 billion. They went on to reduce the weight given to FCAT test scores when grading the schools, likely raising grades that have reflected badly on Legislators and the Florida Department of Education. It has all become almost impossible to fathom.

Paul A. Moore

Even the Communists...

What is wrong with this picture? The president of the United States spends his time, energy, and taxpayer money fighting for marriage between one man, one woman while the government of Communist Cuba...

Raul Castro's daughter spearheads anti-homophobia drive
Monday May 12, 11:54 AM
Source: Agence France-Presse
HAVANA (AFP) - President Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela, is organizing Cuba's second anti-homophobia festival this week to boost public awareness of the country's long-marginalized gay community, this time with the approval of her dad's government. "There's political support for this educational strategy. It's the best thing that's happened to us," Mariela Castro said about the backing the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX) she heads is receiving from Cuba's Communist Party.(snip) For as long as Cuba's communist revolution began nearly 50 years ago, Mariela and her mother have been busy trying to whittle away at the country's machismo tradition. The week-long festival in Havana and six of Cuba's 14 provinces, aims to increase public awareness about gay rights through television programs, movies, theater, debates and book fairs, culminating with the International Day Against Homophobia, on May 17. Besides the educational efforts, Mariela's group is also busy reforming Cuba's Family Code and has proposed in parliament a bill on freedom of gender -- the right to choose one's gender, and the right to "legal union" for gays. The legal union issue is an effort to sidestep the Catholic Church's determined opposition to gay marriage rights.

========================================================

Maybe someday our Commie hating country will provide all her citizens with the same non-homophobic legislation.

Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day... not only a special day for my mom but also for her friends and those who love her. Yep Mom, it's a more special day this year because you're healthy and celebrating with us. Your January surgery was very successful. In March, just six weeks later no signs of the cancer. Yes, today is a special day! We love you Mom.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

dan

Where has the month gone?

Good grief. How can it be that I haven't written in a month?! Is that right?!??! Man, Spring Break was just beginning and now it's done and gone. What happened to April? It's May already!

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon, 86F and I'm sitting here doing nothing instead of FINALLY finishing the bathroom I've been working on half my life... at least so it seems.

At school we had our first Day of Silence observance on April 24th. It went well and the message "was delivered" across many parts of our campus and our community.

We're 1/2 way through the 4th Quarter at school. Graduation is only 4 weeks from yesterday!

Went to see Spamalot and Wicked in the past month. Loved 'em both even if the Bob Carr has horrendous acoustics and the rows from hell! Maybe the new PAC will actually be done in this lifetime!

The Florida Legislative Session ended Friday and the Republicans have decimated education and our social programs but managed, of course, to leave all the exemptions in tact for their buddies! Our school district is facing a $30million cut. The legislature CUT the per pupil funding (FTE) for the first time in years when it has NEVER been large enough to begin with!

Go figure.

dg

Our good friend Chris.

Our friend Chris Becker died today.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/obituaries/article443767.ece

Chris is one of those special friends who, though I only saw him a few times a year, had a special place in our hearts. Chris was a teacher of young children who made learning fun and significant. His kids found him to be a special person too. On Sunday those whom he taught many years before, lined up with others to say hello to him at the Hospice Center.

Ralph, Bennie, and I were able to spend a few minutes with Chris Monday. Few have ever seen him without his strong energy but even in his weakened condition he continued to tell me, "I'm gonna beat this!"

Chris, a baby boomer, due to celebrate his 50th birthday this summer cared deeply about public education, his community, and his country. George Bush made him crazy. Jeb made him livid over the way he treated our students and our teachers.

Chris worked very hard to keep our freedom of speech.

Chris, we miss you now and will have a hole in our hearts at the NEA RA this summer when we work to raise awareness of the needs of our schools. There is no one who can coerce money from us for kids as well as you! Memories of you will, however, do the trick!

dg

Finally!

It's been six weeks since 15 year old Lawrence King was murdered in his 8th grade classroom in Oxnard, California and the media seems to finally be getting a CLUE that there is some merit to the story of this boy's brutal murder.

TODAY, March 28, the AP Wire Service writes...

Gay California student’s slaying sparks outcry

Activists demand that middle schools do more to teach tolerance

Gee... do ya think it's about time?
It's a good article and I must say that I am very glad to see it even if it took this long to make mainstream media. Please read it. dan

The Associated Press

updated 4:06 p.m. ET, Fri., March. 28, 2008

OXNARD, Calif. - Larry King was a gay eighth-grader who used to come to school in makeup, high heels and earrings. And when the other boys made fun of him, he would boldly tease them right back by flirting with them.

That may have been what got him killed.

On Feb. 12, another student, Brandon McInerney, 14, shot him twice in the head at the back of the computer lab at their junior high school, police say.

The slaying of the 15-year-old boy has alarmed gay rights activists and led to demands that middle schools do more to educate youngsters about discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Police would not discuss McInerney's motive. But the day before the shooting, King told McInerney he liked him, eighth-grader Eduardo Segure told the Ventura County Star.

If King had flirted with the other boy, "that can be very threatening to someone's ego and their sense of identity," said Jaana Juvonen, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hate-crime allegation
McInerney was jailed on $770,000 bail on an adult murder charge that could put him behind bars for life. Prosecutors also filed a hate-crime enhancement, which could bring three more years if McInerney is found to have acted on the basis of the victim's race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation.

The shooting has galvanized Oxnard, a city of nearly 200,000 people about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Several vigils for King have been held, including a march that drew about 1,000 people to this strawberry-growing section of Ventura County.

Like the killings of some other gay students — such as Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and Brandon Teena, the Nebraska transsexual whose story was the subject of the movie "Boys Don't Cry" — King's death has drawn national attention and outraged many gays.

Comic Ellen DeGeneres, who is a lesbian, said on her talk show Feb. 28: "Larry was not a second-class citizen. I'm not a second-class citizen. It is OK if you are gay."

'He wasn't afraid'
Students at E.O. Green Junior High said the other kids used to taunt King, call him names and throw wet paper towels at him in the boys' restroom, and he would bravely fire back by flirting with them and chasing them.

"He didn't like people insulting him," said his friend Miriam Lopez, 13. "Larry was brave enough to bring high heels and makeup to school and he wasn't afraid of anything."

Jerry Dannenberg, superintendent of the Hueneme School District, would not discuss details of what went on between King and McInerney but said students are encouraged to come forward if they have been threatened.

He also said that King was free to wear women's accessories with his uniform of white shirt and dark pants because the dress code prohibits only those items that could be a safety threat, such as steel-toed shoes.

"If girls are wearing jewelry, you can't stop boys from wearing it, too," he said. "Each gender has the right to wear what the other does."

The school system said that it has tolerance programs in its middle schools, but that sexual orientation is often not dealt with until high school. Since the killing, school officials have been meeting with gay leaders about changing the program.

"With young people coming out at younger ages, our schools — especially our junior highs and middle schools — need to be proactive about teaching respect for diversity based on sexual orientation and gender identity," said Carolyn Laub, executive director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network. "The tragic death of Larry King is a wake-up call for our schools to better protect students from harassment at school."

Abuse and harassment
A 2005 survey by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network found that more than 64 percent of gay and lesbian students report verbal, sexual or physical harassment at school, and 29 percent said they missed at least a day of school in the previous month out of fear for their safety. The group is holding its annual "Day of Silence" in memory of King on April 25.

The families of both boys have refused to comment. An e-mail message left for McInerney's attorney was not immediately returned.

Both teens have been described as good kids.

King and his mother crocheted hundreds of scarves that were shipped to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The avid singer planned to belt out the national anthem at his brother's opening-day baseball game this spring.

"He had an amazing voice and was always singing," said Averi Laskey, 13, a friend since elementary school. "He would stick up for you no matter what. Larry was the best kind of person you could meet."

McInerney was described as the typical eighth-grader, goofy and fun to be around. He trained to be a lifeguard and took martial arts. He also enrolled in the Young Marines, a group similar to the Army's Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps.

Rough upbringings
The two had at least one thing in common: rough upbringings.

King had been in foster care at a center for abused and neglected children since November, said Steve Elson, the facility's chief executive. Confidentiality laws prevented him from saying why.

McInerney's parents accused each other of domestic violence and filed dueling restraining orders, according to court records. Several months before McInerney was born, his father was accused of shooting his mother in the elbow. Kendra McInerney told a local paper she struggled with drug addiction for many years. The couple divorced in 2002.

Jay Smith, director of the Ventura County Rainbow Alliance, a gay rights organization, questioned whether teachers have enough training to deal with gay teens.

"Those of us being out remember being bullied and we don't want to see that happen to another kid," he said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. (believing this fits none of these categories... dan)

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23847511/