- reach out and work with communities in various ways.
- liaison with, and for, community agencies for service within affected areas.
- fight to make a difference.
- raise awareness.
- deal with community issues.
- raise awareness in the community of how we are making differences about undealt-with issues .
- when necessary, refer inquiries to outreach coordinators.
- Help coordination agency administrators identify and address outreach opportunities.
- model timetables and conceptualize benchmarks.
- issue guidelines for poster contests and interpretive dance festivals.
- Gather voter registrations, win valuable prizes.
And that's just the beginning. Let me give you some specific examples of how community organizer organizations like CFBH are making a difference right here in Majestic Oakewoods, a subdivision off exit 242. As you know, in the year since I moved here my community has experienced a rash of crime, despair, and abandoned homes. To address these community problems, I reached out to local groups of disaffected dropout youths who were struggling with unemployment. During a rap-session kegger at my home, I spoke with them about ways they could get involved with the community and help protect the environment. Together we organized an innovative free community bicycle / metal recycling program. I am proud to say that it has been so successful that our private sector partner, Kyle's Salvage, has encouraged us to create an expanded free community car program.
Barack Obama can't help it if he's a magna cum laude Harvard grad and you're a Wal-Mart shopper who resurfaces driveways with your brother-in-law. Americans are so narcissistic that our candidates have to be just like us. That's why George Bush is president. And that's where the McCain camp gets its campaign strategy: Paint Obama as cocky and arrogant and wait for America to vote him off, like the black guy in every reality show. A black president? Half of Pennsylvania isn't ready for black quarterbacks. Forget Obama, they think Will Smith needs to be taken down a peg.
Meet anonymous protester at the RNC convention.With grave suspicion and reservations, I nonetheless rejoice that the fading embers of conservatism may have indeed caught fire once more. That fireball is Gov.Sarah Palin of Alaska, I pray the next Vice President of the United States. Now I know why I have seen no one with any guts in the Republican Party in so long: the governor of Alaska has them all. Her speech last night was clearly a grand slam out-of-the-park home run. America, we have liftoff!
By selecting Gov. Palin to be his running mate, Sen. McCain has finally electrified the conservative base -- the very base he desperately needs to defeat Sen.Obama in November. I, for one, am greatly relieved and inspired by her message, delivery, confidence, poise, class and grace.
To borrow a relative quote from Michelle Obama, with the selection of Gov. Palin, it’s the first time in quite some time that I’m proud of the Republican Party.
Representative Charles B. Rangel has earned more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never reported it on his federal or state tax returns, according to a lawyer for the congressman and documents from the resort.Mr. Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the federal tax code, bought the beachfront villa at the Punta Cana Yacht Club and has received twice-yearly payments from the resort, which rents the property for $500 or more per night.
Records from the development, now called the Punta Cana Resort and Club, indicated that Mr. Rangel’s rental profits varied from year to year, from $2,700 in 2004 to $7,600 in 1994.
What's so "progressive" about tax evasion?
Sen. Barack Obama ditched his normal languid cool today, punching back at Gov. Sarah Palin as he spoke with reporters in York, Pa, hotly defending his work as a community organizer. He said he assumes Palin "wants to be treated same way guys want to be treated, which means their records are under scrutinty. I've been through this for 19 months. She's been through it, what four days?"He is right. We republicans already live in organized communities. That's probably why we don't have to worry about 235 murders IN ONE SUMMER.Obama's hackles were clearly raised by Palin's dismissal of his community organizing --a response to his earlier dismissal of her record as a small-town mayor. "Why would that kind of work be ridiculed?" Obama said. "Who are they fighting for?" The idea that community organizing is not relevant to the presidency, he said, just shows why Republicans "are out of touch and don't get it."
An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.
In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.
According to the Defense Department, 65 soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.
In the same time period, an estimated 245 people were shot and wounded in the city.
The aw-shucks quality and class warfare elements here are familiar. The indirection, sarcasm, and unembarrassed intelligence are new. It's a measure of how surprising Palin's style was that so many of her detractors could respond only with rage, incomprehension, and irrelevant complaints. In particular, Palin's Democratic counterpart Joseph Biden's predictable-as-Pickett's-Charge objection that the speech lacked substance sets up a very plausible scenario for the vice presidential debate: I'm willing to predict that the hyper-informed Biden will demonstrate his mastery of the facts, leave no doubt about his flair for complex policy questions, get his ass handed to him in the debate, and never understand what went wrong.
Sarah Palin is exciting and appealing. But what kind of executive is she? None of us have even the remotest idea. We don't know whether she takes advice from a wide circle or a narrow one, whether she tends to decide quickly or slowly, whether her budgets are realistic, whether she is calm or excitable in a crisis. We have no idea whether she is decisive or vacillating, prompt or procrastinating, curious or incurious. These things matter enormously in a president.
Nigerian anti-graft investigators have seized money raised by the head of the Nigerian Stock Exchange to support US presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said it would give the money back to those who attended a gala dinner in Lagos last month.
The EFCC said it had seized 74m naira ($630,000, £314,000), but said no Nigerian laws had been broken.
US political parties are not allowed to receive contributions from abroad.
Stock exchange chairwoman Ndi Okereke-Onyuike is also the head of Africans for Obama, a Nigeria-based support group.
More....
Another one bites the Obama bus.
Don't worry Kwame. You're a democrat. Next year, you can run again and win in a landslide. It doesn't matter how corrupt and/or incompetent you are. Just ask Marion Berry, William "Cold Cash" Jefferson, BJ Clinton, Ray Nagin, and Ted Kennedy.
A decade behind schedule, a $350 million downtown high school finally opened on Wednesday after years of environmental, seismic and legal troubles.
"We've been waiting a long time to get this," said Uriel Rivera, an 18-year-old senior at the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center. "A lot of people in the community were supposed to graduate from here, but they didn't. I thought it was going to be the same for me."
Rivera was among more than 2,400 students who streamed into the school on its first day - long after what had been expected to be a late 1990s debut of an education showplace to relieve sorely overcrowded classrooms.
Much of what was then called the Belmont Learning Center was already constructed before fears grew about toxic gases rising from an old oil field upon which it was built.
Construction was halted in 2000, then resumed in 2002 only to be thwarted again, this time by the discovery of an earthquake fault that crosses the site.
Lengthy investigations by the county district attorney's office, the city attorney and the California attorney general found no criminal wrongdoing, but in 2003 District Attorney Steve Cooley labeled the project "a public works disaster of biblical proportions."
Ms. Williams said the decision "was not easy nor made lightly," but was reached after "it became clear that a shrill and vitriolic ballot campaign marred by misinformation and disinformation would be impossible to avoid."
This is the lunacy we get to look forward to if the President and Congress is dominated by liberals.
A strange thing happened to running back Rudi Johnson when he visited with the Detroit Lionson Monday.
Someone stole his stuff.
Seriously.
Specifically, and as we’re told by a reliable source (i.e., not the person who told Mort that Joey Harrington had agreed to terms with the Ravens on Monday, or the person who told John Clayton that Todd Bouman had agreed to terms with the Ravens on Tuesday), Johnson left his bags outside CEO Matt Millen’s office while he met with team officials and, ultimately, worked out a deal with the team.
So when Johnson came back to get his bags, they were nowhere to be found. Johnson and Millen were stumped.
Enter the eye in the sky.
The team checked the videotapes generated by the team’s in-house surveillance system, and they quickly identified the culprit.
So who might it have been? None other than Tatum Bell, who lost his gig with the Lions after Rudi arrived.
More....
Liberals have long lamented the existence of two nations in America. They are right to do so today, but in a way they never meant. It is not the divide between rich and poor which soon will be causing serious pain on the left. Sarah Palin's pending nomination for Vice President is exposing the depth of the cultural divide between Middle America and the leftists who have taken over the education, media, and cultural establishment of our country.
That the Republicans missed about Sarah Palin then--and what the Democrats seem poised to miss now--is that she is a true political savant; a candidate with a knack for identifying the key gripes of the populace and packaging herself as the solution. That keen political nose has enabled her to routinely outperform her resume. Nearly two years into her administration, she still racks up approval ratings of 80 per cent or better.
One might reasonably ask to what extent her local popularity is buoyed by the high price of oil (and thus, a budget surplus, and thus, the ability to carry a stick into meetings with big oil). One might speculate about the durability of her anti-corruption stance in light of her conflict of interest in the dismissal of her director of public safety. And only the truly feckless would not concern themselves about her dearth of foreign policy experience. But in probing this candidate, it would behoove the Democrats and the pundits to shed the notion that they are dealing with some dimwitted bumpkin (Dan Quayle seems to come up a lot lately) who’s going to start crying when they ask her to name the president of Azerbaijan; or that Palin is the townie who was brought into the Skull & Bones initiation night for the amusement of all; or that somehow the prom queen ballots got mixed up with the Alaska gubernatorial poll. Trivialize her at your own peril.
Sarah Palin is a living reminder that the ultimate source of political power in this country is not the Kennedy School or the Davos Summit or an Ariana Huffington salon; even now, power emanates from the electorate itself. More precisely, power in 2008 emanates from the working class electorates of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Sooner or later, the Obama camp will realize that the beauty pageant queen is an enormously talented populist in a year that is ripe for populism. For their own sake, it had better be sooner.
A son and a brother of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware are accused in two lawsuits of defrauding a former business partner and an investor of millions of dollars in a hedge fund deal that went sour, The Washington Post reported, citing court records.The Democratic vice presidential candidate’s son Hunter, 38, and brother James, 59, meanwhile say it was they who were defrauded by their former partner, whom they have accused of misrepresenting his experience in the hedge fund industry, The Post said.
According to the legal skirmishes, which have been playing out in New York State Supreme Court since 2007, Anthony Lotito Jr. said that he agreed to help set up Paradigm Companies, a hedge fund group for the Bidens, because the V.P. nominee was concerned on how his son Hunter’s lobbying activities would reflect on his campaign.
Long before the national media spotlight began to shine on every twist and turn of his life's journey, Barack Obama had this to say about himself: "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. . . . I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind."
More....Political experience
Obama: Worked his way to the top by cultivating, pandering to and stroking the most powerful interest groups in the all-pervasive Chicago political machine, ensuring his views were aligned with the power brokers there.
Palin: Worked her way to the top by challenging, attacking and actively undermining the Republican party establishment in her native Alaska. She ran against incumbent Republicans as a candidate willing and able to clean the Augean Stables of her state's government.
There was much talk about change last week at the Democratic convention. But are the Democrats really offering any substantive change?To find out, I pulled out John Kerry's 2004 Democratic national platform and compared its fiscal policy with that contained in today's Barack Obama-inspired missive.
The documents are so similar it's creepy. While there are a number of new minor policies, and fresh details on old targets such as health care, the big picture has stayed the same.
When Democrats say they offer change, what they really mean is that things will be different if voters accept the policies they rejected last time.
To be fair, there are some alterations this year.
Both platforms promise to extend the Bush income-tax cuts for the middle class, but repeal them for the rich. In 2004, Kerry defined rich as those making more than $200,000. Today, Obama promises not to increase taxes on anyone making less than $250,000.
So the definition of rich has increased from $200,000 to $250,000. That's change you can believe in that will be especially appreciated by everyone making between $200,000 and $249,999.
