National Women’s History Month-Race For The Cure

this month is National Women’s History Month, and a friend, Maria K. also asked me for our help in The Race For The Cure. So follow the links Maria Provides below and Save the boobs! You know you want to.

 

Breast Cancer. Isn’t It Time To Stop
This Disease in Its Tracks?

Maria K. Accepted the Challenge

Walk for the Cure:
The Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure® is an amazing 60-mile walk that helps mothers, sisters, spouses and friends get one step closer to a world without breast cancer. Join us for three inspirational days where together we’ll walk so long, so far and with so much hope, the world will hear our footsteps.
What YOU can do:
There are many different opportunities to be a part of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure®.
1. Register as a walker or as a crew member
2. Volunteer
3. Support a participant with a donation or come out and cheer them on
4. Sign up for updates and newsletters to learn more
Follow Maria’s journey as she trains for the 3-day 60 mile walk:
A Mind Lively and at Ease

March is also National Women’s History Month which may sound strange after reading what the Republicans have planned for women with their defunding of Planned Parenthood. “Big money has co-opted conservative activists for its agenda, but scratch the surface and it’s the religious right that rears it’s head. The Republicans who seem to have been co-opted by the Tea Party tell us they are not interested in social issues but just economic ones. It must have been quite a surprise, then, to have the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which rode in on a sea of Tea Party energy and funding, to immediately put most of their efforts into controlling the uteruses of America, through a series of bills that  defund Planned Parenthood, end all private insurance funding for abortion, and even allow doctors to refuse to save the lives of pregnant women if doing so would require performing an abortion.” There are two great articles that were recently published that lay this out, one by Amanda Marcotte in The Guardian which I have quoted from above. The other was in this mornings Alternet News. Both point out how the Tea Part/Republicans/Religious Right intend to marginalize women and there by marginalize the Democratic Party. This seems a tragedy when women in America have fought so long and hard for equal footing in the U.S.

As Black History Month comes to a close, Women’s History Month begins.
Women’s History Month is a relatively new invention, dating back to the 1970s, when women were fighting for greater recognition of female accomplishments. (Also at that time, the Equal Rights Amendment debate was in full swing.)
According to the National Women’s History Project, the idea for a month dedicated to women’s history sprouted in 1978.
That year, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women declared the week of March 8 “Women’s History Week,” selecting March 8 because it isInternational Women’s Day. The event was a success, with schoolchildren learning about women’s contributions to history, and a parade bringing the week to a close.
The following year a member of the Sonoma County commission told colleagues at the Women’s History Institute at Sarah Lawrence College about the Women’s History Week experiment. Excited by the idea, the Sarah Lawrence group decided to replicate the efforts in schools across the country and to begin pushing for National Women’s History Week.
Their efforts paid off quickly: In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued a message asking people to recognize National Women’s History Week from March 2-8. He said, “[T]he achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well.”
But National Women’s History Week was still not yet formally recognized. So then Rep. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Sen Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, co-sponsored legislation to ask that the president make National Women’s History Week official in 1981. It passed, and in 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued the first official proclamation naming the week including March 8 as National Women’s History Week.

For the next five years, Congress continued to pass the legislation, and the president continued to issue his proclamation. Then, in 1987, organizers decided to be expansive and changed the week to National Women’s History Month.
Since 1987, the president has proclaimed March to be Women’s History Month; for the first few years, Congress was involved, but since 1995, our presidents have done so without congressional prodding.
This year, the National Women’s History Project has declared Women’s History Month’s theme to be “Our History Is Our Strength.”

I’d like to suggest to all the guys out there, they take sometime this month to acknowledge the contribution of women in this country. if you’d like to take a moment to contribute to a cause by contributing to  Maria K.’s Race for the Cure, please do so, if you’d like to read some good books, Amazon has a great selection here: http://www.amazon.com/American-Womens-History-Doris-Weatherford/dp/0671850288 and almost more importantly, don’t let the Tea Party, The Republicans and the Religious Right get away with killing these important services for women.

 

The Dirty Lowdown

The Dirty Lowdown for February

After participating with the Veterans Administration in a demonstration of US Military one up man ship ie: That the Chinese do not have a monopoly on Chinese fire drills. On the 14th of December I was to have spinal surgery on my lower back, but on the morning of the surgery, after being thoroughly medicated the night before and treated to a “gourmet meal” consisting of fare deemed not suitable for our people in either theater of war, the surgeon canceled because of personal reasons reported to be a tornado in the small Oregon town he lives in. I knew this was bogus because Oregon doesn’t have tornados…err, well they usually don’t. They shuffled me out to a civilian hospital who took one look at my reports, films and MRI’s and promptly sent me back to the VA with a note saying, Ha! The VA figured they might as well not waste the medications they had pumped me full of and went ahead with the scheduled surgery “lite” and did a little exploring that, really, fixed nothing but did leave me with one more zipper. Then, they sent me home where I promptly got the flu.

All of that is in explanation for my silence here for the past 6 weeks. I would have shut up for longer but in a moment of weakness I announced on Facebook Friday that I was going out for a “tequila night” and since the cat is out of the bag, I figured it was time to blog.

Fun stuff on the agenda first up, February is Black History Month. You shouldn’t need an excuse to read these since Black History is very much a part of American History, but nonetheless, it’s a good time to get some great books. Barnes & Noble has a great sale.

Staying with the Book Theme, great news from Simon & Schuster’ Scribner division, Chuck Hogan, the author of “Prince of Thieves” which was turned into the block buster movie, “The Town” starring Ben Affleck, has announced the release of “The Devils in Exile” in Trade Paper Back. “Neal Maven comes home from his tour in Iraq to nothing—no job, no friends, no future. Then he meets Brad Royce, a fellow vet, charismatic and confident, with the lifestyle and the one woman Neal has always wanted: Danielle Vetti, Maven’s high-school dream girl. Royce offers Maven a spot on his team of vets who intercept major drug deals, take the dirty money, and destroy the product—an adrenaline-charged, get-rich scheme with a clear moral imperative. But is it too good to be true? With two psychotic hit men out for retaliation, a relentless DEA agent closing in, and more questions than answers about Royce, Maven suddenly finds he’s in too deep—and the truth may be his worst enemy.  Hogan so impressed me with “The Prince of Thieves” that I voted it one of the best novels of the decade, and “Devils” looks to be just as enthralling a read.

Now, on to the music scene.

I have a weakness for bass guitar, and Marcus Miller is my bass guitarist of choice when it comes to Jazz, and Classical interpretations. “A Night In Monte Carlo” has Marcus, along with Roy Hargrove and Raul Midon leading the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra in a live concert that will have music fans and bassists everywhere listening over and over again. There is a Miller composition on here called Blast that is superb! And then he fills in with Brasilian samba, Miles to Jimmy Dorsey all interpreted with great intelligence. Buy this album now.

A few last items close to my heart. February is ignore Sarah Palin month. Don’t mention her name, don’t blog about her (I just did, but never mind) and don’t cause yourself to have to double your Blood Pressure meds because of the inane things that come out her mouth, off her Facebook page or through Twitter. There is also a “Flush Rush” campaign going on on Facebook that is indeed a noble cause. Now if we can come up with something similar to shut Glenn Becks mouth, we’ll be in luck.

That’s the Dirty Lowdown for February