Friend –

An assault on unions anywhere is an assault on working families everywhere.

Wisconsin’s tea party-backed governor, Scott Walker, has launched an ideological crusade against his own citizens’ collective bargaining rights. He’s using the pretense of a state budget deficit to curb the rights of teachers and other public employees in his state to unionize — rights we’ve recognized here in America for over 80 years to assure better working conditions and fairer compensation for all workers.

Fourteen brave Democratic state senators — backed by tens of thousands of ordinary citizens protesting outside the state Capitol — are boycotting a vote on the governor’s plan. We’re counting on these 14 state senators to prevent the most serious setback America’s labor movement could ever face.

I want them to know working families in Illinois and across the country welcome the “Wisconsin 14′s” boycott and stand with them, every step of the way.

Sign my petition to show the “Wisconsin 14″ we support their boycott and encourage them to continue standing strong to protect the rights of American workers.

Governor Walker is not setting out to fix his state’s budget. After all, he just enacted a sweeping tax cut that will make Wisconsin’s deficit worse.

No, at the behest of his big corporate backers, he’s setting out to break unions, clear and simple. Why else would he refuse to even sit down with teachers and state employees and work out a fair compromise — when union leaders have signaled that they are open to temporary wage and benefit concessions?

It’s because this whole debate is about who holds political power — the corporations or the people — and not budget deals.

In the wake of the Citizens United decision granting moneyed interests unprecedented power over ordinary citizens, the current showdown in Wisconsin marks a watershed moment in American history. If we lose this fight, Republican leaders throughout the country will move forward with their own plans to bust unions and further undermine the power of American workers to earn a decent living.

That’s why we must all rally behind the thousands of Wisconsinites protesting in the streets of Madison — and the 14 Democratic state senators who refuse to entertain a rollback of workers’ collective right to speak for themselves. These legislators are workers’ last line of defense, and it’s crucial we show them our support.

Show your support for the “Wisconsin 14″ as they stand strong against Governor Walker’s assault on American workers’ hard-earned collective bargaining rights!

Thank you for joining me in publicly supporting the “Wisconsin 14″ and their courageous boycott on behalf of every American worker.

In solidarity,

Dick Durbin
U.S. Senator

Please take the time to sign Dick Durbin’s petition and support the Wisconsin 14.

OR… show your support by ordering pizza for the protestors at the Capitol building! People from all over the U.S. and the world have sent money to Ian’s Pizza (on State ST, downtown location) to buy food for the demonstrators…. You can order by phone and indicate it should be delivered to the square (Capitol building) and off it goes. There are four restaurants that are involved. People from Korea, and Finland, Egypt, the Netherlands, Australia, England, China, Turkey and Germany have sent food, plus folks from all 50 states. Check out this pic of the chalkboard at Ian’s Pizza! There’s also a really cool post in their announcements section about everything they’ve been doing for the protestors.

Stay Strong Wisconsin!

We’ve gotten most of our other things in order before we leave. Mainly it’s just the little things to take care of.

And…today is the birthday of Howlin’ Wolf, a legendary blues musician and singer. Check out this remembrance to Chester ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ Burnett performing Smokestack Lightning live in England 1964: http://www.fark.com/cgi/vidplayer.pl?IDLink=4439941. 

Anyways. Here are some ramblings from a blog I had on WordPress about a year ago and then another blog I had on a website I made with iWeb more recently:

Courtesy of Guylaine Brunet

“In 2003, the Sanbona Wildlife Reserve in South Africa released a male and a female white lion. The goal of the project was to integrate the white lions with the wild tawny lions native in the region, in order for the tawny lions to teach the white lions to live in the wild successfully and for the tawny and white lions to interbreed. White lions have been interbred on breeding farms from a small population, and interbreeding with the tawny lions will improve the white lions’ ‘genetic integrity.’ A integrated lion pride was just released into the wild, and is closely monitored in order to ensure their survival in the wild. But for now, things look good for the white lions and the integrated pride. Read more about the white lions from the Mantis Collection and from Cat Channel.”

“So it has been several months since my last post…Sorry!

Since then, some new and totally AWESOME developments have occurred. We bought a brand new Mac Pro and it is phenomenal. Powerful machine. Easy to upgrade too; Mark was able to add another hard drive in there already! Needless to say, I’ve been loving it and playing with it every day.

Another completely fabulous piece of news is that I got a notification email from Adobe the other day saying that CS4 is here and shipping. Whoohoo!! We ordered it about a month ago and I’ve been waiting and waiting for it to be released. I’m really excited about that, it should be coming any day now.

I started writing a weekly blog post for Green My Website, a joint venture between me and a good friend, Austin Lea. I’ve been pretty good about writing a weekly post, but there have been a few Sundays that I’ve missed–so I need to be better about that.

My research has been going well. I read absolutely, hands-down, amazing book. Check it out, Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rainforest by P.A. Cox. Nature lovers, environmentalists, people who care about people, check this book out because it is a great read. I’ve been reading a lot of other really great stuff, but Cox’s book is noteworthy. I wrote a little today. That’s a good thing, I haven’t written in a long time. I’ve been reading so much that I needed to get down some thoughts I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a while.”

“I spent some time completing the online training for human subjects protection research which was time consuming and bland. But in the midst of modules and quizzes, something caught my eye. I found it to be very interesting that there are organizations that act like the “police” of financial conflicts of interest in research, i.e., corporate influence on research conducted by academics and their institutions. The Integrity in Science Project works to combat the conflicts of interest that arise from the commercialization of science. They investigate committees for undisclosed conflicts of interest, watch the media and scientific literature for failure to disclose conflicts of interest, and support others to embrace strong disclosure policies. Pretty interesting stuff.

So of course, I want the Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium or Web Premium. but really…I’m not going to stumble across a couple thousand any time soon. So today I started looking around for a freeware graphics editor. A good resource for free graphics editor is at Iron Spider, a web design and resource center. Another great resource for free graphics editors is the General Disarray blog. It links to free graphics editors, but it also links to other applications for Mac OS X. The free graphics editor I finally went with is Gimp. A really helpful resource for Gimp is Wilbur-loves-Apple.

By the way, to use Gimp on a Mac OS X, you must have X11 installed. For OS X 10.3 to 10.3.9, Apple provides a X11 download on their website. But for OS X 10.4, Apple tells you to use the original Tiger install DVD. If you have the original Tiger DVD, Overstimulate, a weblog, has really helpful step-by-step install instructions with images of each step. Unfortunately this advice does not help the Mac user that lost their Tiger install DVD. After searching most of the day, I finally found someone else that doesn’t have the original Tiger DVD on hand and he has been kind enough to put the X11 User and X11 SDK packages for Mac OS X 10.4 online. What wonderous pleasures the small joys bring :o)”

“My research interest is indigenous environmental justice groups and their websites. A great start to get information on and examples of indigenous environmental justice is the Indigenous Environmental Network, an indigenous environmental justice group advocating for native and indigenous peoples across North America. Recently, I performed a qualitative content analysis of the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment website as a pilot study before I begin my Master’s thesis research. From an initial analysis, it appears that the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment’s website empowers Mohawk culture and identity, as well as promotes counter-accounts of reality.

In addition to researching, I maintain a genuine attempt to stay current on web design and development topics. I think one of the best resources that helps me stay informed is Smashing Magazine. This site has most everything, or at least links to most everything. Today there was an awesome post with amazing nature backgrounds.”