Guest Speaker:  Andrea White, Wife of Bill White
Candidate for Governor of Texas

Thursday, September 23rd
11:45 a.m.
Amarillo Club
Starburst Room – 30th Floor

Cost:  $15.00
RSVP:  359-4473 or 356-9082
Space is limited so call soon!

Hostesses:  Roberta Hicks, Claudia Stravato, Sylvia Perkins

The California Senate on Friday approved legislation that sends a clear message to Texas and textbook publishers: don’t mess with our kids’ minds.

“My bill begins the process of ensuring that California students will not end up being taught with Texas standards,” State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), who authored and sponsored the legislation, said in an interview. Texas standards had better not “creep into our textbooks,” he said.

The S.B. 1451 measure – approved on a bipartisan vote of 25-5 – requires California’s Board of Education to examine and report any discrepancies between the new Texas standards and California’s standards. “At that point,” Yee told Raw Story, “we will make it very, very clear that we won’t accept textbooks that minimize the contributions of minorities and propagate the close connection between church and state.”

California, also a critical client for textbook companies, can counteract Texas’s influence on how books are written for schools across the country. “It’s a warning to the textbooks writers and companies,” said Yee, who served on the San Francisco Board of Education earlier in his career and is currently the second highest ranking Democrat in California’s upper house.

The Texas modifications – approved last Friday – include elevating the significance of Christianity in the nation’s founding, minimizing the importance of Thomas Jefferson and his framework for separation of church and state, emphasizing “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s,” diminishing the scope of Latino history, and redefining slavery in more pleasant terms.

Yee called the changes “pretty disturbing,” accusing the Texas board of seeking to “wipe away history” and “rewrite history.” School curriculum, especially social studies and history, he said, should be “devoid of politics.”

America “came into existence because the founding fathers wanted to flee the tyranny of the church over a government,” added Yee, who immigrated from China at age three. “That part of the pride and joy of living here – that you’re not dictated by religion.”

Book publishers argue that such worries are unfounded in the digital age, where textbooks can easily be re-customized based on the different curriculum standards of different states.

“Whenever someone tells me not to worry, that’s when I worry,” Yee retorted, explaining that textbook publishers are in business not to “help out students” but to “make money,” so if given the choice they’d prefer not to spend the extra money re-customizing books.

The legislation now faces a vote in the California Assembly before it’s considered by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has not announced whether he will sign it.

Everyone in or moving to Amarillo, Texas, would like to know the economic state of this fine city. Well, I am here to enlighten your curious minds. We are actually doing quite well, even considering any economic changes elicited by the Bush-Obama change in administration, the Healthcare Reform and the recession. Amarilloans, in comparison with other parts of the state and other cities, are fairly independent and self-sufficient. In fact, our overall economy has only been majorly affected by the recession in more recent months. While other major cities began floundering from the offset, Amarillo has successfully held its own. Here is the latest information on the economic state of Amarillo, TX in 2010.

Job Growth. During the month of May 2010, unemployment rates were dropped down to the level of the previous decade, and employers are actually adding a few jobs. Private industry and well-managed new and old money in Amarillo has kept the job market fairly even and, now that the initial scare over the presidential change has blown over, there is a slight increase in job availability from the past two years. Amarillo and Midland were tied for the lowest unemployment rates in the entire state of Texas. Start making plans to grow your industry!

Hospitality. Efforts and funding for Amarillo hospitality has actually grown in the last six months, adding to the economic independence of our fine city. During times of recession, the arts are known to flourish, and Amarillo is no exception, bringing in some of the finest musical and dance talent to perform at our Civic Center and Globe News Center for the Performing Arts. Our tourist attractions are kept up-to-date and heavily accessible, and we are growing in population quite rapidly. 

Crime Rates. Per 100,000 people, Amarillo has far less crime than Dallas, TX. For murder, robbery and auto theft, Amarillo scores less than half on crime rate per 100,000 people as Dallas, TX. As of 2006, even Lancaster, PA had four times the amount of murder as Amarillo, TX. We do, however, have a healthy amount of public freedoms when it comes to asserting our right to change our city government and area laws. This is, truly, an independent city.

Whether you are traveling to Amarillo, TX to check it out as a possible new place to live, or you already live here and welcome this city as your home, it is always good to know the statistical data of the place where you live. Feel free to comment below on any thoughts, opinions or questions you may have.

http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/press/2010/062510epress.pdf

http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.tx_amarillo_msa.htm

The Outreach Committee is asking for 20 volunteers (at least 15 women) to help Habitat for Humanity on Saturday, July 10. You may volunteer for the whole day or just morning or afternoon from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Please call Lorita (806-655-0446) if you plan to be there. Tools and know-how are provided by Habitat so all you have to do is show up and learn some new skills while you help out those less fortunate.

The city of Amarillo will have nearly $55,000 more to use for housing people with chronic mental illness in 2010-2011 than it has had in the current fiscal year.

A $343,884 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accepted today by the Amarillo City Commission amounts to $54,672 more than the current year’s allocation for the city’s Shelter Plus Care Program.

The program provides rent subsidies for low-income individuals who have been diagnosed with a chronic mental illness and their families, Assistant City Manager Vicki Covey said.

Texas Panhandle Mental Health Mental Retardation personnel handle the program participants’ case management, Covey said.

The program “is funded to help 50 households, but we always help more,” Housing Assistance Administrator Patty Hamm told the commission.

Weekly Presidential Address

 Presidential Weekly Address!

With Congress having finalized a strong Wall Street reform bill, the President urges Congress to finish the job and send the bill to his desk. The legislation reflects 90% of what the President originally proposed, including the strongest consumer financial protections in history with an independent agency to enforce them. It ensures that the trading of derivatives, which helped trigger this crisis, will be brought into the light of day, and enacts the “Volcker Rule,” which will make sure banks protected by safety nets like the FDIC cannot engage in risky trades. It also creates a resolution authority to wind down firms whose collapse would threaten the entire financial system. Wall Street reform will end taxpayer funded bailouts and make sure Main Street is never again held responsible for Wall Street’s mistakes

After an appearance on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” (watch above) in which he suggested that he did not agree with certain parts of the Civil Rights Act, GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul sought to clarify the meaning of his comments on Thursday.

“I unequivocally state that I will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Paul said in a statement.

Paul was questioned about the landmark civil rights law in interviews on both National Public Radio and MSNBC on Wednesday. He said that while he liked the Civil Rights Act and opposes racial discrimination, but he thought a lot of problems could be handled locally instead of nationally.

Asked by Maddow whether or not lunch counters should have been desegregated, as in the 1960s in the South, Paul declined to give a yes or no answer. Instead, he said he doesn’t believe in discrimination, suggested the issue was abstract, and raised the idea of who decides whether customers can bring weapons into restaurants.

High Plains Food Bank Community Garden
The Out Reach Committee of the Democratic Headquarters needs volunteers to work in the High Plain Food Bank Community Garden on the morning of May 15th. The garden supplies fresh produce to 161 agencies in our area. We would like to have around 20 people to volunteer. Tools and instruction will be provided. You may want to bring gloves.

Garden Location: Behind the High Plains Food Bank,
between 8th and 9th Avenues

To volunteer, contact: Lorita Montgomery
655-0446
LoritaTed@clearwire.net

From The White House Blog:
Posted by Jesse Lee on May 10, 2010 at 10:00 AM EDT

The President has always viewed nominating new Justices to the Supreme Court as one of his most important responsibilities, and his nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan reflects the results of a careful and thorough search across America’s exceptional pool of legal talent.

Widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading legal minds, Solicitor General Elena Kagan has forged a path-breaking career in the law and in government service, distinguishing herself throughout by her penetrating intellect, unwavering integrity, sound judgment and prodigious work ethic. Her family taught her the value not just of education, but of service, and instilled in her an understanding of how the law affects the lives of working Americans.

She was the first woman to serve as Dean in Harvard Law School’s 186-year old history. And she was the first woman to serve as Solicitor General – the lawyer who represents the United States Government before the Supreme Court. Of the 111 justices who have served on the Supreme Court, only three have been women. Kagan would be the fourth, and this Fall, for the first time in history, three women would take their seats on our nation’s highest court.

As an academic, her scholarship focused on issues ranging from freedom of speech to government policy making – issues with a profound effect on our daily lives. As a White House lawyer and policy aide, she played lead role in working with Democrats and Republicans on legislation to prevent tobacco companies from targeting children with deceptive advertising practices and addictive products. As a law school Dean, she turned a fractious institution into a united one, and inspired students to use their legal training to serve their communities. And as Solicitor General, she has defended before the Supreme Court Congress’s efforts to protect shareholders’ rights, to implement bipartisan campaign finance reform, and to preserve the national security interests of the United States.

With an unparalleled ability to bring together people of different backgrounds and beliefs, she has earned praise across the political spectrum for her fair-mindedness, even-handedness, and insistence that all views deserve a respectful hearing. Every Solicitor General over the last quarter century – Democrats and Republicans – wrote a letter of support for her nomination as Solicitor General, noting her “brilliant intellect,” “candor,” and the “high regard in which she is held by persons of a wide variety of political and social views.” And her nomination to the Supreme Court is receiving similarly wide support from members of the legal community across the ideological spectrum.

Elena’s father was a housing lawyer devoted to the rights of tenants. Her mother was a public school teacher committed to helping her students realize their potential. They sent Elena to an all-girls public high-school where she learned that she could achieve any goal she sought. Following in her parents’ footsteps, Elena became a lawyer like her father, using her legal training to serve others, and a beloved teacher like her mother, inspiring the next generation of students to use their legal training to improve lives and communities.