Christian Leftist

Eight years and a day after Bush revived the law that prohibited the U.S. from giving governmental assistance to health clinics abroad that discuss abortion options or provide abortions abroad, President Obama overturned it with a stroke of the pen.

According to the L. A. Times:

President Reagan instituted the rule, also known as the “Mexico City policy,” in 1984, stating that the U.S. government would not contribute to groups that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

The result, critics said, was that nongovernmental organizations working in the developing world could not refer women to safe abortion providers or even conduct family planning education campaigns that discussed the procedure.

This is one of the first acts of Obama’s presidency, and it signals to me and other progressives that he has not forgotten the most grievous of the past ills of the Bush Administration. Whether or not his White House will attempt to or even be able to dismantle all of the harm Bush has done remains to be seen. I would hope for an overal reversal, but I suspect that not allof the damage the neoconservatives have done in the name of so-called “patriotism” and “family values” will be as easy to erase from the legal system or our memories. Still, the future is looking better than it has for a long time now.

I think he will see us through this depression. I hope he will.

I could weep for joy. I have been waiting a third of my life for this day.

Actually, I loved CBS’s montage of the Inauguration Day as well, but they cut off Aretha Franklin’s last note on that one for Katie Couric to say goodnight. WTH? Do it like Brian did, only do a longer version, people. Hello!

I tried to watch and tape all three of the major network’s evening news broadcasts yesterday. I think the best overall was NBC’s, which makes me angry because I only taped half of ABC’s and all of CBS’s. Once again. I picked the wrong network to record. D’oh. Anyway, here’s a clip from an amazing day.

People living in Northern Alaska off the coast of the Bering Sea are hurting this winter because of several factors, and in one particular town called Emmonak, people have only one meal a day because they survive on sustinence fishing and the catch was terrible this year.

Local commercial fishermen didn’t make any money from king salmon — a staple of the economy — Tucker said, and an early freeze-up forced the village to miss its winter fuel barge.

Then the cold snap hit.

Tucker says he suspects other nearby villages are hurting in the same way.

…

Heating oil currently costs $7.68 a gallon, according to the Emmonak village corporation that sells the fuel.

But that price could soon rise, because the corporation had to start flying in extra heating fuel last week to make up for the missed barge.

Former Emmonak City Manager Martin Moore estimated in December that flying in the oil could raise the price as high as $11 a gallon.

Apparently, Palin’s rural advisor resigned in October, and she has yet to name a replacement, so there’s no one coordinating state aid to the Native American villages. Those villages rely on fishing to survive and who need heating oil to keep their families warm through the winter.

If you would like to help the people of Emmonak, please contact:

Emmonak Tribal Council
P.O. Box 126
Emmanok, AK 99581
(907) 949-1720

or

City of Emmonak, (907) 949-1227/1249 (Credit card donations are acceptable.
Please specify the donation is for heating oil!)

We lost almost 2.6 million jobs last year, 524,000 of them in December, according to Bloomberg News.

2,589,000 jobs. That’s like losing the workforce of an entire state the size of Tennessee.

The indication, according to charts from every major news source is that we are in a job-loss freefall.

Fasten your seat-belts. It’s going to be a bumpy year.