Energy Work

Everyday we are faced with negativity, the darkness not only surrounds us, but it resides inside us.

This creates an illusion that speaks to us, causing our minds to lose focus on the beautiful things.

It causes us to forget our purpose.
To bring light into the world.
To display pure unadulterated love, to ourselves and the ones around us.

The things that keep our hearts purified with love are choked out and forgotten, making us feel like a heavy blanket or atmosphere is surrounding our soul, choking out the light that wants to shine within.

You are not alone.
Your light is there waiting for you to consume it and become closer to enlightenment.

Acknowledge and accept that you need help in bringing the light into yourself, while rejecting and pushing the darkness away from you.

Ask your Higher Being to help you, guide you and love you. 
Ask for what you need, and listen to their answers.
They will only do what is best for you.

There is no rejection in their love.

Meditate. It is the only way you can hear the answers your guides are providing for you.
Quiet your mind.
Listen.

Follow your intuition, it is another way your guides are helping you.
Throw away all fear, all hate, all negativity.
Let the light in.
Let love in
Let peace in
Let joy in
Let prosperity in
Let all these beautiful things into your soul.
Watch the blessings come in.

Taye Diggs on Hollywood

According to Associated Press Taye Diggs is less than happy on the way African American films are treated as opposed to other Hollywood films. Making it extremely difficult for black films to get funded and produced.

"Whether a studio decides to proceed with a black-oriented film can depend on the success of other movies with primarily African-American casts, even if the projects are unconnected, said Diggs, who starred in "The Best Man" romantic comedy and its sequel.

In a recent interview, the actor said he and others who worked on the "Best Man" movies are eager to start on a third. But its fate is tied to how other black-oriented films, including the upcoming "Think Like a Man Too," perform at the box office, he said.

"Unfortunately, the business is such that as far as studios are concerned, they judge one quote-unquote black movie on how other 'black' movies have done, even if they have nothing to do with each other," he said.

That's "ridiculously" frustrating, said Diggs, 43, whose movie credits include "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and "Rent." He stars in a new TNT drama, "Murder in the First."

"We've definitely come a long way. But we've got a long way to go," he said. "It's too bad we can't do well on our own merit when it comes to the studios. They don't like to take risks and, unfortunately, we're still considered a huge risk, even though I don't think we are."

"The Best Man Holiday" grossed more than $70 million in North America last year and was profitable, said Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst for box-office tracker Rentrak."

GOP Rejects Drew Turiano for Spreading Racist Views

The last few years, it seems that the GOP can't do anything right. Their candidates have attacked women's rights, profiled African Americans and rejected gays. For a party with so many problems it seems impossible for them to stand up and do something for the people, instead of against them.

Drew Turiano (R-Mont.) a tea party member, has officially filed to run for congress this next term; he is hoping to pick up Steve Daines's (R-Mont.) seat who is now running for U.S. Senate. Drew Turiano is known for using the n-word on Fox news in 2001 and for heading "Operation Wet-Back", an initiative that would deport all undocumented immigrants and their American born children. 

According to the Missoulian, Turiano has been excluded from speaking at the Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner.

“We asked Mr. Turiano not to attend our event because we have no intention of allowing him a platform to spread hate and intolerance,” Yellowstone County Republican Chairwoman Jennifer Owen said. “There is simply no place for racism in this party.”

In response Turiano said that the reason he was being excluded, is due to his affiliation with the Tea Party.   And that Chairwoman Owen is trying to get back at him for their disagreement about "Operation Wetback".

Montana GOP Executive Director Bowen Greenwood agrees with the concerns that Owen's has, saying that the Republican Party has been long standing against racism. He also points out that the fact that Turiano is campaigning on an "Offensive racial epithet" has caused many republicans to reject him.

According to Turiano's website he also supports the state's right to nullify and/or reject federal law or judicial mandate. This includes Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act. He also feels that President Obama should be impeached.

Thank goodness the GOP is taking steps, no matter how small, to rid themselves of the racism and discontent of certain politicians.

Reparations From Britian, France and the Netherlands

The slave trade has had a devastating effect on all people of color around the world. This devastation didn't end after slavery was was outlawed, many countries today are still enduring the debilatating effects of slavery.

Several leaders of Caribbean nations have decided that it is appropriate to sue the countries that have benefited and encouraged the atrocious behavior.

"A British human rights law firm hired by the Caribbean Community grouping of nations announced that prime ministers had authorized a 10-point plan that would seek a formal apology and debt cancellation from former colonizers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands," states AP.

These Caribbean nations do not plan to stop there. They also plan to sue for reparation payments to try and repair not only the damage that has been done, but to repair the ongoing psychological trauma that effects black people today.

Not only have European nations damaged Africans psychologically, but they have succeeded in doing their best in excluding the Caribbean in the nations in Europe's industrialization and confined to producing and exporting raw materials such as sugar.

The plan also demands that Europe help with aid in strengthening the regions public health, educations and cultural institutions.

The plan goes on to demand diplomatic assistance from Europe to resettle Jamaica's Rastafarian population back to Africa, which has always been very important.

This deal is not new, for years Caribbean countries have asked for reparations from European countries with no success. But, recently it has gained momentum.  

"Caricom, as the political grouping of 15 countries and dependencies is known, announced in July that it intended to seek reparations for slavery and the genocide of native peoples and created the Caribbean Reparations Commission to push the issue and present their recommendations to political leaders.

They then hired Leigh Day, which waged a successful fight for an award compensation of about $21.5 million for surviving Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government during the so-called Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s.

The commission's chairman, Hilary Beckles, a scholar who has written several books on the history of Caribbean slavery, said he was "very pleased" that the political leaders adopted the plan.

In 2007, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed regret for the "unbearable suffering" caused by his country's role in slavery but made no formal apology. In 2010, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged the "wounds of colonization" and pointed out France had canceled a 56 million euro debt owed by Haiti and approved an aid package.

The Caribbean Reparations Commission said Monday that far more needed to be done for the descendants of slaves on struggling islands, saying it sees the "persistent racial victimization of the descendants of slavery and genocide as the root cause of their suffering today.""

Regressive Uganda

On February 24 2014, the Ugandan president signed into law The Anti-Homosexuality Act.  It was first dubbed the kill the gays act due to it's death penalty clauses, but now has changed the consequences to life in prison. The bill doesn't just stop at punishing gays individually, but also punishes people who harbor homosexuals and companies that support LGBT rights.

In response to this new law President Obama has threatened to cut off aid to Uganda, if the laws are not changed. Uganda also expected to receive a  loan from The World Bank to help over haul it's health system. The $90 million loan has been postponed though, due to the tough anti-gay law. This comes at a surprise, considering that The World Bank usually tries to avoid politics altogether.

"We have postponed the project for further review to ensure that the development objectives would not be adversely affected by the enactment of this new law," World Bank spokesman David Theis said in an email.

The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, sent an email to his bank staff saying the bank does not condone discrimination, and will protect the safety to all employees.  

Scotland has also joined in the fight against discrimination against the LGBT community. The country has proposed a plan to offer asylum to any Ugandans that are being persecuted by the new anti-gay laws. 

Humza Yusuf wrote in a letter submitted to the U.K. Foreign Secretary, "Scotland will play her part in providing asylum for those seeking refuge from this draconian legislation."

Scotland's proposal for asylum for these Ugandan comes in fear of gay Ugandans being hunted down and killed. Prominent gay activist David Kato, had such a fate when he was identified as gay in a local newspaper. Being murdered shortly after. The tabloid didn't just stop there, they identified 200 other gay people living in Uganda. 

The U.K. supreme court recognizes the importance to help people that are identified as gay, and offer them asylum. In 2010, they announced that it would be unreasonable to send men back to countries like Iran and Cameroon, where homosexuality is forbidden, and they should not have to hide their sexual orientation. 

Uganda is not the only country that has anti-gay laws. There are at least 41 other countries that have anti-gay legislation. The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, in which Uganda and several other anti-gay countries are set attend, the Kaleidoscope Trust, an anti-gay advocacy group hopes that Scotland will use the gathering to condemn the countries that have such regressive laws. 

“We have always felt the Games had an important part to play in tackling the scandal of LGBT abuses in the Commonwealth and welcome the Scottish government taking the bull by the horns," the Kaleidoscope Trust told The Herald.

Hopefully, with the pressure from President Obama, the World Bank and Scotland, Uganda will reconsider its regressive discriminatory laws. 

The History Of Rape In The Military

“Few northern soldiers raped…True manhood was characterized by sexual restraint not sexual assertion; even mutually agreeable intercourse would have threatened masculine identity. Letting anger toward women break out in unsanctioned violence against women would have been unmanly,” read a passage in Reid Mitchell's book The vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home.

This and many other records of the civil war denies that rape was a problem during the civil war. Suggesting that soldiers weren't even having sex. But looking at the records of disease during the civil war shows that there were 109,397 cases of gonorrhea and 73,382 cases of syphilis, and these are only the ones reported among white U.S. troops, the confederate records were destroyed.

There, also was at least 450 cases of rape or attempted rape cases in Union military courts. The laws outside the courtroom made it hard for women to report rape cases because of the emphasis on chasity. If a woman were to get consent  in the face of a severe beating or at gun point, it would still be considered consensual sex, and the attacker would not be punished, leaving the accuser ostracized.

The Atlantic interviewed Kim Murphey about the research she did on military rape. Read Below:

Why does war, in general, tend to breed rape?

Because, basically, men can get away with it. Very few men are prosecuted for it during war, and commanders usually do not come down very hard on it. I mean, it’s kind of like the military right now, what they’re going through. Military women are being raped and they often have to report to the person who may have been the rapist, or who may have been friends with the rapist. So it really hasn’t changed. [Ed. Note: In a 2012 survey, 6.1 percent of active duty military women reported they had experienced “unwanted sexual contact” in the past year. Of these, 67 percent did not report the incident.]

You mention a lot of difficulties with determining what happened during the Civil War in particular—for example, many of the Confederate records were destroyed. How do you go about extrapolating what may have happened that was not reported?

Unfortunately, because we don’t have all the records, we don’t really know. But when I uncovered several hundred cases [of rape], I think that speaks loudly because very few women would have come forward. Very few women come forward during peacetime; it’s even fewer that come forward during wartime, so we know that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s being reported.

"If he was holding a gun to her head and she was scared to death, that was still considered that she had given her consent."

Also, the thing that most people don’t recognize is that most of the records, like the court-martial records that we do have, were reported during times of occupation. That means that the troops were there, they weren’t in an active battle situation. That’s when women could find someone to go forward to. During times of battle, the chances of them even knowing who they could report to would be almost nil, and even if they did find someone, the chances that the officer in charge would be able to find enough officers to take on a court martial at that time would be next to impossible.
In the book, I mention [a rape that occurred during] Sherman’s March, when the army was on the move. The victim did report it. But by the time the case made it to court martial, they were 100 miles away, so she could not testify. That’s what people don’t understand—it was totally against the women to even be able to report it.

Can you give an overview of how the rape laws worked at the time?

The court martial tried to do by the state laws of the time. During the time, women had to essentially prove they had been raped, and that meant that she had to give the ultimate resistance against the attacker’s force. One thing that was different in the Civil War era was that girls as young as 10 could often be considered as trying to entice men.
Women in court settings also were often barraged with questions of how she had resisted his advances. If she consented because he beat her, or if he was holding a gun to her head and she was scared to death, that was still considered that she had given her consent.

Do you know what would have been an acceptable answer?

As far as resistance? Well, the woman usually had to go out of their way to say how much they had resisted. That’s where the title came from, “I had rather die.” A woman was testifying that she “had rather die” than be raped, and it was during those resistance questions.

Explain the distinction between “persuasion” and “force”—it seemed like that was a very nebulous thing.

Basically, if a man could persuade a woman in any way to have intercourse, then it was not considered rape. Again, it didn’t matter if he beat her silly in order to “persuade” her, or if he had a weapon and persuaded her that way. In other words, a man could use as much persuasion as he wanted in order to have intercourse and it not be considered rape.

There’s a sort of double standard, especially if you think about the idea of what was considered “being a lady” at the time. Now you have to be able to fight off a man—even though normally society thought you should be dainty.

Even if it was an upper-class white woman, who was more likely to believed, sometimes judges would dismiss it because they would feel, “Oh, [if she were really a lady] she would have been too ashamed to actually come forward.” So everything was stacked against the woman.
That’s the other thing: both the North and the South rarely thought it was rape when it was a black woman. It wasn’t until the Civil War when black women were actually able to come forward and call it rape. Before that time, even in the North, they would make it a lesser charge [for black women], if at all. I do have at least one record where a black woman was able to testify about a sexual assault in New York or someplace like that, but that was very rare. For the most part, black women’s voices went unheard.

It seems there was every kind of hurdle: race, class, and whether or not the person had a weapon, or witnesses to corroborate the story. And the more factors you had in your favor, the more likely you’d be successful.

And if you had a white male witness, you generally were more likely to be believed.
Most of the black men that were found guilty of rape and executed, generally speaking, they were gang rapes, so it was multiple men against a white woman. And with the white men, most of them had other crimes [on their records], and a high percentage of the white men that were executed were foreign born—so there’s an obvious prejudice there, too. They tended to have a history of desertion or other crimes that they were guilty of in the past.

Can you talk a little bit about this quote:

“It is true that rape is a most detestable crime, and therefore ought severely and impartially to be punished with death; but it must be remembered, that it is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.”
-- Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736)

It seemed, from your book, that all the laws and attitudes at the time revolved around this idea.

Yeah, that came from the judge, Matthew Hale, in the 18th century. He was saying that men had it very difficult to prove that they hadn’t raped. That woman was vindictive so, therefore, she would “cry rape.” His words were used in the court martial records and civilian records in the 19th century, and were still used in courtrooms well into the 1970’s.

Whether or not those [specific] words are used, do we see this attitude continue today?

For sure. There’s no doubt about that. It seems like so many times women still have to prove that they’ve been raped when they shouldn’t. I think we have made some steps forward, but unfortunately women don’t go forward enough because they still feel like they’re going to be lost in the justice system. And I know we’ve had several cases recently where athletes were considered more important than women who had been raped, and that’s essentially the same thing that was going on during the Civil War era. It was more important to have a good soldier, whether or not he had committed rape.

So you can see parallels between now and then?

Mmhm. And I see it more and more each day, it seems like, where people keep saying, “Oh, we need to say a woman had been forced in order to be raped.” Well, rape is rape, and any kind of rape is forced.

Russian Trying to Hide the Environmental Costs of Hosting Winter Olympics

Vladimir Putin promised that hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics will not have a negative impact on the environment. According to several environmental agencies Mr. Putin has not lived up to his promises to host a 'green Olympics'.

According to the Agency France Presse, Wetlands that provide habitat for several different types of wildlife including dozens of bird species, have been covered with 6.5 feet of crushed rock. Though, Ornithological Park was created as an alternative for the birds to migrate, they have not taken to it.

And it only gets worse from there. Olympics organizers have been accused of illegally dumping construction waste in Sochi national parks. This is destroying parts of Sochi National Park and blocking migrating routes for wildlife. Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus have monitored the activities of  the construction sites for the last two years and in response to their reports, they have endured harassment of its members.

Yevgeny Vitishko is the latest victim of this harassment getting a two week jail sentence for swearing in public.  This would be just long enough for the games to continue without his intervention. He is not the only one who has been to detained, according to The Guardian Igor Kharchenko after finding his car smashed was grabbed by police in Krasnodar. The police then took him to the police station and charged him with resisting arrest. He was put on trial and sentenced without any legal counsel.

Vitishko has been very vocal about the changes in environmental laws in Russia, from 2006, 2011 and 2013, Russian authorities have weakened the laws to facilitate the Olympic related construction. If he is convicted for other charges he could face up to three years in a labor camp.

It is unfortunate that despite Vladimir Putin's promise to have a 'green Olympics', he could not deliver on that promise. If he could have delivered, it would have helped normalize greener practices for future countries that host the Olympics.

CVS to Stop Selling Tobacco Products!

When you think of a Pharmacy, what is the first thing you think of? Maybe prescription drugs, beauty products, health to name a few. But what about cigarettes? Is this something you think should be in a pharmacy? CVS Caremark, doesn't think cigarettes should be sold by a company that advocates health and wellness.

CVS announced that starting Oct. 1st they will no longer be selling these products in their stores. That includes cigars, cigarettes and any other tobacco product that goes in that category. By eliminating these products CVS will be giving up a big chunk of money, at least 2 billion dollars.

“Every day, 26,000 of our pharmacists and nurse practitioners are on the front-line of healthcare,” CVS Pharmacy President Helena Foulkes said. “They’re working with our patients and our customers who have chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol and diabetes. We know that smoking is extremely antithetical to helping people with their healthcare needs. So, it’s the right thing to do, and it’s also underscoring our position as a healthcare player.”

Though, CVS maybe losing a lot of money by discontinuing tobacco products, they are making room to take on a changing health care scene. CVS will be hiring clinicians to offer care onsite, keeping the community healthy; selling tobacco products would prove to be a conflict of interest and cause people to question their creditability as a provider of healthcare.

“It’s very important to us, as we’re working with doctors and hospital systems and health plans, that they see us as an extension of their services,” Foulkes said. “So it’s virtually impossible to be in the tobacco business when you want to be a partner in the health care system”

Though, CVS will reduce the number of retailers that sell tobacco products by about 7,600 between now and October 1st, experts believe that this will not stop smokers from buying tobacco elsewhere.

This big change will put on the pressure for other retailers that sell the product to follow their example. The more the retailers join in the fight the less places people can buy the product encouraging the abandonment of tobacco all together. Not only will this make smoking inconvenient but change social attitudes about smoking making it unacceptable.

As CVS Medical director Troy Brennan and UCSF tobacco researcher Steven Schroeder write in a medical journal commentary released in tandem with the announcement, “Making cigarettes available in pharmacies in essence ‘renormalizes’ the product by sending the subtle message that it cannot be all that unhealthy if it is available for purchase where medicines are sold.”

Pharmacist and the American Heart Association have long opposed selling tobacco in pharmacies and California has stopped it all together.

“If other retailers follow this lead, tobacco products will become much more difficult to obtain,” Brennan and Schroeder write. “Moreover, if people understand that retail outlets that plan to promote health, provide pharmacy services, and house retail clinics are no longer going to sell tobacco products, the social unacceptability of tobacco use will be substantially reinforced… . If pharmacies do not make this effort voluntarily, federal or state regulatory action would be appropriate.”

Thanks CVS for helping the rest of us breathe a little easier.



 

Free Speech: How Far is Too Far

The First Amendment, most people feel is one of or the most important part of the consitution. It stands for what democracy really stands for. And to take that away would be to deny us our human rights. Or does it?

What if this part of our democracy is denying others their rights?

France and Israel have come to an agreement that free speech is very important to society, too much free speech can also be the exact opposite. In response to this revelation they have put limits on the use of certain types of speech, even banning or fining anyone who uses it. In France, Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala has been banned from playing in two cities and has been fined repeatedly for hate speech; being charged with intent to disrupt public order. The French have even made the encouragement racial discrimination a crime.

Israel has taken action against free speech by banning the word Nazi, unless used in an education context. Using this word, or even referring to the Third Reich with intention of hurting another person, can land a person jail for several months, along with some hefty fines. Israel did not stop there though, they have also made it illegal to deny the Holocaust. 

France and Israel are not alone in their efforts to control the harm done on society due to unbecoming speech. Six other European countries have also put restrictions in place.

This leaves America on it's own.

Coming back to America, this may seem excessive, even undemocratic. Federal court has held up the free speech law in a big way. In 1977 they upheld the rights of Neo-Nazi's to march right through a town in Illinois whose residents were survivors of Hitler's regime. Even when West-boro Church decided to picket outside the funeral of a gay soldier with signs that says "God Hates Fags" there was no repercussions. Though America seems to unlimited free speech there are some limits, for example slander, defamation, obscenity and the incitement of imminent lawlessness. This is a small portion of the hateful words that are hurting people everyday.

When is it too far?

"Recent studies in universities such as Purdue, UCLA, Michigan, Toronto, Arizona, Maryland, and Macquarie University in New South Wales, show, among other things, through brain scans and controlled studies with participants who were subjected to both physical and emotional pain, that emotional harm is equal in intensity to that experienced by the body, and is even more long-lasting and traumatic. Physical pain subsides; emotional pain, when recalled, is relived,"  reports the daily beast.

Physical wounds may last a long time, it's the psychological wounds that last a lifetime, and like physical harm, emotional distress can make the body sick. Even when these emotions are brought back, the person will relive the incident over and over again. This causes mental trauma, not just for the one person it may be directed too, but to everyone that can relate.

There, of course, is nothing wrong with trying to express your ideas in public, but this can be done without shouting obscenities at a gay soldiers funereal, or burning a cross in an African American neighborhood. 

"Free speech should not stand in the way of common decency. No right should be so freely and recklessly exercised that it becomes an impediment to civil society, making it so that others are made to feel less free, their private space and peace invaded, their sensitivities cruelly trampled upon."

RedHawks is Much Better Than RedSkins, Just Change the Name!

This interesting debate as gone on for 40 years. It seems that Daniel Snyder would give in and change the name of the Washington Redskins. It would even add money to the franchise if he did change the name. So why the reluctance? 

Check out the background of the battle of the names below as reported by Think Progress. 

It was a simple declaration. With it, the owner of the Washington Redskins probably thought he was putting to bed the idea that his franchise might ever go by another name.

“We will never change the name of the team,” Daniel Snyder said in May.

“We’ll never change the name,” he reiterated when the reporter followed-up. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

But for all of Snyder’s public bluster on the subject, the tenor of the organization’s private response would shift in the months to come. Inspired in part by Snyder’s own comments, a small but powerful Native American tribe would join the long fight other Native American activists and advocacy groups had waged to change the franchise’s name. And in response, the Redskins would enlist a group of high-profile Republican strategists and officials to privately shape the organization’s response to public pressure as Snyder sought to preserve the name the team has used for 80 years.

For forty years, a loose coalition of Native American tribal and organizational leaders had targeted the title of Snyder’s football team. For the past two decades, they had waged legal fights that sought to undermine the team’s federal trademark protection, arguing that laws prohibiting the trademarking of offensive racial terms should void the one that covered “Redskins.” Snyder, like the owners who came before him, had no inclination towards a change. Especially not last spring, with his team coming off one of its most successful seasons during his tenure as owner and — despite questions about his star quarterback’s shredded knee — with the franchise’s future looking bright.

But the country was changing around him.

Thanks to the persistence of those activists, names like “Redskins” had slowly begun to vanish. In March, a group of high school students had successfully lobbied their school board to quit using what Native Americans called a “dictionary-defined slur” to refer to their athletic teams. Two months before Snyder’s declaration, in his own own backyard, politicians had introduced federal legislation to make trademarking the name of his team illegal. 

The federal trademark board had heard a second lawsuit challenging Snyder’s team name, and if the plaintiffs prevailed, it would leave him with little choice but to find a new moniker.

The 2013 football season, supposed to be a triumphant one, would turn disastrous on the field. Things would be even worse off the gridiron. By the middle of the season, the President of the United States would all but urge Snyder to reconsider the name of his football team.

And the simple statement meant to end the discussion instead helped ignite a major controversy that enveloped Snyder and his team.

“The stonewall by the NFL and the Washington team was shattered this year,” Ray Halbritter, a representative from the Oneida Indian Nation, which conducted a wide-ranging campaign against the team’s name throughout the 2013 season, said. “It’s a permanent movement now.”

And it’s a movement with increasing chances of success. But even as changes close in on the Redskins, emails between team advisers, obtained by ThinkProgress, reveal a deep contempt for the arguments that may ultimately cost the franchise its name.

Kill The Indian, Save The Man

The etymology of the word “Redskin” is, according to a study from Smithsonian Institution Native American language historian Ives Goddard, “entirely benign” Native Americans, Goddard found, were the originators of the term, which they used to set themselves apart from people new to their land. By the early 1860s, however, whites had co-opted the term as a racial descriptor at best and, at worst, as a slur. A newspaper in Winona, Minnesota used the word as part of a bounty notice published in its evening edition on September 24, 1863. The notice, provided by the National Congress of American Indians, which claims it has been independently verified, read:

THE State reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth.

CREDIT: National Congress of American Indians

Sixteen years later, a United States Army Captain named Richard Henry Pratt founded Carlisle Indian School, one of the first in a wave of Indian boarding schools meant to help the U.S. government solve its “Indian problem.” Many whites at the time believed that the only way to deal with Indians was to educate and assimilate them into Euro-centric American culture. Indians could be “saved,” but only if whites eradicated their cultural backgrounds. Carlisle, in the words of its founder, existed to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man."

Carlisle sat on an abandoned military base and existed under the authority of the United States Army. The school found little success in educating Indians. But it excelled in replacing Indian traditions and beliefs with the English language, Western religion, and American culture. This was especially true on the football field, where Carlisle ascended to the top of America’s new burgeoning obsession: collegiate football.

Carlisle regularly competed with–and beat–the powers of the day, Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale, and military academies like Army. Though they were officially known as the Red Men or Indians, newspaper reports referred to its players by another name. “Every time the reports of Indian games are printed, hundreds of Chicagoans are heard to express ‘Oh, how I would like to see those redskins play,’” a Chicago reporter wrote of the team in 1898.

By the second decade of the 20th century, Carlisle had spawned numerous other Indian boarding schools, which decades later would fall under criticism for their curriculums and cultural assimilation programs. Some who attended such schools remembered them as repressive institutions that destroyed their culture and provided little in the way of actual education. Carlisle closed in 1918. 

Fourteen years later, the team that is known today as the Washington Redskins played its first professional football game. The Boston Braves, as they were known then, adopted the “Redskins” name after just one season. As legend holds, the team changed names to honor its second coach, a burly Indian man named William “Lone Star” Dietz. The team moved to Washington in 1937. It has called the nation’s capital home ever since.

Dietz, in the organization’s version of the story, was a Sioux, and the team adopted its name “out of respect for Native American heritage and tradition.” The Redskins have used the story to defend the name for decades; it plays a central role in Snyder’s defense of the moniker now.

“Dietz’s true identity remains a bone of contention,” author and historian Linda M. Waggoner wrote in her exhaustive effort to debunk Dietz’s claims of Indian heritage in the spring of 2013. But his birth certificate stated that he was born to German parents in Wisconsin. It was only later that Dietz adopted the story of his Indian heritage. Waggoner’s research suggests that he did so for self-promotional reasons, first to help him sell his talents as an artist and later to help him gain prominence as both a football coach and a film creator.

Dietz gained entry into the Carlisle school, as an acquaintance put it, “thru some subterfuge” in 1907. Waggoner found that he was likely among the players illegally recruited to Carlisle for football purposes. At this point, Dietz “began crafting himself a fabulous autobiography,” Waggoner found, and he appears to have made up an “astoundingly anachronistic” Indian heritage that cribbed heavily from an Indian named James One Star, who had left Carlisle in the 1890s and, based on government records, likely died as a soldier. His “heritage” had gotten him into Carlisle, though, where he played and coached football alongside the famous Pop Warner, a non-Native who coached the school’s team. 

His time at Carlisle helped launch his coaching career — he went on to work at, among other places, Washington State and Purdue. In 1933, he joined the Redskins.

His tenure there was hardly outstanding. In Dietz’s two seasons as a coach, the team’s record stood at 11 wins, 11 losses, and two ties.

And Dietz’s story about his heritage was already in doubt before he joined the team. It actually caught up to him the year after Carlisle closed in 1918. A Washington state-based FBI agent investigated Dietz, and he was charged in 1919 for attempting to dodge the World War I draft by falsely registering as an Indian, and for misrepresenting a business he ran. He disputed the charges during a trial that ended with a hung jury. He pleaded no contest to new charges of lying about his heritage and misrepresenting his business and served 30 days in jail in 1920. Upon his release, he stuck to his story until the day he died.

The Redskins and the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, may not have been aware of this backstory. Still, Waggoner found little evidence from the time to support the claim that Washington chose the name Redskins specifically to honor Dietz, though it changed names when it hired him, and before he coached his first season. Waggoner’s research instead claims that the name was possibly a ploy “to cash in on Indian football nostalgia,” a phenomenon Carlisle helped create. Home to football legends like Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Carlisle helped foster the belief that Native Americans had supernatural athletic talent, particularly on the football field.

Dietz died in 1964, three decades after his short stint with the Redskins and right around the time the movement against Native American imagery in sports began. In the early 1960s, groups of Native American activists and students began working with colleges and universities to change names and drop mascots, and by 1970, they had won their first prominent victory. That year, the University of Oklahoma banished Little Red, an unofficial Native American mascot, from Sooners football games. 

For the first time, an American sports team had listened to Native Americans who were arguing that it was inappropriate to make caricatures of their people for the entertainment of sports fans. Marquette University dropped its Native mascot in 1971 (it would take 23 years for it to change its “Warriors” nickname). Stanford University dropped its “Indians” nickname the next year. In 1974, Dartmouth College’s board of trustees decided the school should quit using its unofficial “Indians” nickname and imagery.

The Redskins could have been next.

Four Decades of Fighting

 As Oklahoma banned Little Red, the Redskins underwent a transition of their own. Owner George Preston Marshall — who had finally wilted and integrated his team in 1962 amid federal pressure to do so — died in 1969. The Redskins were left in the hands of Washington-based attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who owned a minority stake in the team and became its managing partner. Native American activists who wanted the name changed thought the new leadership presented an opportunity.

Suzan Shown Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee tribes who later led the National Congress of American Indians from 1984 to 1989, was one of those activists. Harjo said she “watched from the sidelines” as activists persuaded Oklahoma to change, but she followed them into the fight. She is today the most lasting and prominent voice against Native American mascots, “something of a godmother” to the cause, as the New York Times has described her. Harjo wasn’t present when Williams finally met with Native American leaders, but those who were told her that Williams had been personally cordial and receptive to their criticism.

But when Canadian media entrepreneur Jack Kent Cooke became the team’s majority owner in 1974, its name was still the Redskins.

Cooke refused to meet with Native leaders. So did Daniel Snyder, the businessman who bought the team in 1999. According to Harjo, Williams remains the last team owner to meet face-to-face with those who want the name changed.

Over the two decades following the initial meeting, Harjo and other activists sought ways to target the name, both legally and in the court of public opinion. The activists considered various lawsuits challenging the names on civil rights grounds, but feared they would only end in crushing and expensive defeats.

They had little idea how to proceed. Then, in January 1992, the Redskins won the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl XXVI, played in Minneapolis, was the third, and last, championship the franchise won under Cooke’s stewardship. Local Native American groups held small protests against the name around the stadium. 

But the game is more notable because it sparked a thought in the mind of a Twin Cities-based patent lawyer named Steven Baird, who was working on a law review article and contacted Harjo for an interview. Harjo said Baird asked a simple question in the course of their talk: Why had she and her fellow activists rejected the idea of challenging the team’s federally-protected trademark? A 1946 law known as the Lanham Act, she learned during their conversation, contains an obscure provision that gives the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office the authority to deny trademark protections when the terms used may be disparaging.

“I said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’” Harjo said. “It wasn’t that we rejected them. It was, you know, I’d never heard of [that argument].”

The strategy was promising enough for Harjo, the Morningstar Institute — which she founded to promote Native American culture and help rid sports of Native stereotypes — and other groups like NCAI to adopt. They went to work, recruiting Native Americans who found the name offensive enough to join a lawsuit against it. In September 1992, seven months after the Redskins won Super Bowl XXVI, Harjo and her co-plaintiffs, seven of them in all, petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trial and Appeals Board, asking it to invalidate the Redskins’ trademark.

The media took notice of their efforts. “People think that it is only this past year that there has been any momentum on this, but that’s not true,” Harjo said. “When we filed our lawsuit in 1992, there was a tremendous number of press people. It was amazing how many people were there. It was a big deal.”

Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser called for a name change, and others did too, giving the movement a new source of momentum. When the team responded months later, it dismissed the suit, alleging that it was without merit and that the appeals board should toss it aside.

In 1999, nearly seven years later, the trademark board agreed with the plaintiffs, finding that 

“Redskins” violated the Lanham Act and as such should lose its trademark, pending appeal. That same year, a young, wealthy businessman named Daniel Snyder bought the team, a move that instilled hope in the activists again. The combination of a legal defeat and new ownership, Harjo said, fostered the belief that the team might finally accept the change. Among the factors that made the activists optimistic was Snyder’s Judaism, which they thought might make him open to the concerns of another minority group.

It wasn’t so. Snyder, like Cooke before him, refused to consider a change. The franchise went about running out the clock on whatever momentum had arisen against it. The team continued to defend the name as a “tradition” and an “honor,” and throughout the fight it had another major motivation for preserving the name: money. The Redskins are a brand, one carefully crafted over 80 years and among the most recognizable in sports. Though there are disputes over how much changing the name would cost, the team argued as part of the trademark case that it would cause “every imaginable loss you can think of.” If the team didn’t have to rebrand, why would it willingly except such an expensive undertaking?

Four years later, in 2003, a district court judge overturned the trademark board’s decision, agreeing with the Redskins that the plaintiffs had waited too long to file their complaint. The office issued the trademark in 1967, 25 years before the seven plaintiffs filed their case. They hadn’t been offended for years before, the judge reasoned. Why were they offended now? The youngest plaintiff, an artist named Mateo Ramero, was just a year old when the original trademark was granted. To the court, it didn’t matter. For seven more years, the case wound its way through appeals. The Supreme Court refused to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal in 2009. The case was dead. The name Harjo spent decades fighting was not.

Harjo wasn’t going away. In between appeals, she recruited new plaintiffs to bring the same case. The new group, led by Amanda Blackhorse, was younger. Young enough, Harjo and the others hoped, to avoid what they thought was a trivial technicality that had derailed their previous victory.

If the trademark suit felt like a loss, it was actually one of few the community had suffered in the three decades since it started fighting the use of Native American imagery in sports. Students, parents, and Native Americans alike successfully argued for name changes in school districts and states across the country. A number of state boards of education have conducted a system-wide reviews of every Native American mascot in use in their schools. Miami University in Ohio, named after the Miami tribe, changed its name from Redskins to Redhawks in 1997. High schools across the country made similar changes, dumping “Redskins” and other names in favor of new monikers. In 2005, the NCAA passed a bylaw prohibiting schools from wearing any logo it deemed “hostile” or “abusive” toward Native Americans on uniforms during postseason play. Schools with such mascots wouldn’t be allowed to bring them to postseason games. As a result, the University of Illinois, with much consternation, dropped its iconic Chief Illiniwek mascot, who for years performed faux-Native dances at basketball and football games. Other schools followed.

In 1970, more than 3,000 high school, college, and professional sports teams had Native American nicknames or mascots. Today, fewer than 1,000 remain.

‘We don’t need to comment on all of these ignorant requests’

For most of the four decades that the fight had raged, the Redskins felt little need to respond to their critics. That’s changed dramatically. But that doesn’t mean that the team is taking the allegations about its name to heart. To the contrary, the Redskins’ position has hardened, both in Snyder’s public remarks, and in private discussions about how to respond to inquiries about the controversy.

Emails obtained by ThinkProgress reveal that the team consulted with a group of high-profile Republican advisers, some of whose involvement with the team has not been previously reported, about how to handle this reporter’s questions about the organization’s approach to the campaign to change the team’s name.

Included in the email chain were Frank Luntz, the Republican messaging consultant famous for phrases like “climate change” and “death tax”; Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary under George W. Bush from 2001 and 2003 and now runs a consulting firm called Ari Fleischer Sports Communications; George Allen, the former Virginia governor and U.S. senator who now runs the consulting firm George Allen Strategies; and Bruce Allen, George Allen’s brother and the organization’s general manager and executive vice president. Both Allens are the son of former Redskins head coach George Allen. 

The web sites for neither Fleischer nor Luntz’s firms include client lists. The Redskins’ vice president of communications, Tony Wyllie, confirmed that while Luntz had conducted a focus group on behalf of the team, he has not been paid for other work with the Redskins, and that Fleischer and George Allen’s firm do not have contracts with the team. Fleischer, Luntz, and George Allen had not responded to requests for confirmation at press time.

But the fact that the men participated in the email chain at all is revealing. Last summer, when ThinkProgress first reported Luntz’s involvement in the team’s efforts to focus group the name, the Redskins and Luntz declined to confirm that Luntz or his firm, Luntz Global, were involved in the project.

The email chain shows that after this reporter requested comment on a number of issues related to the Redskins name and claims made by its opponents, Wyllie forwarded the email to Luntz, Fleischer, and the Allens. George Allen’s response is the first included in the chain, and it suggests that the team reiterate its story about changing its name to honor Lone Star Dietz, even though the team can’t prove its claims.

“The point was that the Redskins owner at the time obviously believed that Lone Star Dietz was a Native American and named the team to honor Native Americans and be motivated by their heritage,” Allen, whose 2006 Senate campaign was marked by allegations about his use of racially charged language, wrote. “All the other aspects of the story about Lone Star’s adoption and other intrigue and speculation is undoubtedly beyond our ability to discern as to its veracity.”

“We don’t need to comment on all of these ignorant requests,” Bruce Allen wrote in response. “Tell reporter to call the family of the College Hall Of Fame Coach Dietz and ask them this insulting question.”

“I agree,” Fleischer responded, “not [sic] need to answer any more questions or waste any more time with this outfit.”

ThinkProgress’ inquiries included questions about the organization’s response to the idea that the campaign against its name was now “permanent” and to the fact that multiple Native American leaders and their allies had suggested that a name change was “inevitable.” The others dealt with the trademark lawsuit, the fact that civil rights groups, political leaders, and media figures had criticized the name, and whether the team was aware of the research questioning the veracity of Dietz’s Native American heritage.

The team’s official statement in response to those questions is strikingly different from the email chain.

“As a recent national poll showed, the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with our position on our name,” Wyllie wrote. “An earlier poll by the Annenberg Institute showed that 90 percent of Native Americans support our name and that’s the message we have heard from hundreds of Native Americans who wrote to Dan Snyder in support of the Redskins.”

The team’s statement included a quotation from a Native American Redskins fan in support of the team’s name that the franchise has circulated to many other media outlets as evidence of Native American support for the franchise’s name.

“We respect those who don’t agree,” the team’s statement concluded, “but we think the voices of many Native Americans who support the Redskins should be listened to as well.”

The team’s robust efforts to control the message trace back to the last spring. It was May 10 when USA Today sports reporter Erik Brady asked Snyder whether the name would ever change. Initially, Snyder stuck to the party line. Brady followed up, asking what would happen if the team lost the new trademark suit. Snyder went off script. He delivered the now infamous quote, telling Brady to print his answer — “NEVER” — in all capital letters.

“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

Months later, D.C. lobbyist, lawyer, and media consultant Lanny Davis, who Snyder had retained to help with communications strategy, said he regretted the tone of Snyder’s comment.

 

“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

“Since I left the White House, I’ve helped him on several matters, so I know Dan Snyder. And when I saw the all caps comment, I thought that had the wrong flavor to it,” Davis said during an appearance on a local radio show. “I think saying ‘we care about people’s feelings, we’re respectful when anyone is offended, but we have this eighty-year name that we love. … We sing ‘Hail to the Redskins’ every Sunday at the stadium, and we say we’re part of ‘Redskins Nation.’ That’s our vocabulary. Those are terms of honor.’ And that’s what he should have said, but he, I don’t think, is going to say ‘all caps. Never’ again.”

Though the context of Snyder’s quote was in keeping with prior owners’ stances, the tone was different — and it mattered. Snyder’s retrenched intransigence made the Redskins’ name less an immutable fact of life and more an expression of his personal style. This was the same combative approach to critics he had taken before, the one that led him to sue both fans who said that the Great Recession had left them financially unable to meet their season ticket obligations and a local newspaper that criticized him. By stepping out from behind the organizational justifications, and the organizational tone, for the first time, Snyder made himself an easy target.

The Redskins have been trying to shift the conversation ever since.

In June, ThinkProgress reported that the communications firm owned by Republican communications guru Frank Luntz held a focus group for people in the Washington area about the Redskins name. In October, Snyder defended the team’s name in a letter to fans that followed the tone Davis had suggested. In November, the franchise asked its fans via email to contact their member of the D.C. city council and urge a vote against a resolution that would condemn the team’s name. Later that month, the team honored Navajo Code Talkers at halftime of a Monday Night Football game, a gesture that may have been genuine but came across as a desperate public relations ploy.

A New Version of an Old Fight

Snyder’s new tone in the spring was only part of the reason the team needed to reset the terms of the fight. The other was much larger. Snyder’s comment came at exactly the wrong time. A new movement to reinsert the issue of racially charged sports team names into the public consciousness had started in February and was beginning to coalesce around Snyder. And a small but powerful tribe was newly interested in joining the movement. Amid all of this, Snyder’s May comment acted as a spark to the opposition, particularly because the media had begun to pay attention again.

In February, a month after the Redskins lost in the playoffs, Harjo organized a symposium at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. The event brought together activists to talk about Native American mascots in the Redskins’ backyard, and with little else to do at a slow time in the sporting calendar, the media showed up. Newspaper reporters, local television cameras, and web journalists all listened as Harjo and other activists described their new trademark case, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would hear in March, and explained why they found names like “Redskins” troublesome. The event spawned a round of media coverage that reintroduced sports fans to an issue that, for the most part, had been out of the national news cycle for years. The timing was perfect.

A month later, as a small group of members of Congress prepared legislation that could strip the Redskins of their trademark, the school board in Cooperstown, New York voted to drop the “Redskins” name used by Cooperstown Central High School. The vote came at the request of students who no longer saw the name as appropriate. The board agreed, though it had a question: how was it going to afford new uniforms, signs, and everything else it would have to refit with whatever new name the school chose?

Oneida representative Ray Halbritter

CREDIT: AP

Enter one of the names now synonymous with the “Redskins” controversy. The Oneida Indian Nation of New York heard about Cooperstown and told the school board it would pay for the change. In March, the school board unanimously approved the change. Oneida donated $10,000 to pick up the tab. And there was more. Oneida didn’t plan to stop in Cooperstown. There was another, much more notable team using the same name in Washington, and Oneida leader Ray Halbritter wanted them to change, too.

Oneida is a relatively small tribe in New York, where its people lived before Europeans reached North America. Despite its size, Oneida is financially secure, thanks to the Turning Stone Casino and a network of gas stations it owns and operates in upstate New York. The tribe has attracted criticism over tax deals it struck with the New York state government, and Halbritter, the tribe’s public face, has attracted both vigorous support and equally energetic criticism. In a profile of the newest face taking on the Redskins, the Washington Post described Halbritter as a man loved by supporters for “pull[ing] his people out of poverty” — the casino helped bring jobs, hospitals, schools, and other basic needs to Oneida’s people — and “defending their image.” But the Post found that Halbritter’s adversaries, some of whom are members of the nation and others who oppose the tax, casino, and land deals he struck with the New York state government, criticize him “as an opportunist who has amassed a fortune at the expense of others.”

Both his proponents and detractors, the Post wrote, acknowledge “that he is a formidable adversary who has faced tough fights before,” and that is the persona Halbritter brought to Oneida’s campaign against the name of Washington’s football team.

Cooperstown is close to the Oneida tribe — in the Washington Post profile, Halbritter recounted a childhood memory of seeing tribe members burned alive in a trailer not far from the town — but the students’ movement against the name struck Halbritter and Oneida for another reason. There are virtually no Native Americans in Cooperstown. According to the Census Bureau, Otsego County, New York is nearly 95 percent white. Native Americans make up just 0.2 percent of the county’s population. Native Americans hadn’t forced this change. A group of white students who didn’t want to exclude another group of Americans had.

“They were kids and they did something these billionaire team owners and the nine-billion-dollar NFL won’t do. That was sort of a shining light moment, a moment of clarity,” Halbritter said. “That was very inspiring to us.”

NCAI and smaller Native American groups had fought this name for years, both behind the scenes and in public papers and reports. Oneida was familiar with the NFL — the New York tribe sponsors the Buffalo Bills, while its Wisconsin tribe sponsors the Green Bay Packers — and its members may have even been personally offended by the Redskins’ name. But the Oneida had never organized around it.

That was about to change. The symposium in Washington and the pending trademark case had re-energized the people who had worked to change these names for decades. The Cooperstown decision brought Oneida into the fold. And Oneida brought with it two things the other groups never seemed to have: an organizing strategy that would inject their cause into the mainstream and the money to fund a major advocacy campaign that no one could ignore. Oneida’s Change The Mascot campaign, launched in September, marked a shift in the way Native American activists would tell and sell their story to their opponents, the media, and the broader public.

Other events helped set the stage. The 10 members of Congress who introduced The Non-Disparagement of Native American Persons or Peoples in Trademark Registration Act of 2013 in March wrote a letter to Snyder and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in May. Goodell responded in June with a letter largely based on the historical claims of “honor” and “tradition” the activists had long opposed. In July, Eni Faleomavaega, American Samoa’s delegate to Congress, blasted the name on the House floor, calling the racial implications a “moral issue” that its defenders had ignored.

And right as football season prepared for kickoff, Oneida’s campaign launch blew the issue through the roof. The arguments the Oneida made weren’t very different from the ones that had been presented before. Natives had used a broad, inclusive message. And they had argued that the mascots create and reinforce stereotypes with long-term consequences. They had even argued that this change was ultimately inevitable.

 

Oneida and its allies orchestrated a fight that looked and acted like an insurgent political campaign.

Oneida helped refine these messages and to craft broad media strategy that would take the arguments public in a way the movement previously hadn’t. Over the next six months, Oneida and its immediate allies — Harjo, NCAI, other Native American groups, and the original members of Congress — orchestrated a media-driven push that looked and acted like an insurgent political issue campaign. Oneida placed strategic ad buys in cities across the country where the Redskins were scheduled to play road games during the 2013 season. Taking the issue outside of Washington would get it away from a public predisposed to defend the team and into other communities, some of them, like Green Bay and Minneapolis, that were already familiar with Native American issues.

The ad buys weren’t solely aimed at the public, though. They were also a way to generate free coverage — earned media — that would beget more coverage. Oneida spent thousands of dollars on ads, but it knew that it couldn’t go toe-to-toe financially with the Redskins, much less the NFL and its $9 billion in revenues, its own dedicated TV network, and major media influence. Oneida, like any campaign, needed organic help. The ads would give sports and news writers a reason to talk about the campaign and the issues it raised. They would give reporters a reason to ask local political leaders and influential people about the issue. The ads would generate attention that led to more attention, stories that led to more stories.

In some instances, the campaign used a broad message of racial tolerance that tied Native Americans’ fight to those of other racial minorities, particularly when those fights were in the news. Oneida’s first ad, targeted for Week One of the NFL season, likened the Redskins name to the racial slur Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper used against a black security guard at a concert during the offseason. Cooper’s slur was in the news — the Eagles, his teammates and fellow players, the media, and even commissioner Roger Goodell condemned his actions.

Oneida praised the Goodell’s response, with Halbritter saying in the first ad that Goodell “is absolutely right; this kind of bigotry has no place in America.” Then it asked a question. If the NFL had to condemn Cooper’s form of bigotry, why did it sanction another? Halbritter used Goodell’s own words against him, and it worked: the ad generated coverage in mainstream outlets, and it was both educational and effective.

In other instances, the comprehensive media strategy went on display. A protest march accompanied the ad Oneida released in Minneapolis ahead of the Redskins’ Week 10 tilt with the Vikings. Children and adults alike carried signs throughout the streets around the Metrodome with messages like, “I am not a mascot,” a provocative image for the web and the next day’s paper. The ad and the march occurred in an area where Rep. Betty McCollum (D) had spoken out against the name — she was one of the 10 members behind the legislation targeting the trademark and the letter to Goodell and Snyder — and where tribal issues were well known. And the efforts inspired reporters to pose questions to other local leaders. At a press conference days before the game, a reporter asked Gov. Mark Dayton (D) to weigh in. “I believe the name should be changed,” he said.

While its campaign focused on a deliberate media strategy, the coalition never lost sight of its educational message. The franchise and its defenders often argued that “Redskins” was merely a name and that Native Americans had larger issues to worry about. Oneida and the other groups countered with research NCAI had pushed for years showing that these mascots perpetuated harmful stereotypes that had deep psychological and social effects on a community that deals with higher than average rates of poverty, under-education, alcoholism, depression, suicide, homelessness, and mental health issues.

McCollum, the co-chair of the Congressional Native American Caucus, argued that those stereotypes made it harder for her to do her job on the Interior Committee, which deals with Native American issues.

The name “makes it much easier in the back of your mind to disregard the health care, to disregard the housing,” McCollum says. “The same person you put down is the same person I’m going to be working for to make sure they have access to dialysis and diabetes prevention.”

Leaders like Robert Holden, NCAI’s deputy executive director, focused on the religious and cultural background to the issue.

“Look at the antics that were done in the stadium. (Fans) don fake eagle feathers and put fake war paint on. These are things that are part of our culture,” Holden told ThinkProgress. “Those eagle feathers, they’re a sacred item, shown by the creator to us how to treat them and how to respect this creature, what it does and how it sends our prayers to the creator. Some of these feathers are given to warriors and to people who do great things for our community. For these idiots to put these on and jump around like idiots, that’s like making fun of religion and our culture. It’s part of the education process, making them understand that what they did, what they have done and what they will continue to do is an affront to us.”

Halbritter framed his fight as one not over a name, but over Native Americans’ rights to define themselves.

“What is more important in life for anyone than their own belief in themselves?” Halbritter asked.

As the campaign progressed, it rapidly picked up allies. USA Today columnist Christine Brennan wrote in September that she’d no longer use the name. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized the name, and the Post’s editorial board opined against it. President Obama said in October that he would consider a name change if he owned the team. NBC’s Bob Costas devoted a segment to the history of the name during halftime of a Sunday Night Football broadcast and concluded it was “a slur.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the team should change its name. The D.C. City Council unanimously approved a resolution condemning continued use of “Redskins.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized it in December.

Along the way, the campaign’s broad appeal brought in other civil rights and religious groups too. The NAACP and ACLU, which had long opposed the name, were part of a coalition of 200 civil rights organizations that condemned the name in December. Members of D.C.’s black clergy pledged to preach against it to their congregations. 60 D.C. area religious leaders from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities signed a letter to Goodell calling for a name change.

To many of the people involved in the campaign, change seemed inevitable. The only question was whether Synder would embrace it himself.

“It’s going to change, but he can be a part of the change,” McCollum said of Snyder. “He has an opportunity to do that. He just needs to see the handwriting on the wall and be the change that should be.”

An End in Sight?

By all indications, Snyder has no interest in being a part of that change.

His organization, as it has in the past, continues to lean on public opinion polls to defend the name, citing a recent survey showing that 71 percent of Americans wanted to keep the name compared to 18 percent who wanted to change it (a previous poll by the Associated Press showed those numbers at 79 percent and 11 percent, respectively).

Oneida and other Native American groups counter by arguing that the name should not be subject to public opinion.

“I don’t think this is an issue that you just vote away,” Halbritter said. “How many people have to be offended for things to change? This is a defined offensive term.”

But their solution might not have to rely on public opinion.

A decision in the second trademark case is due any time. The Trademark Trial and Appeals Board heard arguments in the case in March 2013; in the previous case, the board issued its ruling just less than a year after it first heard the case. There are indications that the new plaintiffs could win. They won at this stage last time, of course. And the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently rejected a trademark for a product called “Redskins Hog Rinds” on grounds that it contained a derogatory term.

If Harjo is right and if the issues with the first case are fixed, the plaintiffs may be able to hold on throughout the appeals process too. If they do, the Redskins name will almost certainly have to change. Losing the trademark would prevent Snyder and the NFL from protecting the Redskins brand. Anyone who wanted to market Redskins-brand gear could make their own and sell it. It would cost the team a substantial sum of money, and those costs wouldn’t just hit Washington. The NFL splits merchandising revenue evenly among its 32 teams. Lose the trademark, and every team loses money. The NFL is content leaving the decision up to Snyder now. It’s hard to imagine it sitting idly by if his pride in the name starts costing the league not just public support, but revenue.

But there is something tragic about that fact that financial interests will, one way or the other, ultimately decide the fate of a name that so many Native Americans have fought so long to change.

“There’s no financial solution to a moral problem,” Halbritter said. “Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t give you the right to use a racial slur.”

Think Progress

The State of Our Union

After hearing the State Of The Union last night, I felt hopeful, that maybe, just maybe congress can start to work with the president to get things done.

Starting with raising the minimum wage for federal workers.
 

"But America does not stand still – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do," Obama points out.

This is a big step for the president who is tired of the bickering going on in Washington and decided to take executive order an sign the new minimum wage into law. He is standing up for the Americans that voted for him and are still supporting him.

It's about time, the minimum wage is 20% lower than it was when Ronald Regan was in office. That's just embarrassing.

Of course the right is angry with the president calling him a dictator, socialist and other unattractive names, but really GOP; would you have done anything if Obama hadn't?

Didn't think so.

Obama invites congress to follow his executive order and raise minimum wage for the private sector also. I hope they will do so, for their own sakes.

One of the most emotional parts of the speech is the recognition of Cory Remsburg who has fought for us since he was 18. He is now 30. His entire young adult life was and is dedicated to protect our liberties as a country. And, even though he is wounded he wants to get better and return to serving his country.

Now after this extended standing ovation for the young man, can we please, please take care of our veterans instead of cutting their benefits? They are fighting for our freedom, giving they're lives so we can live ours. The least we can do is make sure they have the income and healthcare they need.

 

"Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a “Mad Men” episode. This year, let’s all come together – Congress, the White House, and businesses from Wall Street to Main Street – to give every woman the opportunity she deserves. Because I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds," said Obama.

The success of our country depends on every citizen whether man or woman getting equal pay. By not paying women the same as men is only hindering our own economic growth. 

"They believe, and I believe, that here in America, our success should depend not on accident of birth, but the strength of our work ethic and the scope of our dreams. That’s what drew our forebears here. It’s how the daughter of a factory worker is CEO of America’s largest automaker; how the son of a barkeeper is Speaker of the House; how the son of a single mom can be President of the greatest nation on Earth. Opportunity is who we are. And the defining project of our generation is to restore that promise."

 

"Taking a page from that playbook, the White House just organized a College Opportunity Summit where already, 150 universities, businesses, and nonprofits have made concrete commitments to reduce inequality in access to higher education – and help every hardworking kid go to college and succeed when they get to campus. Across the country, we’re partnering with mayors, governors, and state legislatures on issues from homelessness to marriage equality."

Obama also highlighted the importance of everyone having an opportunity to succeed regardless of who your parents are. After all the days of kings and queens are long over. 

With these words Obama was trying to motivate and encourage the working class that their dream can be achieved, and he's going to do whatever he can to help. He is not only doing this for better jobs, but for better education and for marriage equality. These are the things that the American people care about, and what he was voted into office for. 

On the other hand we have the Republican response(s). 

The fact that the republicans had four different responses is just a look at how the party is divided. It's really sad to watch them. While the official response was just an superficial overview of Cathy McMorris Rogers's, wonderful American life, it didn't really go into any ideas the republicans have to help Americans or any strategies for the coming years.  With a party this divided they will never grow enough strength to win elections.

Thailand's Revolution?

The most basic political right, is the right to vote. People all around the world protest for their right to vote. What happens when protestors are blocking the right to vote?

In Thailand that very thing is happening, thousands of anti-government people took to the streets on Sunday to obstruct voting polls in Bangkok. In their effort block the voting, voters became impatient and violent. According to Bangkok's emergency services 1 person was killed and several others wounded. In response the Prime Minister had to shut down the polling places.

 “This is the day when Thailand and the rest of the world saw the true face of the protest movement,” said Sunai Phasuk, a researcher in Thailand with Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group based in New York. “They are using thuggery to disrupt the voting process.”

The protestor's aim was to stop the election, and replace the parliament and put in it's place, an unelected people's council. By doing this they are hoping to oust the corrupted government and replace it with another.

“I consider myself a very tolerant person,” Mr. Pruettha said after being turned away from a polling place where protesters were blocking the entrance. “But this is very unfair. They violated my political rights.”


Sounds like their going about it the wrong way though, you cannot force people to not vote, that is their right, that is a democracy.

 Blocking the vote of an election is bound to raise suspicion, on who the leader is and what they are really their to accomplish.

The protestors are backed by Mr. Suthep, a former deputy prime minister and veteran politician, who he himself was riddled with corruption when he was in power. The government is very suspicious of his actions and thinks that he is using these protests to regain power. And since he can't win elections he feels like this is the only other option he has.

According to the New York Times, the protestors are not the only thing the government has to worry about, the government also faces significant opposition from within government agencies, including the Election Commission, which it accuses of dragging its feet. 

The commission has repeatedly asked the government to postpone the voting and at the commission’s urging, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled Friday that it could be delayed if the commission and the government agreed on a new date, a decision that legal scholars say appears to contradict a mandate in the Constitution to hold the elections within 60 days of Parliament’s dissolution.

Surapong Tovichakchaikul, a deputy prime minister, on Sunday accused the election commission of “playing tricks” and said the elections would be held as scheduled.

He questioned why the commission had not called on security forces to guard the polling places and ensure that voting went ahead.

Even if the elections proceed, the new Parliament will not reach the required minimum number of members because protesters blocked the registration of candidates in many provinces in southern Thailand. More than two dozen by-elections will need to be held before Parliament can elect a new government.

Protesters in Ukraine Reject the Ministers Concessions

According to the energy minister, Eduard Stavytsky, 100 protestors tried to seize and control the ministry, but he asked them to peacefully leave the building so that the energy system wouldn't collapse putting the entire country at risk.

The protestors did leave peacefully, but they blocked the entrance outside the building.

According to Aljazeera, the siege comes a day after the president, Viktor Yanukovic, offered concessions to protestors, including changes in government ministers and the amendment sweeping anti-protest laws through parliament last week.

The violence and protests have not stopped, showing that they will not concede and accept the terms.

The protests began in November after Yanukovich spurred an association agreement with the European Union in favor of have having closer ties to Russia. This is not the first of demonstrations for Ukraine, the first of them were in 2004-5 the Orange Revolution which denied Yanukovich his first attempt at the presidency.



This set of protests started out peacefully in Kiev, but the police have intervened violently  to break up the protests. Now the protestors have set up barricades near their football stadium and are throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. Police of course return fire with rubber bullets, stun grenades, killing at least half a dozen people so far.

 

The protestors have adavanced and taken control of certain parts of the city including its main independence square. On friday they occupied the main agriculutrial ministry building after talks stalled on Thursday night between the president and those opposed.

The government have detained at least 100 people and 24 have been formally arrested. At least five activists have been killed but the government says they had nothing to do with their deaths.

The Federal Government is Changing Banking Laws for Marijuana Retailers

The Federal Government is moving to make it easier on states where selling marijuana is legal. Eric Holder announced that U.S. Treasury and law enforcement agencies will be issuing new regulations opening banking services to state-sanctioned marijuana businesses even though the plant is still an illegal narcotic under federal law.

He also added that the new rules will make it easier for newly licensed medical marjuana dispensaries and recreational retailers in Washington State and Colorado to manage their funds through banking services.

This will reduce the risk of the retailers from getting robbed and will be able to pay employees through payroll instead of keeping the cash on hand. This will also benefit the state government to tax the revenue of the sales the retailers bring in.

"You don't want just huge amounts of cash in these places," Holder told the audience at the University of Virginia. "They want to be able to use the banking system. And so we will be issuing some regulations I think very soon to deal with that issue."

He also added, "There's a public safety component to this," he said. "Huge amounts of cash - substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited - is something that would worry me just from a law enforcement perspective."

Holder isn't the only one that has been concerned about the safety of the dispensaries but his deputy James Cole also expressed this concern in September. 

This comes at a time when Colorado has already enacted it's new marijuana consumption law, with Washington state right behind them. Other states like Alaska, California and Oregon is also on it's way making marijuana legal as early as 2014.

Though Holder didn't mention specifics to how long it will take for the new banking laws to be enacted, but this a step in the right direction.