I thought I would throw this out here, since this community has been so helpful and generous.  

A dedicated local activist near where I live has succeeded in getting permanent immigrant visas for two Iraqi translators under death threats, along with their immediate families, to live here as legal immigrants, with a huge input of time and money from herself and her efforts in fundraising.  

Both men are fluent in English and very well educated with a variety of high-level professional job experience, however there is a limit to the jobs they can search for, and also a lot of services they can't get until all their paperwork goes through.  

I'm a member of the Friends of Pretty Bird Woman House and have taken a strong interest in violence against women since my best friend was raped when we were 15 and almost everyone she knew sided with the freaking rapist (30 something, a youth theater teacher, never prosecuted).

Today, Georgia Little Shield forwarded an article on Bush's devastating proposed budget cuts to federal funding for shelters and programs that combat domestic violence, provide shelter and services to victims, and prevention education to communities.

The budget came out in February, but I hadn't realized that it proposes cutting funding for domestic violence services and prevention by a third.  This when they're already running on shoestrings, and when life is getting steadily harder for Americans in so many ways.

If DKos can do so much to give PBWH a new shelter, you can spend a lot less time and money to secure funds for shelters across the country through 2010.  

Take a break from the yammering of politics, and take some concrete positive action tonight!  

This diary is directed to everyone who has enough to eat, and $10 or more to spare.  

Fact is, food banks need you year round.

But if you buy groceries and have to pay attention to what you spend, you know how much more expensive food (not to mention gas) have gotten in the last six months.

I just got an email from a friend, telling me that the food bank in a small town near me, and I do mean small, has 200 potential recipients for turkeys this week.  As of today, they have 12 to give away.

American Indians, Native people, Native Americans - somehow Thanksgiving is one of the times in the year when I hear the word 'Indian' most often (unless casinos or a sports team are in the news).  

Which is no doubt why November is Native American Heritage Month.  Though I can't say I've seen any mainstream (ie, not on a blog) PR for that this year.  Have you?  Maybe it's just me...  

In any case, would you like to know more about Native American lives now, understand more about the past history, find out where they live, what they're working for, how they vote in your state?  How easy it is for them to register to vote in your state?

Or have you wondered about the truth behind the myths of Thanksgiving?  If you know about all that, ever wish you had an alternative curriculum for your local school teachers?  

Or would you just like some conversation pieces for the family dinner on Thursday?  Or a fry bread recipe?

Follow me over...

If I could go, I would.

I never heard of this before, but our very own Department of Energy sponsors a biennial competition to build working solar houses.  The 2007 Solar Decathlonwill be the third of these competitions.

The teams, from colleges and universities around the globe, participate in an unparalleled solar competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered home. In fall 2007, the teams transport their solar houses to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where they form a solar village. The teams compete in 10 contests to determine an overall winner. Using only energy from the sun, the teams generate enough electricity to run a modern household. With an eye on energy efficiency, the students carefully choose the systems, products, and appliances used in their houses.

I hope this is appropriate.  I've been in touch with nbier and have offered to locate and coordinate offers of grantwriting help from Kossacks.  

I've been going through the comments for previous diaries and stories about Pretty Bird Woman House with only limited luck - a lot of the offers are from folks with no email address listed, who say they know someone...  So I thought I'd try this.  Hop over...

Throughout the latest national freak-out over immigration, including the National Language furor, I have kept saying to myself, hey; I know that three of my (European extraction) great grandparents grew up speaking languages other than English, in communities that spoke those languages, and they were American citizens, second or third generation away from immigration.  

This was in Minnesota, where you will still see the occasional old "English Lutheran church" in the countryside and it doesn't mean the founding congregation was English, it meant the service wasn't being held in Norwegian.

And this morning I opened the paper and was vindicated!  Jump over for a link to a nice little pop quiz that will test your knowledge of immigration in USA history, and give you some tasty morsels for countering the current wave of anti-immigration sentiment sweeping July 4 picnics across our fair land.

Thanks to Bush's new budget cuts, the EPA just lost the entire budget for it's library catalog.  Sounds dull and insignificant?  Think again. For anyone who wants to see environmental progress in this country, this is very serious indeed.  The EPA library network contains much information that is not digitized, and not available anywhere else.  Without a catalog, and without physical access to the libraries that will close, a huge vital unique collection of scientific data and studies will be closed to researchers and the public alike, including EPA scientists and enforcement staff.

Last night an amendment to The Organic Food's Production Act was passed in a closed-door committee.

Among other things, this allows for many synthetic additives and ingredients, and non-organic ingredients, to be used in organic food products without public review or announcement. This mainly affects processed foods of course.

There is a lot of money in organic food these days, and a lot of food industry pressure to lower organic standards so that they can put the 'organic' label and the accompanying higher price tag on products that are less expensive to produce.

I deleted this as a diary yesterday and posted it as a comment instead to this diary which was already being rated up.  There are more useful resources posted there of course.

But then someone suggested that I post my comment as a diary anyway, to make it easier to find.  It's been a long while since I wrote a diary, so what the heck, here it is, in the interest of easy searching.

My physicist husband came home shaking his head last night after a dinner with a faculty candidate and several others in his department at which they discussed the cuts to the NSF.  So I did a little reading (more below)...

My mom loves the TV show, The West Wing.  I can't keep track of regular TV shows with any complexity these days, what with two kids under 4, so I haven't really seen it.

But it seems this show, which has a reputation for being fairly smart, recently added to the culture of anti-Islam in this country with a really callous and ignorant plot line.

More...