Janelle Monàe shows her support for President Obama with a performance at a recent campaign event in Chicago.

“I was deeply honored to be invited by the President to perform at the rally in Chicago at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was an amazing feeling to be amongst so many people, young and old, black, white, red, disabled, all united, eager to help support a man who has ended the war in Iraq, gotten rid of “don’t ask don’t tell”- allowing anyone to serve this country regardless of who you love, made sure women were not paid less than men merely because they are women, doubled pell grants, given 2.5 million young people health insurance, and has created a law that recognizes that crimes based on sexual orientation, gender identity, race or disability aren’t just any crime- they’re hate crimes that deserve justice. These are all things he said he’d do before he was elected and did them. There are more important accomplishments that can be added to this list.  I strongly believe our nation should continue upon this path, bringing justice to all and change where needed.  President Obama remains the candidate of hope and change, and he will continue to move our country forward, bringing even more change if re-elected.” – Janelle Monàe

We’ve accomplished so much since Election Day 2008, but let’s make sure we finish the job together in 2012. Election Day 2012 is exactly one year from this week. That’s why we’re not waiting to build this campaign. Watch the video, then commit to volunteer and say you’ll show your support in 2012.

Since Election Day 2008, we’ve:

• Saved over one million jobs in the U.S. auto industry

• 20 consecutive months of job creation

• Took the fight to Al-Qaeda

• Reduced and secured nuclear weapons

• Passed health reform, lowering costs and insuring 32 million

• Ended “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

• Nominated first Latina to Supreme Court

• Doubled college grants, now for 9 million students

• New Protections against credit card companies

• New 54.5 MPG fuel standards, saving $8,200 per family

• Reined in Wall Street –ended taxpayer bailouts

• Ending the war in Iraq

Excerpts from Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Election Night acceptance speech:

“I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to — it belongs to you. It belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington — it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy. It grew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers.

You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.

This victory alone is not the change we seek — it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you –without a new spirit of service, without a new spirit of sacrifice. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime.

There jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet –alliances to repair. The road ahead will be long, the climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term, but America I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you we as a people we’ll get there. America we have come so far we have seen so much but there’s so much more to do.”

Over the last 4 years, we’ve seen and live during some of the most interesting times in history. A lot has been accomplished and our beloved President wants to keep the momentum going for the year and term to come.

This movement needs you in it. We need you to finish the work we started. We’ve ended combat operations in Iraq and all of our troops will be home for the holidays. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history. Comprehensive health reform is becoming a reality and already one million more young adults have health insurance because of it. And after a huge battle, we’ve put new rules in place to protect consumers and our economy from recklessness on Wall Street.

All of this is thanks to you and the work you’ve done. You proved the cynics wrong by helping build a movement for change but we have so much more to do. This is a moment that demands everything we’ve got to put people back to work and rebuild an economy that works for everyone. You’re our new generation of leaders and we’re stronger together than we can ever be on our own.

Take the first step and join now:

http://my.barackobama.com/youngamericansvid

The White House gets a Halloween makeover in anticipation of trick-or-treaters to arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the White House pastry kitchen prepares 4000 gift bags to be handed out by The President and The First Lady for Halloween.

Even before Moammar Gadhafi’s death Thursday, the Treasury Department was already starting to thaw some $37 billion worth of frozen Libyan assets to make them available to the new government in Tripoli.

The new Libyan government will get all the money. Eventually.

Earlier this year, the United States froze its piece of what some analysts believe to be as much as $150 billion in assets that had been available to the Gadhafi regime around the world.

Outside of the United States, those assets range from real estate to stakes in the Italian bank UniCredit, the British publisher Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, and Italy’s soccer club Juventus.

In September, the United Nations gave the United States the green light to release $1.5 billion in U.S.-held Libyan assets as humanitarian aid to the Transitional National Council, which was recognized as the new government of Libya in July. So far $700 million has been distributed, according to Treasury.

“We remain in close contact with the TNC, the State Department and our international partners, and are committed to releasing assets frozen worldwide in a manner consistent with the wishes of the Government of Libya,” a Treasury spokeswoman said.

Last month, Treasury also partially lifted some Libya sanctions. That opened the door for U.S. companies and individuals to do business with the Libyan National Oil Corp. and other companies in Libya, as long as the transactions don’t benefit anyone affiliated with the Gadhafi regime.

The question of what to do with the frozen assets has been a big talker in Congress, especially in the wake of mounting budget deficits that have only widened with years of navigating conflict in the Middle East and Africa.

Some lawmakers want to use frozen Libyan assets to reimburse NATO countries for military operations. Others want to link frozen assets to Libyan cooperation with investigations into Gadhafi-era terrorist attacks, according to a Congressional Research Service report released Sept. 29.

Sen. John McCain told CNN on Thursday that, during his visit to Tripoli a few weeks ago, new government officials told him they’re willing to reimburse the United States for its role in helping end the Gadhafi regime. So far, that tab has run about $1.2 billion, according to Pentagon and State Department officials.

“Obviously, it’s their money,” said McCain, in Arizona Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “They are willing to reimburse us and our allies. They’re obviously are going to be a very wealthy country.”

The Transitional National Council has been lobbying for months for a broader release of frozen funds for its use.

And international financial analysts say that, using Iraq as an example, the United States will try to release those funds, which will likely go first to reconstruction, as soon as possible.

“It’s anyone’s guess on how quickly we can free that up, but they’ll probably move pretty quickly,” said Glenn Simpson, a senior fellow in corruption and transnational crime at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

The Congressional Research Service report said the Transitional National Council will be under pressure to maintain order and support for the new regime.

“While a lively political atmosphere has emerged in opposition-controlled areas, political support for the TNC among the broader population may be contingent on the council’s ability to provide basic services and financial support via salaries and subsidies,” the report stated.

Indeed, the report suggested that the transition period will require “sustained attention and resources beyond the scope of the current fighting.”

Via CNN

At 7 a.m. tomorrow, Mayor Bloomberg is evicting the Occupy Wall Street protesters from their occupation of Zuccotti Park, unless you can help. Zuccotti Park is the birthplace of the Occupy protests sweeping the nation and capturing the public’s attention. It’s where a community of committed Americans are standing up against Wall Street and the corporate capture of our democracy for the 99% of us trying to take back the American Dream.

But tomorrow at 7 a.m., under Mayor Bloomberg’s orders, the NYPD is coming to Zuccotti Park to kick the 99% protesters out. It’s being done under the guise of “cleaning” the park, but new rules will mean the end of the occupation.

There is very little time to act. There is a need to gather a huge national petition as soon as possible, so it can be delivered to City Hall tonight and have it for the protesters in Zuccotti Park. So act now. Sign the petition and tell Mayor Bloomberg: “Respect the protesters’ First Amendment rights. Don’t try to evict Occupy Wall Street.”

SIGN THE PETITION HERE

Britain and the United States are pressing for United Nations sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban figures to be lifted later this month in the strongest indication yet that the western powers are looking for a negotiated peace with the Taliban. 

This article titled “Making peace with the Taliban? UN pressed to lift Afghan sanctions” was written by Jason Burke in Kabul, for The Guardian on Thursday 2nd June 2011 19.24 UTC

Britain and the United States are pressing for United Nations sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban figures to be lifted later this month in the strongest indication yet that the western powers are looking for a negotiated peace with the Taliban.

Candidates include the controversial former head of the regime’s religious police, Mohammed Qalamuddin, whose officers were responsible for some of the worst atrocities under the Taliban regime.

Officals believe the move would send a clear signal to insurgents that reintegrating into Afghan society is possible if they put down their arms.

The sanctions were imposed in 1999, when the Taliban were in power, and were expanded after the 9/11 attacks on America. They ban about 140 individuals from travelling or holding bank accounts. Removing the restrictions has been a key demand of insurgents in Afghanistan and has long been supported by the Afghan government.

The removal of men like Qalamuddin is likely to be controversial. Patrols run by the religious police chief beat women and men in the street to enforce the Taliban’s rigorous interpretation of Islam. As a minister, Qalamuddin also issued his own edicts, including a ban on women wearing makeup or high heels.

Other candidates include well-known figures who have acted as intermediaries in contacts between the Afghan government and the insurgents in recent years such as Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban education minister, as well as Qalamuddin, who has kept a low profile since being released from prison in 2005.

An Afghan minister also said that lifting the sanctions on such men would facilitate the establishment of a political office for the Taliban in a third country as it would allow key intermediaries, mainly former senior figures in the movement now living in Kabul, to travel.

Turkey, Turkmenistan and Qatar have all offered to host such an office, Afghan and western officials in Kabul have told the Guardian.

Senior Afghan officials in Kabul also said that contacts with the Taliban leadership could now be described as “systematic” and a “significant advance” on earlier “disorganised” discussions.

The talks involve an envoy travelling between Kabul and Pakistan on a regular basis relaying proposals and counterproposals, said the minister, who has direct knowledge of the “peace process” as it is known in the Afghan capital.

The meetings come at a time of intensifying effort to find a negotiated solution to the 10-year-old conflict in Afghanistan as western governments prepare to withdraw troops.

It was recently disclosed that US officials and a Taliban representative have held three meetings in the last two months, two in Qatar and one in Germany.

In another important development, representatives of the Haqqani network, one of the most effective and intractable of the insurgent factions, visited Kabul “very recently”, the officials told the Guardian.

The Haqqani network, named after its leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, is widely believed to have a relationship with the ISI, Pakistan’s main military intelligence service.

In the last six years only 15 names have been removed from the sanctions list. A key shift has been in Washington where there is now almost unanimous support for the delisting of dozens of individuals.

Delisting requires the assent of the five permanent members of the UN security council. Russia has made clear that it currently opposes any such move and may block any mass lifting of sanctions. France supports the move while China appears ambivalent.

A request for the delisting of 47 individuals was supposed to be submitted by Kabul to the UN sanctions committee before a key meeting on 16 June. However, the necessary documentation for only 18 individuals was assembled in time by Afghan officials.

Further opportunities to remove individuals will come later in the year.

Britain and America are also keen to scrap the sanctions list in its present form, replacing it with a list that distinguishes between al-Qaida and the Taliban.

However, the proposed lifting of UN sanctions has not been met with universal approval in Afghanistan.

“If there is a deal with the Taliban and people like him [Qalamuddin] come back to power it will all go back to being like before and we will lose all our freedoms,” said Monisa, a 24-year-old female NGO worker in Kabul.

Earlier this week Qalamuddin told the Guardian the restrictions weighed on him “as a human being” and that he has “rights like anyone else”.

Active Taliban are unlikely to be among those removed from the sanctions list, officials told the Guardian. “Don’t expect to see Mullah Omar [the Taliban overall leader] among them,” one said.

• This article was amended on 3 June 2011, to clarify a reference to “scrapping” the sanctions list.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Since we didn’t get to post more earlier this week in tribute to International Women’s Day, here’s another story to help put some more stamps on the scoreboard for women all over the world. Tena Clark, Grammy Award Winning Composer and music industry veteran, presented Secretary-of-State Hillary Rodham Clinton with a commemorative song titled, “I Believed,” to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day.

“I Believed,” was written and produced by Clark and performed by Judith Hill at the 2011 International Women of Courage Awards for an audience that included First Lady Michelle Obama, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein; Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard; Kyrgyzstan President Rosa Otunbayeva, dignitaries and distinguished guests.

Secretary-of-State Clinton explained, “The International Women of Courage Awards honors women from around the world who have truly done heroic work to advance freedom, equality, opportunity, and dignity for all. They have risked their lives. They have served in prison. They’ve been harassed and oppressed. Sometimes their own children’s lives have been at risk. They have been insulted, beaten, and tortured. And yet, each of these women has found the strength to persevere in the face of fear, isolation, or repression. And they’ve done so not just one day or one year, but day after day and year after year.”

Troy Davis was convicted of the murder of officer Mark Allen Macphail in 1991 in Savannah, Georgia, USA, and despite doubts concerning his conviction, has been on death row for the last 19 years. Since 2007, Amnesty International has been campaigning with Troy’s family and other supporters for a new trial. Finally, in August of 2009, the US supreme court granted Troy another chance to prove his innocence in the form of an evidentiary hearing. During this hearing, four witnesses admitted that they lied at trial when Troy Davis was implicated, four witnesses also identified another man as the one guilty of the murder, and three original state witnesses described police coercion during questioning.

In August of 2010, the federal district court judge decided that Troy did not meet the high standard for proving his innocence and on November 5th, 2010, the 11th circuit court of appeals (covering the states of Georgia, Alabama and Florida) denied Troy’s request to appeal the Savannah court’s ruling against him.

As a means of bringing attention to the case of Troy Davis, anonymous German street art collective Mentalgassi and UK-based Brothers and Sisters (duo of Lisa and Kirsten™) have developed lenticular fence poster installations across London, UK for Amnesty International. The poster project entitled ‘Making The Invisible Visible’ depicts the face of Troy Davis painted on fence railings. When viewed straight on, one does not see anything – his face remains invisible.  It is only when the fence is viewed from an angle that Troy Davis’s face becomes visible to the public.

Troy Davis: Making the invisible visible from Amnesty International on Vimeo.

U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada simply have been erased under a program run by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol that issues The Trusted Traveler of North America cards.

Instead of a representation of the United States, the cards issued by the agency under Barack Obama’s leadership carry a logo that depicts North America as a continent, without borders to identify the United States.

WND previously reported that on Nov. 30, 2010, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano and Mexican Ministry of the Interior Secretary Jos Francisco Blake Mora signed an agreement expressing their intent to develop a global entry international trusted traveler pilot program between the United States and Mexico.

Mexican officials believe it would allow 84 million Mexicans to apply for Trusted Traveler of North America biometric border pass cards for rapid entry into the United States.

The Security and Prosperity Partnership and the Trusted Traveler Program

The developments are just the latest in what apparently was launched on March 23, 2005, at the conclusion of their trilateral summit in Waco, Texas, when President George W. Bush, together with then-President Vicente Fox of Mexico and then-Prime Minister Paul Martin of Canada, declared the participation of their nations in the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, without any specific congressional approval or authorization.

Under the SPP, the U.S., Mexico and Canada organized some 20 different “shadow government” bureaucratic working groups composed of agency heads and undersecretaries in the three nations, spanning a wide range of policy areas, from e-commerce to aviation policy to borders and immigration, trilateral travel, transportation, energy, environment, food and agriculture, health, and financial services.

The Trusted Traveler of North America program was an initiative assigned for completion to the Transportation Working Group that consisted of ministers and administrators for the relevant transportation agencies in the United States, Mexico and Canada.