Health Care Reform Now!

I believe that health care is a basic human right.  More than 400 Georgians lose their health insurance each day.  The cost of insuring the average American family increases by nearly $2000 each year and insurance companies are eliminating more and more of your health care choices.  Giving every American quality affordable health care will save money.  Georgia families pay nearly $1000 more in annual health insurance premiums because of the uninsured.  This is an unnecessary burden and makes it more important now than ever that we reform our broken health care system. 

Demand up, supplies down at food banks, Congress hears

By Bob Keefe

WASHINGTON -- With the number of Americans who say they don't get enough to eat reaching new highs, the nation's food banks are facing unprecedented demand and short supplies, charity groups told Congress on Thursday.

In Atlanta, food donations to charities from manufacturers and retailers are down more than 35 percent, John Stephenson, executive director of the philanthropic group J. Bulow Campbell Foundation, told a U.S. House panel.

Marker to note role of slaves in building Capitol

They worked 12-hour days, six days a week on the construction

WASHINGTON - The House on Tuesday acknowledged the use of African-American slaves in the construction of the U.S. Capitol, ordering officials to place a marker inside the new Capitol Visitor Center using some of the original stone quarried by those slaves for the historic building.

John Lewis arrested at Darfur protest

Darfur Protest Arrest

U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta and four other members of Congress were arrested for civil disobedience on Monday as part of a protest against the humanitarian policies of the government of Darfur in Africa.

Lewis and the others were arrested after crossing a police line and refusing to leave the area in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington during the well-organized event that was as much publicity stunt as protest. The Democrat was released a few hours after his arrest after paying a $100 fine.

Segregationist who beat John Lewis asks forgiveness

Andy Burris/AP

WASHINGTON — Elwin Wilson was an unabashed racist, the sort who once hung a black doll from a noose outside his home. John Lewis was a young civil rights leader bent on changing laws, if not hearts and minds, even if it cost him his life.

They faced each other at a South Carolina bus station during a protest in 1961. Wilson joined a white gang that jeered Lewis, attacked him and left him bloodied on the ground.

The President's Hero

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell

A couple of decades ago, when Barack Obama was on a break from Harvard Law School and visiting friends in Chicago, he carried around a copy of “Parting the Waters,” the first volume of Taylor Branch’s magnificent trilogy about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rise of the civil-rights movement. Obama was staying with Jerry Kellman, his mentor during his three years as a community organizer on the South Side. Kellman said that he greatly admired Branch’s book. Obama brightened and said, “Yes, it’s my story.”

Mind reading is a decidedly low form of journalism. Yet it is not hard to imagine that as Obama emerged into the noonday light last Tuesday to receive the oath of office, as he left the Capitol’s warm interior and saw before him the carpet of humanity stretching down Capitol Hill to the monuments miles distant, that he made a mental leap to Marian Anderson’s defiant concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, to the March on Washington that King led twenty-four years later, to the entire story of a struggle that he was too young to join but came to claim as his own.

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