A Sobering Labor Day Quote

Security Guards March for a Union Contract
Originally uploaded by seiu247

"There's no big movement agitating to make working conditions or economic conditions better for most people today."

~ Jefferson Cowie, author of "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class."

Cowie talks to Joan Walsh on Salon about race, class, and the politics of labor.

Quotables: Anne Rice and Alisa Valdes

Author Anne Rice made the following Facebook status update announcing that she has decided to leave Christianity:

"In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control," the author wrote on Wednesday on her Facebook fan page. "In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

For the entire story go here

And on her blog, The Dirty Girls Social Club author Alisa Valdes wrote this about the discrimination she's encountered in Hollywood:

When someone like me suggests, armed to the teeth with personal anecdotes and examples, that the “liberal” Hollywood elites continue to employ racist, unrealistic and damaging stereotypes of Hispanic women, they laugh it off and decide that I’m crazy.

To read the entire 8/2/10 entry go here.

Quote of the Day

I did a workshop the other day for high school students who are interested in a career in education. At the end of the workshop I received a certificate that contained this quote:

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

--Ghandi

Quotes: Martin Luther King, Jr.

A friend, Vickie, asked people to post MLK quotes as Facebook updates in celebration of King's birthday. This quote was kind of long for Facebook, but appropriate given the mean rhetoric about Haiti that we heard this week from Pat Robertson:

"...any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the economic conditions that damn the soul, the social conditions that corrupt men, and the city governments that cripple them, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood."

~ Martin Luther King, Jr. from The Measure of a Man

A Monday Quote

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language. Nothing is taboo. The writer will go anywhere, say anything to get it said; in fact, the writer is bent on doing so. The writer is bent.

Jayne Anne Phillips, "Why She Writes" from Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (Little Brown).