Public Policy
Absentee ballots were once used mostly by ex-pats, military families and diplomats strewn across the globe. They voted from far-away locales by filling out ballots at home and mailing them in, while the rest of the population spent a chunk of the day standing in a long line to cast a vote at their neighborhood poll. Now, in California, the mail-in ballot isn’t just for those abroad—it’s for everyone.
The It Gets Better Project serves as a digital chorus of solidarity and support for LGBT adolescents and teens all over the world. The video project, which in less than a month has turned into an international phenomenon, was spearheaded by Seattle-based advice columnist Dan Savage in the wake of a sequence of gay teen suicides in September. Each teen death has been traced to peer bullying, and to the harsh reality of being a gay teenager in America.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy that forbids gays from serving openly in the military, is now being enforced again, after a federal appellate court granted the Justice Department’s request to keep the policy in place while a case challenging its constitutionality is being decided.
It’s the First Friday in October, and Art Murmur is in full swing. Local ’zines, art depots and thrift shops are peddling their wares in between galleries packed with inebriated merrymakers. The atmosphere is hardly political, and yet mingling with the crowd is Don Macleay, one of Oakland’s ten mayoral candidates. “Let me tell you,” he says, thrusting fliers into the hands of passersby, “say ‘Hi, I’m a politician,’ and people will shy away from you. But say, ‘Hi, I’m with the Green Party,’ and people will take your card.”
Superintendent Tony Smith got personal while talking reform and student performance expectations Tuesday at the Oakland Unified School District’s Region 1 Teacher’s Dialogue. The meeting, which was the third in a series of teacher outreach meetings being held this month, brought roughly 25 teachers to North Oakland’s Sankofa Academy. The dialogues are supposed to give teachers a chance to understand the administration’s vision and talk directly to the superintendent.
The military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, passed by Congress in 1993, prohibits those who are openly gay from serving in the armed forces. Last week, a federal judge ordered an injunction putting a temporary halt to the policy and on Monday issued a tentative ruling to uphold that injunction. With the judge’s ruling, local Navy vet Michael Hughes said, Americans are “one step closer to liberty and justice for all.”
Two intrepid reporters at our sister site, Richmond Confidential, created an interactive tool to help people navigate the health care reform changes that affect them. You can click through to see what happens if you are uninsured, have a pre-existing condition, or want to extend coverage to children up to 26-years-old.
A short hearing on the status of North Oakland’s gang injunction this Thursday served as a backdrop for protest and legal maneuvering by groups opposed to the city’s newest tactic for curbing violence.
City officials announced Wednesday that an injunction is being sought against 42 alleged Norteño gang members in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, the second such action this year to fight the city’s gang problem. If approved, the injunction would allow police officers more rein in arresting the named gang members for engaging in activities—mostly illegal already—considered consistent with gang behavior.