GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





Lions for Lambs

The TAMU Association for Student Entrepreneurship is sponsoring a free preview and panel discussion of the new Robert Redford movie, Lions for Lambs, this Tuesday night. Details as provided below; for further information contact Andrew Pittz at andrew@ilovepeople.org

FREE Movie Screening:
Lions for Lambs
Tuesday Nov, 6 at 7:30 p.m.

Cinemark Theater
1401 Earl Rudder Fwy. South
College Station, TX

Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and crazy Tom Cruise. Should provide an in depth forum on war; we will have panel discussion after the event, it will be a really nice event, and great movie. We will be able to hear different sides of the issue without yelling at one another, addressing human rights abuses, funding, etc. We are lucky to see this movie for free and before it is released nationwide. Should be a great event.

http://tamu.facebook.com/event.php?eid=19647554936

Admission is free at the theater.

David, for the Coalition





Why is the media not all over this???
The 2008 Election

Giuliani's Princess Bride

Judith Giuliani always dreamed big, which got her out of small-town Pennsylvania, through two marriages, and into the arms of Rudy Giuliani. But, as her husband runs for president, people are asking, "Who does she think she is?"

by Judy Bachrach September 2007

Judith and Rudy Giuliani at Gracie Mansion on their wedding day, May 24, 2003. Denis Reggie/Getty Images.

It was the first anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero, an occasion when the names of the dead were read aloud. The first reader was to be Rudy Giuliani, New York's mayor at the time of the disaster, whose actions during those terrible days would prove a political boon. An army of policemen flanked him—an excessive number, spectators thought, since, due to the hundreds of dignitaries gathered, security outside was extremely tight.

Inside the tent were Secretary of State Colin Powell, New York governor George Pataki, Richard Grasso, who was then head of the New York Stock Exchange, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Senator Hillary Clinton stood in the aisle—until she was unceremoniously pushed by a phalanx of four burly cops entering the tent, these guarding Judith Nathan, Giuliani's girlfriend. No apologies were offered, one observer noted.

"The nerve of that woman!" Hillary exploded, recalling that her own daughter's Secret Service detail evaporated soon after Bill Clinton left office. Why should an ex-mayor's girlfriend get such royal treatment? "Who does she think she is?" Hillary said to an observer, who later recounted the story.

An interesting question. Who does Judith Stish Ross Nathan Giuliani think she is? These days, even with her husband, a freshly minted multi-millionaire, far ahead of the competition in the Republican presidential polls, no one, least of all Judith, 52, seems to have a clue. In a way, this is understandable. There have been so many different Judiths. As her second husband, Bruce Nathan, has told friends, "She is in an ever changing mode upward."

Three decades ago, Judi Ann Stish, as she was known in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, left her parents' home, a gray two-story house fronted by potted geraniums and a ribbon of flagstone. Fifteen years ago, while working for $1,200 a month as a part-time receptionist, she was living on borrowed money and the hospitality of friends—and threatening her estranged second husband with prosecution over a $3,500 rug. "Judi started from scratch, so of course she grabs every opportunity that comes into her life," Manos Zacharioudakis, her onetime live-in companion, tells me. "Of course she was attracted to Giuliani."

Today she and Giuliani, when they are not boarding private Gulfstream IV jets to Europe or trying to woo voters, shuttle between a $4 million Hamptons house and a $5 million nine-room Upper East Side apartment near Madison Avenue, its dining room walnut-paneled and crammed with crystal, china, and linen from Scully & Scully. Her annual salary has also improved: $125,000, evidently for helping to write some of the speeches Giuliani likes to give (for which he received $11.7 million between January 2006 and March 2007). This comes as a surprise to at least one of Judith's acquaintances. Asked if he knew Judith was writing speeches, one former Giuliani aide replied, "Holy cow! God forbid!"

The details of Judith's life have also undergone some refurbishing. Her monogrammed hand-stitched napkins embraced by thick silver napkin rings are on display, along with the new cigar room designed for her husband, and a mantelpiece adorned with white porcelain figurines of Winston Churchill, the statesman with whom Giuliani likes to invite comparison. She struck an odalisque pose in Hamptonstyle magazine, and appeared robed in a floor-length burgundy gown by Carolina Herrera on the cover of Avenue magazine, whose editorial director, Pamela Gross, accompanies her frequently, especially when TV cameras are present. ("Never get between Pamela, Judith, and a camera," advises one observer.) Judith sits in the front rows of fashion shows, her hair freshly styled by a full-time assistant lured from Frédéric Fekkai, and, when asked to pose, thrusts out an obliging hip for the cameras. Although she informed WWD, "I have no room for shopping in my life," she buys Dolce & Gabbana.

A dramatic transformation has occurred, one she does not care to discuss, despite repeated requests by Vanity Fair. She had always been known as "Judi." "Judi is what she was born. I don't think we called her Judith ever," says her father, Donald Stish, 78, seated on his porch one sultry June day in the shade of a gray metal awning. He is a calm, thick-set man who marvels at his daughter's makeover. After her second divorce, she upgraded herself to "Judith" with such vehemence that, one former Giuliani aide confides, "at City Hall we were prohibited from calling her Judi. She would bawl us out if we did."

For years she appeared, in the public record, to have had only one failed marriage, but as it turned out she'd had two. It seemed that she had gone to Pennsylvania State nursing school, as The New York Times once reported, but she had not. She completed two years of nursing school, but left hospital work before a year was up. Nonetheless, Giuliani has publicly referred to her "expertise" in "biological and chemical" disasters, and believes she would be a help in the event of an anthrax attack.

Her second husband, Bruce Nathan, was, Barbara Walters mentioned in a March interview with Judith, a man of "means"—a notion Judith promoted. A former boyfriend tells me that after the divorce Judith often referred to her ex-husband as a "millionaire." But in 1991, the year before their separation, Nathan earned exactly $72,775. Judith would later insist that Nathan had a trust fund worth perhaps $1 million and a yacht. However, as Bruce has informed friends, there was only a boat—and no trust fund at all. "Do you honestly think I'd be selling wallpaper if I had all that money?" he would ask.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/09/giuliani200709





TEXAS TEENS LEAD NATION IN BIRTH RATE

Texas' policy is to deny contraceptives without parental consent wherever possible and to push an abstinence-only sex education program in public schools. Experts, though, are questioning that approach. They note that from 1991 to 2004, the state's teen birth rate dropped by 19 percent, while the U.S. rate dipped by one-third. By contrast, California, which has seen its teen birth rate drop by 47 percent in the same period, teaches abstinence but also explains contraception at school and has gone to dispensing birth control to teenage boys and girls – for free, no parental consent required – in community clinics and doctors' offices.

Texas teens lead nation in birth rate
Experts questioning abstinence-only education approach

By ROBERT T. GARRETT
Dallas Morning News - November 5, 2007
rtgarrett@dallasnews.com

While the national teen birth rate has slowed, Texas has made far less headway, alarming public health officials and child advocates.

Texas teens lead the nation in having babies. Last month, the nonprofit group Child Trends conferred another No. 1 ranking on Texas. In the latest statistics available, 24 percent of the state's teen births in 2004 were not the girl's first delivery.

"That astounded me," said Kathryn Allen, senior vice president for community relations at Planned Parenthood of North Texas. "I mean, what are we doing wrong?"

Also Online

Tell Us: Is abstinence-only education the correct approach in Texas?

Texas' policy is to deny contraceptives without parental consent wherever possible and to push an abstinence-only sex education program in public schools.

Experts, though, are questioning that approach. They note that from 1991 to 2004, the state's teen birth rate dropped by 19 percent, while the U.S. rate dipped by one-third.





Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America