I'm Rebecca Lando.
I'm an award-winning writer, producer, and editor and upcoming cookbook author based in New York City.
In 2009 I launched Working Class Foodies, a cooking show that creates affordable meals from local, seasonal, and/or sustainable ingredients. Working Class Foodies is a part of YouTube Next Chef and airs on NBC New York's Nonstop Foodies.
I wrote, produced, and edited FilmFan, an award-winning weekly movie review show, for MSN from 2010-2011.
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WORKING CLASS FOODIES
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Susan G. Komen Foundation Also Stops Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research
In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.
That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.
(Source: ericmortensen)
Operation Rescue launches database of abortion providers
To recap:
Operation Rescue is an anti-choice group with terrorist ties. Period.
Their senior policy adviser is a convicted clinic bomber.
The man who murdered Dr. Tiller had their phone number in his car.
And now, this. This. I want to cry. I probably will, actually. And that’s what they want, I’m sure. Well, congrats, Operation Rescue. You have successfully instilled genuine, shitting-my-pants fear in me over the idea of clinic escorting tomorrow. I’m going to go anyway, of course, because it’s more important to me than my own life, but make no mistake, everyone: anti-choicers enable terrorists. Yes, even the ones who claim to be opposed to clinic violence. They enable this shit, they funded this website, and they support the people who created it. They are pissing themselves with glee over it, I’m sure.
There is no middle ground here. There is no compromising. They want us dead.
And I ask you, great big internet, where’s Anonymous? Where are the hacktivists? Where are the people who are frothing at the mouth over SOPA/PIPA as an invasion of privacy? Where are the starry-eyed radikewls who are willing to drop their jobs and lives to camp out at Wall Street and have a drum circle?
Honestly? Fuck you if you don’t care about this. Fuck you if you think it’s all about “the economy.” Fuck you if you’re too self-involved to recognize how access to reproductive health care is essential to economic security and social mobility for women, especially WOC. Fuck you if you are not enraged about compassionate physicians having TARGETS PAINTED ON THEIR BACKS BY A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.
ESPECIALLY those last 2 paragraphs. Where you at Anonymous and Occupiers?
THIS
THIS is why I cannot stand people who say shit to me like “the economy is more important right now” when discussing politics. THIS is why I hate it when people insult me for being a “one issue voter’. THIS is why I want to bite the heads off of people who dismiss me for “only caring about abortion”.
I WISH I could not be a “one issue voter”. I WISH I could vote on something other than abortion.
But I can’t! Because right now in this country if I don’t vote choice, I lose choice.
Hell, if I don’t fit for choice everyday I lose choice.
I had a Libertarian tell me the other day that we, as a nation, had to close the Fed and solve the debt crisis and cut the military budget before we could start on “your unattainable health care/Planned Parenthood thing.” I linked him to an article about Obama’s $450 billion military budget cuts. He said the Prez was probably just doing it for the primaries. OH OK. If Ron Paul did that he’d be a goddamn national hero, but the POTUS is just playing politics or some shit.
I was like, “Unattainable? You know basically every other country has some form of socialized health care, right? And why is my personal liberty, my right to choose, up for debate?” He didn’t respond.
This makes me feel sick to my stomach.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
DOMESTIC TERRORISM IS ALIVE AND WELL.
Also? If you support this group and still have the balls to say you’re “pro-life”? CHECK YOURSELF INTO AN INSTITUTION BECAUSE YOUR REALITY IS BROKEN.
Forever and ever AMEN
Hey, I know the reblog threading here is fucking ugly (THX TUMBLR) but this is still worth a read.
With this defense authorization act, Congress will, for the first time in 60 years, authorize the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial, according to its advocates. This would be the first time that Congress has deviated from President Nixon’s Non-Detention Act. And what we are talking about here is that Americans could be subjected to life imprisonment without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime, without ever having an opportunity to prove their innocence to a judge or a jury of their peers. And without the government ever having to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I think that denigrates the very foundations of this country. It denigrates the Bill of Rights. It denigrates what our Founders intended when they created a civilian, non-military justice system for trying and punishing people for crimes committed on U.S. soil. Our Founders were fearful of the military—and they purposely created a system of checks and balances to ensure we did not become a country under military rule. This bill undermines that core principle, which is why I could not support it.
Al Franken (via azspot)(via asie)
What the fuck are they doing? What the fuck are WE doing?! What the fuck is wrong with our country right now?
(via spytap)
Israeli soldiers drag away a Palestinian farmer from his own territory after he tried to prevent bulldozers from starting work on his farm land which is due to be levelled in order to build a section of the illegal Israeli separation barrier and expand the nearby Israeli settlement of Atarot, also illegal under international law, December 4, 2011. (Getty Images)
“For the people of Gaza, locked in a virtual prison behind the wall of Israel’s illegal blockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children go to sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathers and mothers, unable to work in a decimated economy, have no means to support their families. It means that university students with scholarships to study abroad must watch the opportunity of a lifetime slip away because they are not allowed to travel.
In my view, the abhorrent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its denial of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.
Where governments refuse to act people must, with whatever peaceful means are at their disposal. For me this means declaring an intention to stand in solidarity, not only with the people of Palestine but also with the many thousands of Israelis who disagree with their government’s policies, by joining the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
My conviction is born in the idea that all people deserve basic human rights. This is not an attack on the people of Israel. This is, however, a plea to my colleagues in the music industry, and also to artists in other disciplines, to join this cultural boycott.
Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa’s Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes – and it surely will come – when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice and dignity that they all deserve.”
— Roger Waters for the Guardian: Tear Down this Israeli Wall
Look at this pork dumpling. I mean, just look at him — pear-shaped and slouchy, pug-nosed and stupid looking, sporting a handlebar mustache as if to hide the fact that he might have down’s syndrome.
He’s practically a cartoon of a campus cop, and this picture of him would be little more than silly if it weren’t taken moments before he walked up to a row of peaceful protesters at UC Davis and blasted them in the face with pepper spray so casually you’d think he was watering his fucking lawn.
If ever there were a poster boy for the banality of evil, it would be this guy.
For the record, his name is John Pike and he’s a Lieutenant with the UC Davis Police. Not that his name matters, because he’s unremarkable in every way.
That’s the point, really. He’s just an average schlub working for an average campus police force at an average school in an average town. He is painfully average. This guy spends his days writing reports for stolen bicycles and confiscating open cans of Four Loko. Sure, he’s got a gun and a badge, but who are we kidding? He’s one notch above mall security.
Pathetic men like John Pike are precisely why the banality of evil is such a potent concept, and it’s all those empty heads underneath those ridiculous storm trooper helmets that lead to this kind of normalization of authoritarian violence.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say “fuck the police,” but when tubs of shit like this are making the news, I honestly don’t have any more fucks to give.
At this point, I’ll be surprised if he’s even reprimanded.
Remember when militarized police acting on behalf of corporations so powerful they control the government was science-fiction?
If you’d told me in January 2009 that the banks would pay us back the entire bailout and then some, that the auto companies would actually turn around with government help and be a major engine of recovery, that there would be continuous job growth since 2009, however insufficient, after the worst demand collapse since the 1930s, that bin Laden would be dead, Egypt transitioning to democracy, al Qaeda all but decimated as a global threat, and civil rights for gays expanding more rapidly than at any time in history … well I would be expecting a triumphant re-election campaign.
But we are where we are - and the economic pain is real and the president must take his lumps. The good news for those of us who still back Obama and hope for his re-election is that even with all this positive record essentially dismissed and little of it capitalized on politically, Obama is still neck and neck with any likely opponent. And he is his own best messager.
Andrew Sullivan (via ericmortensen)
Watch this rant
“How am I supposed to tell my daughter with a straight face that capitalism is a better system than communism when we owe tons of money to China, the biggest communist country in the world?”
“John Harold found himself short of workers to harvest his corn and onions after he decided to try to hire more local residents and fewer foreign laborers for his 1,000-acre farm.” (via Farmers Strain to Hire American Workers in Place of Migrant Labor - NYTimes.com)
“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”
If you have tea party relatives that somehow try to reconcile their desire for stricter immigration laws with a support for the free market, send them this article immediately.
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Manhattan Mini Storage Ads
It’s important to understand that these ads aren’t stashed in some magazine somewhere. These things are everywhere, all the time. They’re on trains, phone booths and buildings.
inspired by little read blog
I have used Manhattan MiniStorage a few times in my decade as a New Yorker. I even hired them to move us into our current apartment. They are one of my favorite NYC companies, and every time I see one of their ads, I’m happy to be one of their customers.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the Unites States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) page 25 (via spytap)
Coke Talk: Coke Talk of the Day
I just finished watching the latest episode of Jersey Shore right after watching the republican debate in Iowa, and damn, those two shit shows have surprisingly similar casting:
Mitt Romney is The Situation. He’s an untrustworthy narcissist with way more money and screen time than he deserves.
New York passes Same Sex Marriage bill : 33-29
OK, this is cool.
New York, you always get things right in the end.
