The North Carolina NAACP is the only chapter aside from California’s that has come out forcefully against an anti-gay marriage discrimination amendment, and Rev. Dr. William Barber makes it crystal clear why voters in NC need to come out and vote against Amendment One.

We had another great presentation on our weekly Occupy Supply Webinar title Outreach and Activism:Effective Outreach Lee Gaddies , Sergio Uzurin and Brian Sonenstein joined us for a discussion about out reach tactics. Lee started the conversation off with an account of the Occupy Detroit Listening tour and Outreach philosophy.

My name is John Washington from Occupy Buffalo and I will now be hosting the weekly Occupy Supply Webinars. As an Occupier I can bring a new perspective to the Occupy Supply Webinar. Guided by my experience with Occupy Buffalo I hope these webniars can become an online skill share for organizers around the country.

While there is an official campaign to defeat Amendment One out there, we have to recognize that there are many, many people working at the grassroots level, residents of North Carolina putting in countless hours to educate voters on their own time and dime because they feel passionately that this discriminatory amendment is wrong for the state that they call home. They find a niche to effectively counter the anti-gay, anti-logical arguments out there.

In this case, I wanted to spotlight a local effort — responding to op-eds and letters to the editor (LTEs) in our local and regional papers that have been, as you might expect, populated with anti-gay, fear-driven, often religion-based arguments in favor of Amendment One.

I hope the marginal benefit of not pissing off homophobes in swing states who weren’t likely to vote for the President anyway was worth it.

Since the White House dropped an expected executive order preventing workplace discrimination against LGBT employees by federal contractors, activists have been planning a “We Can’t Wait”, campaign, co-opting a slogan the White House has used in recent executive branch announcements.

While writing a book about ACORN, I got to know Wade Rathke, spending dozens of hours hanging out with him, interviewing him, e-mailing back and forth, interviewing friends and enemies, and literally following Rathke as he worked. In an age of stylish cynicism, whatever else you might say about Wade, he believes in the basic goodness of people, our capacity for empathy, kindness, and caring. These traits are expressed not only through individual acts with his family and friends; but also with strangers, especially those who inhabit the squalid urban communities across the globe–the people ignored by the public officials and exploited by the rich and powerful.

Administration. Either that, or the White House just values them a whole lot. Over the past couple weeks, not one but two potential restrictions on them have been lifted. The first was when the Administration abandoned a plan to force disclosure of political donations by companies who have contracts with the federal government. And the second dropped today.

A small band of foreclosure fraud fighters in Florida, ground zero for the housing crisis, decided to get involved in public service at one of the most basic levels possible. These activists want to become the public official who tracks the transfer of mortgages in their respective counties. Sometimes this is called a register of deeds, or recorder of deeds, or a clerk of court. It’s traditionally a backwater for legacy types who, if they’re lucky, never get their name in the papers. But since the foreclosure fraud crisis, a few of these registers of deeds have shown real leadership in exposing criminal fraud in the mortgage document process. Inspired by their efforts, one of the leading foreclosure fraud activists in the nation, Lisa Epstein, is running for office.

A coalition trying to induce corporations to disassociate from ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group responsible for modeling and writing a substantial portion of the bills that come through the Republican side of state legislatures, has succeeded in getting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and McDonalds to stop funding ALEC.