Yes, our wonderful U.S. gov't, in the name of increased security and fighting terrorism, is pushing the idea of installing RFID chips into passports. Go here for some thoughts about why this is a bad idea from Bruce Schneier, a reknown security expert. Or here for the story from Wired.
Apparently, "protect[ing] our civil liberties" is obscene in the eyes of the Republican administration. Three Medford teachers, who had valid tickets for the President's visit, wore shirts bearing the slogan, and were threatened with arrest and thrown out. Click here for details.
Green Party candidate Teresa Keane is running for U.S. Senate this election. She is taking on incumbent and Democrat Ron Wyden. The following is a brief email Q&A between Salvation Inc. & the truly progressive candidate.
SI: [Referring to the "10 Key Green Values" listed on the the website] I'm curious about your "Feminism and Gender Equity" value listed on the site. How do you propose to have this mindset exist in the state? What could you do to offer such a thing to all Oregonians?
TK: I believe that people who run for office need to be responsive to voters. The Green value of Feminism and Gender equality reflects the belief that all Americans deserve equal rights and protection. In policy, I would work for equal pay for equal work, provisions on child care for working parents, equal benefits for women over 65 who to often become poor and full reproductive rights for women.
SI: Where does the "moral conscience" lie, in your opinion?
TK: A moral conscience means that each individual determines their moral behavior according their own beliefs but no person has the right to harm another.
SI: I love your "Ecological Wisdom" value, but once again, for such a state dependent on logging and the gradual destruction of our forests, how would you propose the ideas into actions?
TK: As a Green I believe in sustainable logging and habitat restoration. This would keep rural people working and provide a healthy planet for future generations.
SI: How would you imagine the Senate if you are elected, as such a progressive candidate, and for a woman (in a rich, white man's world), to be looking to change the entire stale, corrupt system which you would have to deal with?
TK: In the Senate, as a Green, I imagine myself being supported by all the Greens from around the country. The task would be daunting, but I believe many Americans are ready for change.
SI: Will your Stress Reduction history be needed to deal with the sludge of bureaucracy?
TK: My Stress Reduction training is something that helps me everyday and I'm sure will be of great value in the Senate.
SI: What are your expectations if you do not win the Senate seat?
TK: If I do not win, I will resume my work as a nurse practitioner for now.
SI: Have you been in contact with Ron Wyden, or will the upcoming debate [Oct 17th] be your first time?
TK: I have had 2 interactions with Wyden: first when we met face to face at the Labor Day picnic (please see the story on my web site); the second was by speaker phone when we were being interviewed by Willamette Week.
SI: Will you be voting Green for president in this upcoming election, or are you going with the safe state strategy?
TK: I am voting Green for President. I have tremendous respect for David Cobb and he shares my vision of peace and sustainability.
Salvation Inc endorses Teresa Keane's vision and campaign for U.S. Senate.
http://votekeane.org/
help out The West Memphis Three's legal defense
If you haven't heard of the West Memphis Three -- they are three young men who were wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder because of "satanic panic" and because they wore black and listened to heavy metal and read horror novels. They were the subject of two documentaries called Paradise Lost as well as a book Devil's Knot. You can read all the info on this case at wm3.org (they have been in prison now for over 11 years -- one on Death Row).
the benefit is 2/23/05 at the Blue Note in Columbia MO. All ages, cover is $5, doors open 8:30.
Bands are Midwest Murder Society, National Fire Theory (from K.C.) and Fractious (from Austin TX).
Huge raffle with lots of great prizes.
We're up on the WM3 site as well as the venue's site.
If you find anything you could send to the raffle, please send to
Tammy Adin
500 Dickens Street
Clark, MO 65243
if using UPS
Tammy Adin
c/o Worldwide Recycling Equipment Sales
1414 Riley Industrial Drive
Moberly, MO 65270
If you are a band or a group be sure to include promo information on you for our program.
Thanks so much!
Tammy
The following is my letter to the Special Righteousness Committee, one of the few groups which opposes gay marriage, and who was written arguments in favor of Measure 36 in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet.
These people are using the red herring of gay marriage to attempt to distract us from real issues in the world, like the fact that we're fighting an unjust war, or that the New World Order is just around the bend. Gay marriage is certainly an important issue, however, is it not wrong to use rhetoric like "Agree with us or burn in hell!"? (P.78 of the 2004 Oregon voter's Pamphlet).
I suggest anyone who feels this way to write to them, as they have no email I could find.
Noah
October 14, 2004
Dear Special Righteousness Committee,
P.O. Box 1851
Portland, Oregon 97207
I have seen your rhetoric and your Nazi-esque beliefs about 'the other'. I have read M. Dennis Moore's caustic and hateful writings in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet. If hate is a family value, then by your logic, it is also a religious right to be hateful of other people who don't follow the implicit behavior patterns you people do.
I have a problem with the fact that you people are spreading hate in our community at a time when we need love the most. I can't believe you are spending your TIME and MONEY on these trite issues when there is so much more at stake in this world. You're too blind to see it, unless you just do not care at all. Our republican, religious- righted government claims to be spreading democracy to the Iraqi people by firebombing them with missiles containing expelled uranium. Is this a Godly act on the president's part? President Bush himself claims that he speaks with God on a regular basis and has a running communiqué with The Holy One regarding his actions. This is the same God who, when conquerors in the New World worshipped and prayed to for the extermination of the Native American Person, stood idly by and let it happen. If God truly existed, and was as outraged by this as he was in the so- called Biblical times, he would have let his wrath be tasted once again by the human race. Maybe Jesus is up there with God holding him back?
There are more important things to spend you time and money on. Gay marriage doesn't kill people. Gay marriage doesn't hurt anyone. It doesn't hurt anyone the way expelled uranium in the air hurts, deforms and kills people. Gay marriage doesn't profit from killing people the way the tobacco corporations do. Gay marriage doesn't even hurt people who aren't gay. Gay marriage is just a red herring to keep us distracted from the real issues- the ones that affect the lives of people we'll never even meet. People don't really care about Gay marriage! People care about an impending New World Order. People care about their loved ones going to war for an unjust cause (Iraq has NO WMDs, NO links to Al- Qaeda, and has NEVER attacked America physically or religiously). Some of your most loved Republican bureaucrats even have gay family members, like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney.
Let me ask you a question: Where will you be when the imperial army steps in to your hometown, under a presidential declaration of martial law, at which time you will be forced to give up your individual rights and assume the subordination of the supreme authority of the government, under the real or fabricated suspicion of an impending attack? When you no longer are an individual in the eyes of a fundamentalist Christian regime, how much will gay marriage mean to you? Probably not a damn thing, because if you don't want to spend the next 50 years living in neo- Nazi America, then you'd better get your fucking eyes opened. That impending attack thing I just asked you about? That was my own paraphrase of a prediction made in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger, a person loved and revered by many Right Wing Christians, including Ronald Reagan.
Look, it doesn't take a genius ex- Christian like me to know for a fact that Jesus never hated anyone except the people who worshipped false idols, like money and power. Jesus never wanted power. Jesus wanted people to be happy and loving to one another, and not to relish in contempt for their differences. We live in a world of falsities. Lincoln did not really free the slaves. Columbus did not really discover America. Bush did not go to war as a last resort, but we're told over and over again that these things are true. We're even being told by YOU that Orwellian logic ought to be embraced! Jesus never would have believed that love is hate, that war is peace.
So this Gay marriage thing, this veil you want to put over our eyes to disguise the truth, to place opacity all around us. It's not going to work. Try saving yourself first. Try listening to others for a change. Because if you believe in Liberty and Justice for all, you'll drop your weapons and turn the other cheek the way Jesus would.
Noah D Richardson
2923 SE Francis #4
Portland, OR 97202
From In Defense Of Animals
We just found out the first subcommittee dealing with the humane treatment
of animals in OHSU's labs will be held next Monday, October 18th, starting
at 9 am. This is a sub-committee of the legislative Oregon Opportunity/Ethics
Task Force, formed specifically to handle community concerns about abuse of
animals in OHSU's labs. I was told by OHSU Government Relations staff that
the community will have two hours to have our voices heard and we need to
pack that meeting and let this committee know that we have not forgotten
about the monkeys and other animals languishing in OHSU labs.
What: OHSU Ethics Subcommittee Meeting about humane care of OHSU animals
When: Monday, October 18th, from 9-11am
Where: OHSU Main Marquam Hill Campus (room and building to be announced)
Please RSVP to matt@idausa.org or 502-249-9996 x2 if you can attend so we can coordinate our testimony.
Even if you are not comfortable speaking publicly, we could really use as
many community members as possible at this meeting to show our concern! Sometimes actions speak louder than words!!!
As further proof of the oppression of alternative media viewpoints by the powers that be, our beloved Indymedia has had one of their servers taken down by the Swiss and Italians with help from our FBI. Click here to get the full story.
Come celebrate Native resistance and help redefine "columbus day".
For more than 500 yrs, indigenous peoples have been resisting genocide and assimilation.
Come support current struggles, and help celebrate indigenous day, in solidarity with action in Denver, Washington, California, and elsewhere.
Bring your friends and family for music, speakers, and movies!!!
All donations will fund Native Youth Movement projects.
October 11th 2004 benefit
Time 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Title CELEBRATE INDIGENOUS DAY 2004!
Portland Oregon
Location It's A Beautiful Pizza 3341 SE Belmont st
Phone Contact 503-872-9504
Topic / Issue Human Rights
Sponsor Native Youth Movement-Portland Chapter
The presidential candidates for the Libertarian party, Michael Badnarik, and the Green Party, David Cobb, were arrested in their protest of the suppression of free speech inherent in the Presidential debates.
In addition to the arrests of the presidential hopefuls, four students were also subdued unjustly while attempting to head back to their dorms.
Click here to read Badnarik's blog, or here for Cobb's rundown.
Was Bush wearing a wire for the first Presidential debate? Check out this site and decide for yourself. Or better yet, at the next Bush gathering, bring out your HAM equipment and have some fun ;-)
Okay. When I saw this, it simply pissed me off. It is an Michigan absentee ballot. Anyway, notice that the arrows to vote for President are misaligned so that a vote for Kerry is actually a vote for W. Please spread the news!!!
Click here to see faulty ballot.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear...
Election 2004 will be decided by fear
......... by Mickey Z October 04, 2004
President (sic) George W. Bush and company have scared half the voters to death with stories about terrorists...so they'll vote for him.
Senator John F. Kerry (JFK2) and his surrogates on the soft left have scared the other half to death with stories about creeping fascism...so they'll vote for him.
Of course, anyone with an iota of objectivity left realizes the terror threat is laughably exaggerated...and there's infinitely more danger in operating a motor vehicle than all the "evildoers" in the world combined.
But what should we make of the claims of the Democrats (and the disturbing number of lefties who support them)? What about all the yarns spun about liberties lost...solely due, we hear, to one inarticulate puppet from Texas?
Whether we want to accept it or not; we've heard it all before. The fascists are perpetually at the gate, it seems. But, I submit: Are Bush's efforts truly more frightening than, say, Woodrow Wilson's repressive behavior during World War I?
"Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty," Wilson warned...and he had the newly minted Espionage and Sedition Act to back him up.
Passed in June 1917, it cast a wide net and trampled civil liberties. In Vermont, for example, a minister was sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing a pamphlet, distributed to five persons, in which he claimed that supporting the war was wrong for a Christian. Here's a sample of that law:
"Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment of not more than 20 years, or both."
"The Espionage Act had very little to do with espionage," says Howard Zinn.
"Instead it made it a crime, punishable by up to twenty years in prison, to say or print anything that would 'willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States.' The Sedition Act, which was an amendment to the Espionage Act, made it even a little more drastic. In fact, two thousand people were prosecuted under those acts and about a thousand went to prison."
(For those keeping score at home, the Espionage and Sedition Act is still on the books.)
All this "fascism" was in addition to the Palmer Raids and the deportation of Emma Goldman for saying and writing things often less radical than those that appear on this website.
If all this wasn't worse than a Tom Ridge Code Orange, how about lefty hero FDR interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process in 1942?
How does that stack up against Dubya's holy crusade?
We had McCarthyism in the 1950s...COINTELPRO in the 60sm and 70s...Eight years of Reagan in the 80s. And I've left out volumes.
Does anyone recall the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed into law on April 24, 1996 by the alleged liberal king, Bypass Bill Clinton? This USA PATRIOT Act prequel contained provisions that Clinton himself admitted "makes a number of ill-advised changes in our immigration laws, having nothing to do with fighting terrorism." An unconstitutional salvo that did little to address so-called terrorism but plenty to limit the civil liberties of anyone-immigrant or resident-who disagrees with U.S.
policies, foreign or domestic, the bill severely restricted habeas corpus and expanded the number of federal capital crimes...and the Patriot Act is mostly an extension its legal foundations.
News Flash: JFK2 voted for the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and wrote parts of the USA PATRIOT Act. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming:
Things are bad under Bush.
Things will be bad under Kerry.
Things have been bad under every president.
Nothing will change until we change our minds...until we discover what Proust called "new eyes." Because, frightened readers, the facade of power is remarkably fragile. Consider the words of David Hume, written in 1758:
"Nothing appears more surprising...than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as the most free and popular."
Fascism, to me, is not a bigger or more urgent concern than irreparable environmental damage, and I certainly lose less sleep over facile Bush/Hitler comparisons than I do a planet populated with oppressed and starving humans.
Things are bad...but Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Ridge, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al did not invent these problems. Not even close. Replacing them with JFK2 will not eliminate these problems. Not even close. The fascists aren't at the gate. In a country this conditioned, they don't have to be.
"The corporate grip on opinion is the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World," says Gore Vidal. "No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity-much less dissent."
That corporate grip, obscured by layers of fear, is a very,very weak grip...but until we recognize that reality, we'll be too busy running scared from terrorists and fascists to inspire genuine change.
Mickey Z. is the author of four books, most recently "The Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda" (Common Courage Press). He can found on the Web at: http://www.mickeyz.net.
Courtesy of Z Net
The Vice Presidential Debate quickly left the rhetoric and lies and quickly entered a bizarro world...
The two compete to make the best Dick Cheney face.
The two men argue over the size of John Kerry's head.
When asked to shake hands with the most evil man in the room, they locked eyes...
