Here is a link to an article about the voting machines we use in SC, and their possible effect on our presidental primaries. Author Sean Flaherty works for Iowans for Voting Integrity, and the piece is posted on Vote Trust USA, a national network serving state-based organizations working for secure, accurate and transparent elections.
Brett Bursey
The First Thanksgiving
From the Community Endeavor News, November 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
The first official Thanksgiving wasn’t a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.
“Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house,” Newell said.
“Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building,” he said.
The whispering campaign against Obama
by Kevin Alexander Gray, Columbia
I hope folk don’t think I am for a particular candidate cause I’m not. This time out I intend to vote in the Democrat primary but beyond that remains an open proposition. Obama is 3rd on my consideration list. Krugman’s article is just another reason to reconsider his position. Clinton is not on my list at all.
Oddly enough, I was speaking to someone from the midwest this past weekend. I believe it was after the Vegas debate. That person matter-of-factly mentioned that the bomb Clinton operatives may have sent to Novak was Obama’s alleged heroin use. I think the person mentioned it to me knowing that at times I can’t hold my water. I mentioned the call for its oddity to a family member but held passing on the gossip.
But low and behold by Sunday Obama on air was daring the Clinton people to put up or shut up. Then by Monday that sorry-ass Chris Matthews was talking about Obama’s drug use confession to a group of school kids. Matthews said that Obama confessed to drug use as a kid, “pot, cocaine, everything but heroin.”
Activists meet for Network’s 12th annual Fall gathering
by Becci Robbins
Blogging last weekend’s Progressive Summit is late in coming. Sorry ’bout that. But these are heady, hectic days for the Network, and we’ve been distracted. We are in the process of buying a headquarters in downtown Columbia to house offices, meeting space and a social hall, a reprised GROW Cafe. The three-building complex, now occupied by Habitat for Humanity, is in a great location. It’s close enough to the college campuses to attract students, and the State House is just blocks away – the better to keep our eye on the scoundrels. More on this when we actually have the keys.
But back to the Summit. It was, judging by the feedback we’ve received, a smashing success. The statewide gathering may have been our best – most productive, most inspiring, most fun – since our founding conference in the spring of 1996.
One of our guest speakers, Angela Canterbury, outreach director at Public Citizen, said in an e-mail. “I am really impressed at the good work you all are doing. It was a great day – a little like a day at church, worshipping at the altar of hope and change.”
Nice.
Go Fish: Clinton Undaunted by “Gender Card” Allegations
By NOW President Kim Gandy
With a widening six-point lead separating her from Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton remains undaunted amidst media allegations that she has played the “gender card” during debates and public speaking engagements. Are Clinton’s opponents “piling on”? Of course they are — and they’d pile onto any candidate so far in the lead. Taking advantage of that fact isn’t playing the gender card, it’s playing the game.
Most notably slandered for comments made at her alma mater after the last debate, “In so many ways, this all-women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys’ club of presidential politics,” Clinton was attacked by pundits charging that the mere mention of the boys’ club was playing the victim. And when her campaign manager said, quite accurately, that the other candidates had “piled-on” Clinton at the last debate, the pundit-roar was deafening.
The Big Apple, 1000 Hampton, downtown Columbia
Join grassroots activists from across the state for the SC Progressive Network’s 12th annual Fall gathering. Whether you’re concerned about social justice, global warming, the Iraq War, or the growing influence of money in politics, participants will seek common ground upon which to build a movement for progressive power in South Carolina.
“This is the Network’s most important event of the year,” said Co-chair Donna Dewitt, president of the SC AFL-CIO. “Our folks look forward to this weekend retreat, where they can reconnect with old friends, meet new allies, and be inspired by the good work going on all across South Carolina that rarely gets the attention it deserves. We hope to see lots of new faces.”
Obama’s Big Gay and Black Problem
By Kevin Alexander Gray and Marshall Derks, Columbia
There’s a point in a campaign that’s behind in the polls when desperation sets in. That’s the time when trailing candidates try to throw the haymaker punch hoping for a knockout blow on the frontrunner. We are not at that point in this campaign season, but it’s getting close.
It’s no surprise that part of Barack Obama’s South Carolina primary strategy aims at black church-going voters. The church is the most organized part of the black community and churchgoers are reliable voters. In addition, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s hiring of local high-priced preacher-politician-businessman Darrell Jackson and her husband Bill’s clout with blacks puts additional pressure on Obama. The Illinois senator has to cut into Clinton’s black support as well as establishing his own African-American base.
Valerie Plame Still Wants to Know
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
13 Nov.
Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would still like to know the identity of the CIA official who passed her name to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney in the spring of 2003, and “under what circumstances.”
That’s just one of several unanswered questions Plame Wilson has been trying to figure out in the years since several senior officials in the Bush administration leaked her name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and a handful of other journalists. That leak ended her two-decade CIA career.
“I’d like to know, why did Novak go with my maiden name, Plame, in his original article?” Plame Wilson said during an hour-long, two-part interview with Truthout. “I always thought that was strange. When I married, I took my married name. And then he [Novak] used Valerie Plame [in his column]. It was only the CIA who knew that I worked for them, and my maiden name.”
A report released today estimates that the cost of the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is double what the Bush Administration has directly requested. The Joint Economic Committee’s majority staff report, War at Any Price? The Total Economic Costs of the War Beyond the Federal Budget, includes “hidden” costs such as the drain on economic growth as a result of war-related borrowing, the disruption of oil markets, the future care of injured soldiers and repair costs for the military. The report projects the total costs of the wars to amount to $3.5 trillion between 2003 and 2017, $1 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office forecast.
So far, President Bush has asked for $607 billion for the Iraq War, 10 times higher than what the administration estimated before launching its “shock and awe” campaign.
Bring Them Home Now Tour vigil, Columbia, Sept. 14, 2005.