A Palin Poem

I CAN SEE RUSSIA FROM MY HOUSE!

as alaska slathers on lipstick and hits the street
and McPalin oil pimps draw maps for drilling her body
as tundra goes tropical, glaciers cry cracks in gaunt cheeks
and cabins on mountains become prime real estate on the beach
sarah palin will sip her skinny in wasilla and prepare a speech
and it will console the hurricane and rising sea refugees to know
global warming just isn’t something she believes
and climate change isn’t caused by driving cars or burning coal
so we aren’t responsible after all. it’s the will of god.

dear sarah
not only are you are the nightmare of every feminist
you make dick cheney look like an environmentalist
when polar bears get in the way of the pipeline’s fist
you punch them off the endangered species list!
and hey– congratulations on winning the rubber dodo
from the center for biological diversity
they named you america’s biggest environmental enemy
for your battle against bears, your war against nature!
you are not a woman sarah, you are a monster
your idea of fun is to gun down wolves as they run from a helicopter
smart capitalist you are, you put a cash bounty on their paws
while polar bears starve and cling to slush with slipping claws
you smile pretty as you preach drill drill drilll
drive the kids to hockey as you kill kill kill

and it gets worse still
hidden in that energy bill
is a blank check for atomic reactors
so while the news debates drilling rigs
you can aim nukes at commie pigs
and regarding attacks sarah
occupying iraq is not “a task from god”
any more than you are an innocent PTA mom
hell, you’re not even just the pinup of big oil
you are a nuclear timebomb
occupying iraq is an international crime
wrong as auschwitz wrong as guantanamo wrong as the rash
of smallpox blankets that’s gone systemic
pushed into the slum beneath our perfect skin
so buy yourself rubber boots get drunk on dinasaur juice
stock up on armageddon soup and and hunt some moose
and make sure schools don’t teach kids safe sex
just teach them how to shoot
don’t hand out condoms give them rifles
as you ban books and preach the bible
and raise a generation like the jock that got your daughter pregnant
when kids advertize themselves online as rednecks
what do you think is gonna happen next?
the rate of rape in alaska is more than double the national average
and sarah palin believes victims should pay for their own “rape kits”
why should the state have to foot the bill for evidence needed to convict rapists
but it’s not really that you hate women, sarah, it’s more like you’re a racist
native women in anchorage are ten times more likely to be sexually assaulted than white women
more than one in three indigenous alaskan women will be raped in their lifetime
but sarah palin doesn’t support abortion any more than she believes in evolution
any more than she supports equal pay or the separation of church and state
according to her, even victims of rape should be forced to have the baby
but what’s more frightening than sarah palin’s bigotry
is an electorate so lost it would put her within a heartbeat
of the most powerful office
what is most unsettling
is not that sarah palin had a trooper fired cuz he dissed her sister
or that mccain when asked how many houses he owns, wasn’t sure
it’s that he tried to deny the vote to those whose houses are listed for foreclosure
most of whom are poor black and lean towards barack
what that means is that despite their love of god
the republicans put their faith in election fraud
and whether by schemes of social terror
or by machines with mechanical error
they are not just at war on iraqis
they are at war on democracy
so if you care about the earth, women, boys, girls, bears, wolves, get on your feet
if you dream of a day when we no longer beat holes into bodies and skies and seabeds and web that connects us to the rest of the world
meet me on the street
~tatiana jacobsen

Iraq Toll

Those who died in Iraq from Sep 28 to Oct 4:

Pvt Tavarus stetzler  23  Jacksonville FL

Pvt Christopher Bartkiewicz  25  Dunfermline IL

Spc Christopher Fox  21 Memphis TN

6 were seriously wounded.

12 wounded were returned to kill fields.

131 Iraqi sisters and brothers were killed.

In Afghanistan were killed:

Spc Jason von Zerneck  33  Charlotte NC

Sgt Gary Vasquez  33  Round Lake IL

Cap Richard Cliff Jr  29  Mount Pleasant SC

Sgt Jamie Nicholas  32  Maysel WV

Sgt William Hasenflu   38  Bradenton FL

Cf:   www.icasualties.org

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL – ELECTIONS

[The simplest and -- we would hope! -- most nonpartisan issue in the coming elections is whether voters who are entitled to vote will be allowed to, and whether votes legitimately cast will be counted. As the title of this report suggests, this is also among the simplest of religious issues. I hope our readers will be vigilant for the sake of honesty in working to prevent or cure any disease of vote-thievery that emerges this fall. I hope this report, from the AFL-CIO, will be of use to you.  - AW]

In four weeks, millions of  voters will go to the polls to choose our next president, Congress and state and local officials. But even if you are eligible to vote, you could be denied a ballot, illegally purged from the voting rolls or face challenges to your voting status.

To ensure that every eligible voter can vote and have their vote counted, union members and activists are working through the AFL-CIO My Vote, My Right

http://www.aflcio.org/issues/civilrights/votingrights.cfm

voter protection project to ensure the ballot process is run fairly.  The National Campaign for Fair Elections launched www.866ourvote.org and spotlighted a toll-free voting rights hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, operated by a nonpartisan coalition of groups, including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the AFL-CIO. )

A new report released by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law finds that states are secretly purging roles with no supervision or national standards. As a result, the cleaning up of voter rolls is not as precise as it should be and eligible voters are often wrongly removed.

The report calls the nationwide purging process “chaotic,” “shrouded in secrecy,” “riddled with inaccuracies,” “prone to error” and “vulnerable to manipulation.”

The report uncovers widespread errors in voter purges, including the purges of 700 voters in Muscogee County, Ga., 10,000 voters in Mississippi and 7,000 in Louisiana. Read or download the report, Voter Purges, here.

It cites Muscogee County, where a county official removed 700 people from voter rolls allegedly for criminal convictions. But many of the people who received letters informing them of the purge had never even received a parking ticket. In Mississippi, a local election official recently discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters “from her home computer.”

In another report, the public interest group USPIRG shows 19 states are ignoring federal law, which prohibits voter purges 90 days before a federal election. Those states include the key battleground states of Colorado, Ohio and Nevada.

Some state officials are using various techniques to try and suppress the vote. A new website, stealbackyourvote.org, recently learned about “caging” plan for parts of  Florida. Caging is a process in which letters are sent to registered voters and when the letter is returned, the voter’s name is taken off the rolls.

The plan was to send letters to voters in majority black districts, including soldiers at an army base in the black community in Jacksonville. Of course, many of the soldiers might not be on base anymore, points out Steal Back Your Vote founder Greg Palast. He has teamed up with Robert Kennedy Jr. to put together a comic book guide for voters to take your vote back. Check out their video here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRfJtnfQDgg

In Ohio, the AFL-CIO and SEIU District 1199 filed briefs in a successful effort to stop state officials from suppressing student voting. Officials in the Buckeye State challenged Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s ruling that a state law allows some early voters to register and vote on the same day. A recently enacted state law allows residents, for the first time in a general presidential election, to vote early by absentee ballot without providing a justification. But with a huge voter registration effort to get college students, some officials sought to nullify the law. The state Supreme Court and the federal courts upheld Brunner’s interpretation of the law.

In New Mexico, the AFL-CIO My Vote My Rights program has teamed with the Lawyers Coordinating Committee to convince the secretary of state to distribute a poster that lists the types of IDs that are acceptable and is placed in polling places. Voters can advocate for themselves if asked for more than the IDs mandated by law. The AFL-CIO also was instrumental in bringing to the attention of state attorneys general that voters cannot be removed from the rolls for being on a foreclosure list. As a result of our efforts, Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler sent a letter to local and state election officials to ensure that voters who have lost homes to foreclosure know they have not lost their right to vote. Lots more voter protection news

Daily Kos’s Mcjoan reports that some Montana officials are tchallenging the eligibility of 6,000 registered Montana voters in seven counties historically considered Democratic. More than half of the people challenged statewide live, or previously lived, in Missoula County. Montanans who are registered to vote in the seven counties who filled out a change-of-address card with the U.S. Postal Service in the past 18 months likely will need to verify their correct place of residence before the Nov. 4 election. More than 36,000 new voters have registered in Montana.

Andrew Appel reports that a New Jersey state judge has stopped the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine used in the state. Appel blogs on Freedom to Tinker, which is hosted by the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. He is one of a team of experts the court designated to report on the voting machines. The report is part of a lawsuit by  filed by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic. The Sequoia model used in the state cannot be audited and do not produce a voter verified paper ballot trail, so there is no way to know whether the machine is actually counting votes as cast,. Appel says.

Markos at Daily Kos notes that three weeks after Florida began enforcing a controversial law to require tougher ID matches for would-be voters, registration applications from more than 5,000 Floridians have been held up, at least temporarily. In many cases, officials said, the errors were as simple as someone writing down the wrong number, using a nickname or misspelling his or her name. As Kos points out it’s more likely that the government has misspelled the name in their own databases.