CHILD'S PAY
by Charlie Fisher of Denver, CO

During this year's Super Bowl, you'll see ads sponsored by beer companies, tobacco companies, and the Bush White House.¹ But you won't see the winning ad in MoveOn.org Voter Fund's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest. CBS refuses to air it.²  Sign this petition telling "CBS, don't play politics with free speech. If the White House can run an ad during Super Bowl, other groups should be allowed to run issue ads as well."

CBS still refuses to run "Child's Pay" during the Super Bowl. We're not going to let that stop us. During the Super Bowl half time show, at 8:10 and 8:35pm EST switch over to CNN to watch the ad CBS won't air. And let us know you're joining the one-minute boycott.

The New York Times reports that the President "hastily planned" a visit to Dr. King's grave, and then will immediately go to "a $2,000-a-person fundraiser in Atlanta." Even though Bush may spend the majority of his time hobnobbing with donors at the fundraiser, because he will briefly visit Dr. King's grave, he is allowed to deem the entire trip "official" and then bill taxpayers for portions of the huge cost of hotel rooms, rental cars, security, and travel. And those are no small costs - the Washington Post notes that Air Force One alone costs $57,000 an hour to operate.

 

[In response, protesters denounced Bush's visit and claim his policies insult Dr. King's memory.] As Rev. Raphael Allen said, "His administration has never supported anything to help the poor, education, or children. It's all about isolationism and greed for the upper class. That's not promoting the legacy of Dr. King."

 

Excerpt from the Daily Mis-lead, "Bush Exploits MLK's Grave For Political" Fundraiser

When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up "free speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event.

 

An excerpt from "Quarantining dissent: How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech" by James Bovard

The panel set up to investigate why the United States failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, faced angry questions Thursday after revelations that two of its own senior officials were so closely involved in the events under investigation that they have been interviewed as part of the inquiry.

9/11 Director Gave Evidence to Own Inquiry By Shaun Waterman

Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be our next president. This is corruption on a major scale.

Gore Vidal in UNCENSORED GORE VIDAL: The complete interview http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/features-cooper.php

Good news around the world for women in 2003--accomplishments, activism, bold deeds and grounds for hope.

1. Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Iranian feminist and human rights crusader is the first Muslim woman to receive this honor. The ayatollahs are furious!

2. Hormone replacement therapy was further debunked. Instead of protecting you from Alzheimer's, it doubles your risk. The unmasking of HRT is a major triumph for the women's health movement, which has claimed for decades that its supposed benefits are drug-industry hype. You can read all about it in Barbara Seaman's devastating exposé, The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth.

3. Antiwar activism got a feminist edge. The Lysistrata Project saw 1,029 productions of Aristophanes' hilarious, bawdy comedy performed all over the world on March 3. Code Pink took on Bush--and Schwarzenegger--with nervy humor.

4. Barbara Ransby's moving and invaluable Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision illuminated a behind-the-scenes heroine of the civil rights struggle. As Ransby showed, there are other, more egalitarian ways to move forward than by playing follow the leader.

5. A Department of Education commission rejected energetic efforts to water down Title IX, the main legal vehicle promoting equality for women's athletics in schools; the Supreme Court didn't overturn affirmative action.

6. Some movies had leading female characters who were not wives, girlfriends, prostitutes or assassins: Whale Rider, Bend It Like Beckham, Sylvia, Mona Lisa Smile. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation got raves. Older women were beautiful and sexy in Swimming Pool, starring the
ever-fabulous Charlotte Rampling, and in Something's Gotta Give, where 57-year-old Diane Keaton gets to choose between grumpy-old-man Jack Nicholson and boy toy Keanu Reeves.

7. One in four people in Ireland saw The Magdalene Sisters, the movie that exposed the lifelong virtual consignment to hard labor in convent laundries of Irish girls who fell afoul of the church's harsh double standard of sexual morality by, for example, being raped.

8. Afghan women set the gold standard for courage with major conferences in Kandahar and Kabul to push for women's rights in the new constitution. At the loya jirga, 25-year-old delegate Malalai Joya electrified the world when she accused the mujahedeen who control the assembly of destroying the country in the early 1990s.

9. In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws criminalizing gay sex. The Massachusetts Supreme Court, headed by a woman, ruled that the state Constitution required that gays should be able to marry.

10. Amina Lawal, condemned to death by stoning by a Nigerian Sharia court for having sex out of wedlock, was set free on appeal.

11. Prodded by an ACLU lawsuit, Michigan stopped drug-testing welfare recipients (only 7.8 percent came up positive, by the way--the same as at your office) as well as applicants.

12. Jessica Lynch showed herself a real heroine by refusing to go along with the propaganda parade.

13. Seventy-eight-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams confirmed longstanding rumors that she is the daughter of racist Senator Strom Thurmond and his family's 16-year-old black maid, Carrie Butler. That Strom died at 100, reputation intact, definitely proves that God does not exist.

14. In New York, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the 2001 ruling in Nicholson v. Scoppetta that child services can't take away the children of battered women.

15. Louise Glück, who has written poems that are burned into my brain, became Poet Laureate, only the ninth woman to hold the post in the past sixty-six years.

16. Desperately poor women in Nigeria's Niger Delta staged militant demonstrations--including stripping--against Shell, demanding that the company employ locals and share the wealth with the community. They won!

17. An FDA panel gave the thumbs-up to making emergency contraception an over-the-counter drug. Teen pregnancy, still too high, has hit a historic low.

18. Under heavy attack from women, DaimlerChrysler abandoned its sponsorship of the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view Super Bowl halftime event involving models playing full-contact football in their underwear. Turns out women buy cars too.

19. Lieut. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, who thinks Allah is an idol and that God put Bush in the White House, quoted his ex-wife as follows: "I don't love you anymore, you're a religious fanatic, and I'm leaving you." 

20. The Dixie Chicks survived. Pro-war crowds stomped on their records, Clear Channel refused to give them airplay and Christopher Hitchens called them "f**king fat slags." But they're still singing to sold-out crowds, and they're still great.

Subject to Debate by Katha Pollitt

He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: 'If you don't shut up we'll fuck you.'

US Military 'Brutalised' Journalists
    By Luke Harding

Some are resigned to fulfilling what they consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded draft.

-Lee Hockstader on the Military's Stop Loss program

When the stock market takes a beating, the money lost by investors doesn't just disappear. It is adjusted upwards into the holdings of the richest 1% of investors, who have enough capital to survive a downturn and have money on hand to scoop up devalued stock on the chance it retains value later. This 1% owns a disproportionally massive majority of all the stocks traded on the markets.

 

The Color of Bush’s Sky By William Rivers Pitt

Excluded from the ['bracero'] plan is any new mechanism for undocumented workers currently in the US to secure permanent-resident status and citizenship. Bush explicitly declared himself in opposition to any "amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship."  Instead, the plan would create a new category of "temporary workers" with limited rights and dependent upon the mercy of their employers and the government.

Bush unveils “bracero” program for immigrant workers

 What has been accomplished in Iowa:

● 55% of those who voted in Iowa on Monday said that this was the FIRST TIME they had ever voted in a Caucus!!! That is a STUNNING statistic. Although the vast majority ended up going for Kerry and Edwards, I am convinced that the electorate in that state was invigorated by the Dean campaign -- whose entire message was that you CAN make a difference. Just the fact that you have people thinking this way is a gift you have given to America, a nation where the majority, in the past, have given up and refused to vote. I believe that you and Howard Dean will be credited with waking up a near-dead voting public. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

● On top of first time voters, the overall turnout in Iowa was DOUBLE what it was four years ago. DOUBLE! To double the number of Democrats who showed up in Iowa this week means that many independents, Greens, and former Republicans have seen enough of the mess created by George W. Bush. And it was Dean in Iowa who, until the attack ads against him began, focused his whole campaign on educating voters on what the Bush presidency has truly done to America. The number one reason people gave last night for coming out in zero-degree weather in Iowa, ahead of the war and the economy and health care, was "Bush must go." This can only mean good things for the turnout come next November.

● The number of young people -- the age group with historically the lowest percentage of voters -- also doubled on Monday night. Again, you have to credit the Deaniacs for this. Thousands of young people from around the country poured into Iowa to knock on doors and talk politics. Although Kerry and Edwards got the youth vote, I believe it was the Dean youth who made it cool to be political again, and the effect of their enthusiasm was contagious.

● 75% of those voting in Iowa said that they are "anti-war." And who do we have to thank for that? Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. They put the war and its illegality and immorality on the Iowa map in this election year. They pushed Kerry and the rest to take strong anti-war stands (even though Kerry, et. al. had initially voted for the war). Some changed their positions, which we welcomed (Edwards and Kerry voted against the $87 billion Bush got to continue the war). Although Kerry got the most anti-war votes and Dean and Edwards split the rest, Dean was the man who converted them. Those who chugged through the streets and farms of Iowa preaching peace deserve our gratitude.

by Michael Moore

There's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons.

George W. Bush

Who's Who?

GEORGE W. BUSH, President

In 1968, George W, Bush, the son of a Texas congressman, applied for a position with the Texas Air National Guard, a popular way to avoid being drafted for combat. Although there was a long waiting list, and Bush had received only mediocre scores on his pilot aptitude test, he was quickly accepted. Bush's service was supposed to last until 1973, but in 1972 he received a transfer to a guard unit in Alabama, allowing him to work on the Senate campaign of a friend of his father. When he failed to take his annual flight physical, guard officials grounded him, and he never flew again. His final officer-efficiency report from May 1973 noted that supervisors hadn't seen him or heard from him.

DICK CHENEY, Vice President

Cheney, who explained that he "had other priorities" at the time, received two draft deferments one for being a student, and one for being married. In 1965, the government announced a change of policy: Married men would now be drafted, unless they were also fathers. Nine months and two days after that announcement, the Cheneys had their first child.

JOHN ASHCROFT, Attorney General

Ashcroft received six student deferments during Vietnam, plus another "occupational deferment," on the grounds that his civilian job--teaching business law to undergraduates at Southwest Missouri State University--was critical. "I would have served if asked," he has said.
 

PAUL WOLFOWITZ, Deputy Secretary of Defense

Wolfowitz received a student deferment, allowing him to attend Cornell, then do graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he remained until the draft was over.

TOM DELAY, Speaker of the House (R-Texas)

Delay received a student deferment, and in 1969 drew a high number in the draft lottery, meaning he did not have to go to Vietnam. At a 1988 press conference defending his and vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle's failure to serve in Vietnam, Delay argued that so many blacks volunteered to serve as a way to escape poverty that there was no room for patriotic conservatives like him and Quayle.

RICHARD PERLE, Pentagon Adviser
Perle received a student deferment, enabling him to go to graduate school at Princeton, then went to England to work on his doctoral thesis. Fed up with Perle's constant war-mongering last year, Sen. Chuck Hagel, (R-Neb) who volunteered for Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts, suggested that perhaps "Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad."

ELLIOTT ABRAMS, National Security Council, Middle East Director Abrams avoided Vietnam with a bad back, which vanished once the war ended.

An excerpt from Prisoner's Dilemma: How '60s anti-war activists let today's chicken hawks off the hook. A draft-resister's story. by Robert Poe

Afghanistan is now the world's leading supplier of opium for the heroin trade. Under the Taliban regime, which banned opium, annual production bottomed out at 77 tons in 2001, produced only in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance. American military, as part of its "War on Terror," allied with Northern Alliance warlords to overthrow the Taliban regime and keep Al Qaeda at bay. Afghan opium production has since skyrocketed to about 3,600 tons of opium this year, or 75 percent of global production.

An excerpt from "Top Ten Drug War Stories of 2003" By Kevin Nelson