One Utah has some posts on the Emery County situation where the elections clerk is being asked to resign because he exposed his concerns about the Diebold voting machines. The letter that was hand delivered to him today asking him to resign as of April 1 will be published at One Utah later today.
Kathy Dopp has written a letter to the Governor of Utah about the Director of Elections Michael Cragun colluding with Diebold to commit fraud and to cover up fraud committed against the state of Utah.
Recently I posted about the corporate buy-outs of The Body Shop and Tom’s of Maine.
Scatterbox writes about the polarization of corporate reformists. The article discusses the split positions of activists – some who think the buy out of The Body Shop is horrible and others who think it could be a good thing.
it stands to figure that activists are split in their reaction to The Body Shop’s decision to be acquired by L’Oreal.
In one camp are the pragmatists who accept the relationship between The Body Shop’s social welfare ideals and the profit-driven gluttony of shopping malls where the company sells its products…..In the other camp are the outraged ideologues, violently shaken from their convenient rationalization that a $732 million, publicly traded corporation existed primarily to validate their anticorporate beliefs. The UK-based Ethical Consumer threatens to lower The Body Shop’s “ethical rating,” adding the company to a list of activist group boycotts that already includes Microsoft, Bacardi, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Israel, Maxwell House, Procter and Gamble, Shell, Rolls Royce and the whole country of Canada.
Scatterbox proceeds to ask these questions:
Will this stop The Body Shop from leveraging L’Oreal’s resources to expand as a global, socially responsible brand? Nope. But the villianizing and boycotts will further the polarization between corporate activists who want to get results by working within the market economy – and those who dream of destroying it altogether.
“Is The Body Shop window-dressing, or is it an admission that doing good can actually be good for business?” writes Biggs.[of activist site CorpWatch] “Guess it depends on how cynical you are. Personally, I get irked at progressives who attack other progressives for not being pure enough, for questioning any motives that don’t keep us marginalized. Seems to me there’s a place for open minds and optimism. At least until they are proven to be misplaced.”
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Yesterday I wrote a post on student protests against immigration legislation.
Today there is a post by Jesse Jackson on Common Dreams (published in the Chicago Sun Times): Wage War on Poverty, Not Immigrants. I’ve re-posted it here. It speaks for itself.
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Wage War on Poverty, Not Immigrants
by Jesse Jackson
“Sa se puede!” Yes we can. They marched by the hundreds of thousands in Los Angeles, by the tens of thousands in Milwaukee, in Phoenix, in New York. Across the country, Hispanics dramatically entered what has been an increasingly ugly debate about immigration in this country.
Rep. Tom Tancredo is gaining national attention railing against undocumented immigrants. He wants them turned into felons, a wall built along our border to keep them out, police dispatched to send them home. He does not bother to tell us how he plans to transport 11 million estimated undocumented workers out of the country. Nor what will happen to the millions of their children who were born here and are American citizens.
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Posted in Uncategorized
March 29
1626
First American forestry legislation enacted, Plymouth Colony.
1870
African-American men gain right to vote, 15th Amendment.
1925
Black leaders protest the showing of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, scheduled to open at the Rialto Theatre in Charleston on April 1, on the grounds it violated a 1919 state law prohibiting any entertainment which demeaned another race.
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I serve on the Eco Action Committee of the Green Party of the United States. This committee is developing positions on various ecological issues. This is done via email and monthly conference calls.
One topic that has been discussed lately is the effect on the environment by Greens traveling from all areas of the country to attend the annual convention. It has been conservatively estimated that **41 tons** of carbon dioxide would be emitted from just travel to the meeting.
Since most people see value in face-to-face meetings, some have suggesting imposing “carbon taxes” through a variety of means and other ways of mitigating the effect of the travel. One option that has been discussed is to plant trees in the area in which the convention is held.
Some people see that as a symbolic effort and not one that would necessarily attract media attention. Others see it as, in one delegate’s words, Planting enough trees to counter the pollution this year will have an effect every year the trees exist into the future, mitigating the cost of meeting every year from just this one year’s effort…. Isn’t it also enough to do the right thing just because it is the right thing to do? We will be demonstrating a better and more responsible political stewardship of the environment. Showing what works and doing it are two keys to making change inviting.
I personally like the idea of mitigating the costs of travel with a tree planting campaign. How novel and unique and good for the earth.
The 20th edition of Carnival of the Green has hit the blog stands.
Posts this week include these topics:
Kathy Dopp is nationally known for her work in exposing voter machine fraud. Kathy is running for Summit County Clerk for the Desert Greens Green Party of Utah. She aims to win and work towardsa more equitable voting system.
Kathy has been sending out notices on the recent fallout over voting machines in Emery County:
Help Please if you can. Bruce Funk “really” needs our support right now (see
http://utahcountvotes.org)
This DesNews article parrots the disinformation that Diebold is giving to our election officials back to the public. Anyone who has time, please send in a pithy letter to the editor to the DesNews. I’m warn out. Just include the title & author & date of the article plus your name, address and phone number so they’ll print it.
What a con job Diebold has done to bill $40,000 to Emery County to “fix” the damage that the best security experts in America did by examining two voting machines. Yet our state election director, Michael Cragun, is colluding with Diebold after they sent Utah falling apart, mixture of new and old rejected machines from other states, with printers without paper guides that are designed to fail, and a system that one might imagine is deliberately designed for undetectable tampering! I’m amazed at how many times Diebold has defrauded our election officials who keep colluding with Diebold against the interests of Utah voters! Anyone with a smidgeon of knowledge of computer security understands that the biggest security threat comes from the insiders (i.e. Diebold itself) not a nationally renowned security firm! Our state election director, Michael Cragun is, as we speak, giving Diebold access to the storage facility to tamper with the voting machines at Carr Printing in Bountiful, perhaps so that they can cover up the evidence of their fraudulent sale!
Costly fallout in Emery over vote machines By Josh Loftin Deseret Morning News
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635194949,00.html
Concerns about potential tampering with electronic machines have come back to those making the accusations: the Emery County clerk and an independent election security firm.
Now, the county will have to pay to bring in technicians to reinstall the software on approximately 40 electronic voting machines after the clerk let security experts from Black Box Voting, a national elections security watchdog group, test the machines. The cost to the county could be upward of $40,000, according to Joe Demma, the chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert.
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Yesterday about 30 students of West High Schoolwalked out of class and held a demonstration to protest the House Immmigration Bill . The students were able to ultimately attract a crowed of about 400 people, according the Salt Lake Tribune article.
The walkout was part of a nationwide call for action for students to walk out of classrooms in protest of this legislation. Tens of thousands of students across the country walked out of their classrooms.
About 300 students walked out of Northwest Middle School and 30 at Kearns High School in addition to the West High School Students.
The House legislation is designed at “immigration reform”. Here in Utah undocumented immigrants have had their drivers’ licenses taken away and replaced with “driving privelege” cards. Legislation was introduced to eliminate in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants here, but that failed.
“They can put barriers on me, but they’re not stopping me,” said Marisela, who declined to give her last name. “The American dream is not a crime.” Marisela is a West High School student who walked out of her classes yeseterday.
The Deseret News reports the U.S. Senators clears way for illegal aliens. In an obvious election-year move, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has cleared the way for 11 million illegal aliens to seek U.S. citizenship.
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The state represenative who introduced H.B. 148, LaVarr Christensen, is planning campaign to override the governor’s veto, according to a Salt Lake Tribune article in today’s news.
H.B. 148 was a bill designed to block same-sex couples’ ability to legally define their families through custody agreements.
Christensen, who is also running for U.S. Congress, introduced bills during the 2006 Utah Legislative Session, along with State Senator Chris Buttars, that were aimed at denying rights to gay and lesbian citizens of our state and were what I coined as “morality legislation”.
Stepparents and grandparents bombarded the governor’s office with phone calls and letters, afraid Christensen’s legislation could end up cutting them out of the lives of children they have raised. And Huntsman responded, rejecting the bill’s “undesirable consequences.”
Christensen insists the governor’s worries are unfounded. In an e-mail sent to his 103 colleagues last week, he urged lawmakers to remember his stated purpose. “This is a public policy decision regarding marriage, parenthood and family that is most appropriately decided by the legislature,” he wrote.
The Tribune article also mentions that Christensen did not return phone calls to the media inquiring about the issue.
This is clearly an attempt by a right-wing conservative to force one set of values on the whole of a population and waste taxpayers dollars by doing so instead of introducing legislation aimed at providing services for citizens.
What a waste.
March 28
1799</b.
NY State abolished slavery.
1918
2,000 in Quebec, Canada, demonstrated against military conscription in the midst of World War I. Four died in the ensuing riot.
Anti-Conscription Parade in Victoria Square, Montreal, Quebec, May 24, 1917,
The gathering in this photo looks calm. Riots nearly a year later resulted in the death of four demonstrators in Quebec City.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 