Category Archives: Uncategorized

Interesting Way to Protest

Posted on November 15, 2006 | Leave a comment

Some folks in Ogden held a protest with an interesting twist Tuesday. Photos of a variety of Bushites were affixed to pumpkins – and then smashed to smitherines.  The hammers used to smash the pumpkins had names:  Truth, Justice and Liberty  The protest was silent,except for the noise of pumpkins being smashed.

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Tom Smart, Deseret Morning News
People attend a protest in front of Ogden City Hall. No speeches were made. Instead, protesters affixed photos of detested individuals to pumpkins and smashed the gourds to smithereens.

 

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Violence Against Women and the Disabled

Posted on November 14, 2006 | Leave a comment

My job as an educator has me working with students with disabilties. I get to attend a lot of trainings and workshops offered by the state. Today I attended a seminar on Fair Housing and Assistive Technology, organized by the Disability Law Center and held at the Division of Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

I had to pick and choose which sessions I went to and I found myself really wanting to attend the session on violence against women, but there was another one more directly relevant to my job being given at the same time, so I attended that one instead.

I did get the handouts, though from the violence seminar. Here are some stark statistics from various studies:

  • 50% of girls who are deaf reported to have been sexually assaulted
  • 39% of ever-married females with disabilities physically or sexually assaulted by partners
  • 62% of women with and without physical disabilities experience abuse of any type, emotional, physical, or sexual
  • Women wtih physical disabilities experience abuse for longer periods of time than women without disabilities
  • 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner in teh U.S. in 2000
  • In Utah, the oldest reported victim of rape was 95 years old; the youngest was 3 days old.
  • Indivuals with disabilties are abused by more people
  • A sample of 7,027 Canadian women found that women with disabilities had 40% greater odds of violence in the 5 years precedign the interview in the research and these women appeareed to be at particular risk for severe violence.

    There is a lot of work being done in the areas of advocacy and violence prevention. Systemic Changes are taking place in the areas of employment, income support and support services in general, deinstitutionalization and changing attitudes through public education on violence against women with disabilities, as well as support to families.

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    Preparing for the 2007 Utah Legislative Session

    Posted on November 13, 2006 | Leave a comment

    I will be starting to post items on the upcoming Legislative Session. This came across my desk today from HEAL Utah:
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    Yumm—pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, turkey and stuffing—Thanksgiving is right around the corner. We are all looking forward to this time of visiting with family and friends, eating good food, and giving thanks. But before you start carving the turkey, come learn how to help prevent your legislators from carving loopholes into our laws that protect public health and the environment.

    Join us this Thursday, November 16th at 6:30 to learn how to organize an in-home meeting with your state legislators. An in-home meeting is a chance for you (and your neighbors) to start building a relationship with your state legislators, educate them on nuclear and toxic waste issues facing our state, and counter the influence of highly paid lobbyists working in the backhalls of the State Legislature. In-home meetings are a great way to start a dialogue that will help us earn victories come January.

    The evening will consist of:

    1) Our political forecast of the upcoming legislative session
    2) A briefing on your legislators and their voting records

    3) A How-To Guide on hosting or attending an in-home meeting

    Remember—Thursday, November 16th from 6:30-8:30pm at HEAL Utah’s offices, 68 S Main St. 4th floor.
    Please call (801) 355-5055 or email jessica@healutah.org if you’re interested.

    Jessica Kendrick
    Field Organizer
    HEAL Utah

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    Presidential Campaign

    Posted on November 13, 2006 | Leave a comment

    I am very excited to be on the planning and organizing committee for a Green Party of the United States Presidential Candidate hopeful. We had our first organizing meeting last night. I am in the process of setting up a website.

    I’ll be providing more details at a later date.

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    Whose Land Is It?

    Posted on November 13, 2006 | Leave a comment

    This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land….”

    (music comes to screeching halt)

    The BLM allows ranchers to have their livestock trample all over forests and deserts, disturbing sensitive ground (just walk around those forests and deserts of Utah, and you will see….).
    Yet when someone is living on a small parcel of what the BLM deems is “its land”, officials within the BLM determine that residential living is not appropriate for the ground.

    This makes absolutely no sense.

    In the Salt Lake Tribune’s article, Son inherits BLM scrape, there is an account of a man and his family living on his family’s land (inherited from his great-great grandfather), on a small parcel of it that was set up in 1976 based on a fence line between the property and the “BLM” land. (which is actually the land of all of us).

    The BLM is not only now evicting the young family but is requiring them to pay an archaelogical fee to record American Indian sites on the property and to repair the impact on sensitive ground.

    The Tribune lists this time table at the end of the article:
    Continue reading →

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    Rain Water Tax?

    Posted on November 13, 2006 | Leave a comment

    There has been a lot of discussion on a proposed “rain water tax” in West Jordan. The City Council will receive public input and consider for approval Ordinance 06-41,
    amending the West Jordan Municipal Code, Title 90, Chapter 3, establishing a
    Stormwater Utility [Tom Steele] PH 6d    .

    “A Public Hearing will be held before the City of West Jordan City Council on Tuesday, November 14, 2006, at the hour of 6:00 p.m., in the City Council Chambers at 8000 South Redwood Road, Third Floor, West Jordan, Utah, for review and/or recommendation of the proposed
    amendment to the West Jordan Municipal Code, Title 90, Chapter 3, establishing a Stormwater Utility. You are invited to attend the Public Hearing and take part in the discussions and voice any support or concerns you may have. If you desire to speak on an item, the time will be limited to 3 minutes. Items may be moved on the agenda or tabled by the City Council. Copies of the agenda packet for this meeting will be available at the West Jordan libraries and on the City’s website http://www.wjordan.com approximately 4 days prior to the meeting.”

    What is missing from this announcement: A Stormwater Utility Fee of $36 a year will be imposed on all residents and thousnds of dollars to businesses. And also missing is the state law on public notifictaion relaative to fee/tax incresses should change, mandating any increase in fee from cities be publicized in detail.

    A participant on the West Jordan discussion list writes in his analysis of this fee proposal:
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    What is the Rain Tax or Gutter Tax?

    Fee/tax on Mother Nature generated rain that runs off your property to city storm drain pipes that you already paid for by the impact fee on your home when it was first built.
    Continue reading →

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    More on Voting Maching Troubles

    Posted on November 13, 2006 | Leave a comment

    From Kathy Dopp:

    Here is just ONE (1) day of news stories re. electronic voting problems in November 7 election (stories are continuing to unfold). One county using Diebold voting machines in another state has still not announced their election results due to memory card failures. Utah county’s “glitch” disenfranchised voters and touchscreens caused long lines in Utah. Federal law only requires ONE (1) touchscreen voting machine in each polling place for the disabled to use – Utah could use optical scan paper ballots which are conveniently manually auditable, voter verified, less expensive, cause no long lines; and are not susceptible to power outages, denial of service attacks, and vote flipping attacks. Is there any reason to trust insufficiently manually audited invisible e-ballots which are secretly counted by proprietary humanly-unreadable machine language software on voting machines whose components are made in China, Canada, and various U.S. states?
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    It took over 24 hours for Cook Co. Illinois to count their votes. That’s with their brand-new Smartmatic clone Sequoia voting machines. County Clerk David Orr conceded that the hardware and software being used should be re-examined. / One of the striking problems that has come up around the country is the reason for long lines in many places. They just didn’t buy enough machines for the turnout they had. Another boon for the vendors when all they really needed to do was buy one Precinct-Based Optical Scan (PBOS) for each precinct and there would have been no need to go out and buy more DRE machines. And the cause of the long lines in Denver; poorly written, poorly tested voter registration software from Sequoia.

    Other articles:
    Continue reading →

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    Manual Audit of Summit County Today

    Posted on November 13, 2006 | Leave a comment

    Kathy Dopp, Desert Greens candidate for Summit County Clerk sent this today:

    In Summit County, the manual audit is being held today (Monday) at 10 a.m. at the County Building.

    I assume that the manual audits are also being held today in other counties, but please call your own county clerk to find out for sure.

    In Summit County, the final canvass is being held on Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the County Courthouse.

    It would be great to go observe the manual audit and final vote canvass for your county. I’ve been told that the public may observe the manual audit, even though the written procedures do not require it – except to say a counting poll worker or watcher may observe – which I think means that anyone appointed by a political party or a candidate may observe.

    We have an time critical need here in Utah. Please help find a Utah Senator and Utah Congressional Rep in the Utah Legislature to sponsor our independent audit legislation:

    Click to access VoteCountAudit-UT.pdf

    based on scientifically agreed-upon election audit principles (posted at the National Institute of Standards and Technology web site):

    Click to access ElectionIntegrityAudit.pdf

    Kathy Dopp
    http://electionarchive.org
    National Election Data Archive
    Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections
    Subscribe to announcements by emailing election-subscribe@uscountvotes.org
    Please donate or volunteer.

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    The Agitator

    Posted on November 12, 2006 | Leave a comment

    I’ve started a website called “The Agitator”. Check it out. (Note: It’s still being developed.)

    Agitate: to arouse interest in (a cause, for example) by use of the written
    or spoken word; debate.

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    Rumsfeld to be accused of War Crimes

    Posted on November 11, 2006 | Leave a comment

    Donald Rumsfeld is expected to be accused of war crimes in Germany this week.

    The Center for Constitutional Rights will file the suit on behalf of a group of Iraqi detainees as well as the so-called 20th hijacker, who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.

    “The former secretary actually authorized a series of interrogation techniques,” said Michael Ratner, President of CCR. “They included the use of dogs, stripping, hooding, stressed positions, chaining to the floor, sexual humiliation and those types of activities.”

    Those techniques, he says, amount to torture and violate the Geneva Conventions. Ratner will be traveling to Berlin next week and plans to file the suit on Tuesday.

    The suit is being brought in Germany because a “universal jurisdiction” law there allows German courts to claim jurisdiction over war crimes even if they were committed outside that country’s borders.

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