“I just received word that I am now a Republican. This came as quite a shock to me as I have been a Democrat since the day I registered almost 10 years ago. It turns out that when I signed a petition at the college I attend, my party affiliation was changed without my consent. I went to the Supervisor of Elections office to see what happened and I was shown the form I “filled out”. I informed them that this was not my handwriting on the form and they said they suspected that. Apparently, the same thing has happened to many college students here, including the Supervisor of Election’s son. Our local Sheriff’s Office is opening an official investigation into the matter, as it is not only a form of vote tampering, but also forgery. (None of the people affected actually signed the form that was shown to us. It was our names, but not our exact signature…) It looks like the person doing it was a student worker for the college as he was able to get the last four digits of my social security number. The only way to find all my information was to look at my student files in the Business office. The petition was supposedly for the legalization of medicinal marijuana, but apparently there was some other kind of smoke going up. This is the kind of thing that sickens me about the Republican party. This could cause people going to vote to think that they have been purged, as they aren’t on the list they should be on. Not to mention that I live in the “grand” state of FLORIDA.”
::|:| Suspicions Raised Over Fla. Voting, Registration |:|::
MIKE HOFFMAN would not be the guy his buddies would expect to see leading a protest movement. The son of a steelworker and a high school janitor from Allentown, Pennsylvania, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1999 as an artilleryman to “blow things up.” His transformation into an activist came the hard way—on the streets of Baghdad.
When Hoffman arrived in Kuwait in February 2003, his unit’s highest-ranking enlisted man laid out the mission in stark terms. “You’re not going to make Iraq safe for democracy,” the sergeant said. “You are going for one reason alone: oil. But you’re still going to go, because you signed a contract. And you’re going to go to bring your friends home.” Hoffman, who had his own doubts about the war, was relieved—he’d never expected to hear such a candid assessment from a superior. But it was only when he had been in Iraq for several months that the full meaning of the sergeant’s words began to sink in.
“The reasons for war were wrong,” he says. “They were lies. There were no WMDs. Al Qaeda was not there. And it was evident we couldn’t force democracy on people by force of arms.”
::|:| read on |:|::
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CONDOM WARS
New guidelines gut HIV prevention — and endanger young people’s lives
by Doug Ireland
Lethal new regulations from President Bush’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans’ goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds — whether or not any federal money is directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head a Bush appointee). It’s all couched in arcane bureaucratese, but this is the Bush administration’s Big Stick — do exactly as we say, or lose your federal funding. And nearly all of the some 3,800 AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that do the bulk of HIV-prevention education receive at least part of their budget from federal dollars. Without that money, they’d have to slash programs or even close their doors.
These new regs require the censoring of any “content” — including “pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,” “audiovisual materials” and “pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),” as well as “advertising” and Web-based info. They require all such “content” to eliminate anything even vaguely “sexually suggestive” or “obscene” — like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs — in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body’s judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.
Moreover, the CDC will now take the decisions on which AIDS-fighting educational materials actually work away from those on the frontlines of the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political appointees.
This is done by requiring that Policy Review Panels, which each group engaged in HIV prevention must have, can no longer be appointed by that group but must instead be named by state and local health departments. And those panels must then take a vote on every single flier or brochure or other “content” before it is issued.
This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a veto and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem “obscene” or lacking in anti-condom propaganda. With Republicans controlling a majority of statehouses, and having handed over control of the health departments to folks deemed acceptable to the Christian right and cultural conservatives in many Southern and Midwestern states — and the rest of public-health departments notoriously subservient to political pressure from the state and local legislatures that control their appropriations — anti-condom junk science that plays politics with people’s lives will rule the day.
Under the new regs, it will be impossible even to track the spread of unsafe sexual practices — because the CDC’s politically inspired censorship includes “questionnaires and survey materials” and thus would forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without protection against HIV. For that too would be “obscene.” (Questions about gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC’s national Youth Risk Survey after Christian-right pressure).
Not realizing that his weekly radio address is already on the air, President Ronald Reagan quips into his live microphone: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Courtesy of rotten.com.
POSTED: 11:31 pm EDT July 5, 2004
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Dario Cruz has lived in the United States for 16 years, but just became a citizen last week as he and about 200 other immigrants were naturalized.
One of the things he had always wanted to was register to vote, but when he was offered the chance to do that right outside the ceremony, he knew something wasn’t right — the place on the form where you’re asked to choose Democrat, Republican or independent was already filled out.
“It’s like one side,” Cruz said. “You don’t get to choose.”
According to Cruz and his family, every form was checked off Republican.
It was something his wife, Linda Cross, first noticed. She said she asked what was going on, and was told the woman registering voters said they were with a Republican organization.
“I am Republican,” she told Channel 4’s Jim Piggott. “I was very angry with that if they want to register whatever party, you shouldn’t try to dictate to people what party they are going to register; who they are going to vote for, because then you don’t have any freedom.”
The couple left without registering, but they did tell local Democratic Party officials what happened.
“These new citizens that were coming out and maybe did not know much of what was going on were all registering Republican,” Cross said. “Not by choice, but by someone else’s choice.”
Clyde Collins, who runs the local Democratic Party, says this practice is not right, and as informed federal officials about the incident. They told him an investigation is underway.
“First of all, it violates your fundamental right,” Collins said. “You have right to decide which political party you wish to enroll.”
Collins says those who were sworn in last week will be contacted and told they have the right to register for the party of their choice.
For Cruz, that is what’s important.
“I think you should be able to choose who you want to vote for,” he said.
For the record, any registered voter can vote for any candidate of any party in a general election, but in most primaries in Florida, people can only vote for candidates of their own party.
Channel 4 has tried contracting federal officials about this issue since last Friday and have not received a response, nor have local Republican leaders responded. Folio Weekly will have more on this story in this week’s paper.
Copyright 2004 by News4Jax.com.
