(no subject)
This unbelievable report just in from Michigan!
It's true. My family and I were kicked out of a Bush rally last week because of my NARAL Pro-Choice America t-shirt. They ripped up our tickets and told us, "We don't accept any pro-choice, non-Republican paraphernalia.'"
What this told me about Bush was, "If you're pro-choice, you're not welcome in his campaign." That's why when NARAL Pro-Choice America asked me to support their work, including electing a pro-choice president, I said, "Absolutely."
Now you can show the Bush team you won't be silenced by wearing your very own BANNED-BY-BUSH t-shirt. When you buy your t-shirt, the proceeds will support the very cause to which the Bush campaign objected: protecting women's privacy rights and choice. Click here to get yours today.
The Saginaw News told my unbelievable story, "The family reports that 'a young male campaign worker confiscated the offending apparel upon the family's 4:30 p.m. arrival. He returned with two others and asked the trio to leave about an hour later... The guard then grabbed their three tickets from Barbara Miller's hand, ripped them up 'violently' and told her, 'They're no good anymore,' she said."
Afterward, my husband told the newspaper, "I was probably voting for Kerry before. Now I'm 100 percent sure. Maybe I'll start campaigning for him. Maybe I'll start fund-raising." So when NARAL Pro-Choice America called and asked me to help them elect a pro-choice president by telling my story, I didn't hesitate.
Take a lesson from my family - It's not just our right to choose that Bush doesn't accept, but our freedom of speech, too.
Show Bush he can't tell us what to do with our reproductive health and he can't tell us what to wear. $30 gets you your own BANNED-BY-BUSH t-shirt. Click here to wear it with pride wherever you go. Not only will you receive the t-shirt Bush loves to hate, but all t-shirt proceeds will be used to support the very cause to which the Bush Campaign objected: ensuring that a woman's right to choose remains private, safe and legal.
And if you live in Michigan, support our NARAL Pro-Choice America affiliate, MARAL Pro-Choice Michigan, by clicking here and learning what you can do right here in Michigan to protect choice.
Sincerely,
Barbara Miller,
Pro-Choice American
:: Click here to read Michigan's Saginaw News article about the incident.
:: Click here to check out what our own Bush v. Choice bloggers have to say on the subject.
Dear MoveOn member,
Who would have guessed? When we asked MoveOn members last month for their stories for a Real People ad campaign, we got hundreds of responses from members -- Republicans, Democrats and Independents -- who voted for George Bush in 2000, but will be voting for Kerry in 2004. These stories of disaffection are the most powerful statements we've found about the failed Bush presidency. We will highlight these personal stories in an ad campaign to be televised during the Republican convention -- and we want to know which ones move you the most.
In the last two weeks, Academy Award-winning documentary film director Errol Morris has been interviewing these former Bush voters on camera, and he's cut seventeen ads that tell their stories. We're running a contest to help us choose the ads that will best convince undecided and swing voters to vote for John Kerry. We'll run them during the Republican convention. Vote now at:
http://www.moveonpac.org/morris/
Please vote for your favorites, and then tell your friends about this contest. Votes will be taken until midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday, August 11th, and then we'll put the people's choice winner into final production for airing.
As these ads show, support for George Bush is unraveling, even in his traditional base. We hear every day about more prominent Bush defections, from business leaders to four star generals. At first, the administration tried to silence these voices by launching attacks on people like Richard Clarke, the Bush administration's own counter-terrorism chief. But now there are too many people stepping forward to make that possible. On the same day last week that Bruce Springsteen and dozens of artists announced their Vote for Change tour, Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corp, which owns Fox News, announced his support for John Kerry.
But the most compelling voices we've heard come from MoveOn members themselves -- Americans from all walks of life deciding that it's time for a change.
If you don't have time to review and rate the ads, but can help support the campaign, go to:
https://www.moveonpac.org/donate/switchad.html
If we get enough support we'll be airing the best of these ads on nation-wide television during the Republican Convention.
Thanks to the thousands of MoveOn members who submitted personal stories for this campaign, and to those of you who took interviews with Errol Morris. We wish we could have used them all. Thank you for your commitment and courage,
--Wes Boyd and the whole MoveOn PAC team
Monday, August 9th, 2004.
P.S. Here's a note from Errol Morris about his vision for this campaign:
A NOTE FROM ERROL MORRIS
Director of the academy award-winning documentary THE FOG OF WAR.
I have been struck by the eloquence of ordinary citizens. And I have thought in the context of the 2004 campaign, rather than have pollsters talk to the American people, why not have the American people talk to the American people -- in their own words? Who better to express the current concern with the direction in which America is going? Who better to express the dreams and aspirations of Americans? Who better to express their hopes for change?
Many of us have very strong feelings and beliefs about what has happened in the last four years in our country. But there is also a growing concern with what could happen in the next four years. Is this country heading in the right direction? What is our vision of America? Is it being realized?
MoveOn has pioneered a new kind politics with populist roots. It has allowed Americans to speak directly to other Americans.
This is a very simple idea. A different kind of political advertising. Not a prepared speech. Not a voice-over narrative, but rather Americans speaking one on one. Americans speaking to other Americans in their own words, expressing their beliefs and their hopes for the future.
Americans explaining why this election is not just another election, but an election that will define how America is perceived around the world and just as important, what America is for all of us.
None of this can be done -- as in all of what MoveOn has achieved -- without you.
Errol Morris
PAID FOR BY MOVEON PAC www.moveonpac.org
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
Freedom for Afghan, Iraq women?
By Cathy Young | August 9, 2004
FROM THE start of the war on terrorism, America's mission in fighting radical Islamic fundamentalism has been described not only in terms of protecting the homeland but also of bringing freedom to the oppressed -- particularly to women. But have women in the Islamic world truly benefited from the US intervention? Can we -- and should we -- export women's liberation? Today, these questions remain a focus of intense debate.
ADVERTISEMENT
Liberating Afghan women from the Taliban's brutally misogynistic rule was often cited as one of the altruistic reasons for going to war in Afghanistan -- and as a major success story. Watching the news, we rejoiced in images of girls going to school for the first time in years, and of women casting off their burkas, going to work, or even going to beauty parlors. "The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free," President Bush declared in his 2002 State of the Union address.
The victimization of women by Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was also invoked by supporters of the war in Iraq -- though in this case, their oppression was far less gender-specific. Hussein's rule was secular, and while women who ran afoul of the regime could be tortured, raped, or murdered, the men hardly fared better.
Now, more than two years after the fall of the Taliban and more than a year after the fall of Saddam, critics say that the situation of women has not improved much and, in some cases, may have worsened. "For many Iraqi women, the tyranny of Saddam's regime has been replaced by chronic violence and growing religious conservatism that have stifled their hopes for wider freedoms -- and, for many, put their lives in even greater peril," says a recent cover story in Time magazine. The article focuses on "honor killing" -- the murder of women by male relatives after they have "dishonored" the family by committing some sexual infraction (or by being raped). These killings may be on the rise because of the breakdown in law and order and the greater availability of weapons.
Reports from Afghanistan are bleak as well. While few would dispute that things are better for women than they were under the Taliban, particularly in large cities such as Kabul, the country remains in chaos, torn apart by warlords and thugs. Kate Allen, a director of the British chapter of Amnesty International, wrote in The Guardian last March that an aid worker told her, "If a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged -- now she's raped."
Some of the criticism may be driven by ideological opposition to the Bush administration's foreign policy. But some of it comes from strong supporters of US intervention. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, who still believes that "Americans should be proud that we ousted the Taliban," has chronicled troubling and little-noticed developments in the new Afghanistan. Among other things, the Supreme Court has barred married women from attending high school -- in a country where girls as young as 9 are routinely forced to marry.
In part, the situation of women in today's Afghanistan and Iraq is a shameful American failure. Clearly, the Bush administration was unwilling to invest enough resources (financial or human) into helping rebuild these countries after toppling the old regimes.
Yet the limits of American influence are equally clear. We are confronting societies in which male supremacy is deeply ingrained. In Afghanistan, voter registration teams are trying to register women to vote while accommodating the tribal customs that forbid them to leave their homes. So a housebound teenage mother of three, married at 12, will be able to vote in a free election: what a victory for women's rights. What do you do when it's not a dictatorship but custom that keeps women imprisoned, and when honor killings are condoned even by the victims female relatives? What can you do when an attempt to appoint a woman judge in an Iraqi city is met with vehement protests not only from conservative Muslim clerics but from the town's lawyers -- including women?
Feminist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote recently in The New York Times that promoting women's education may be our best strategy against radical Islamic fundamentalism. Yet if women's rights are seen as a Western import, this will likely worsen the backlash against feminism; in some Muslim countries, educated women have donned the veil in anti-imperialist protest. Let us, by all means, try to help women; but let's be realistic about our possibilities.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.