ASK YOUR TV STATIONS WHY WE DIDN'T GET TO SEE THE BIGGEST RALLY IN ALASKA?

Friday, September 19, 2008


The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.
So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery.

"Alaska Women Reject Palin Rally" was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage.

Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men.

I had no idea what to expect.
The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee.
It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee.
It's probably an impressive list.
These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets.
One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host.
Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally "a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots," and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought.
The women, of course, received some nasty, harassing and threatening messages.
I felt a bit apprehensive.
I'd been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies.
Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it's a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren't sent by Eddie Burke, we'll be doing good.
A real statement will have been made.
I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing "socialist baby-killing maggot" haters.
It's a good thing I wasn't tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody's trunk.
When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep!
I could hardly find a place to park.
I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage.
The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators).
This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state.
I was absolutely stunned.
The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by.
And even those that didn't honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute.
This just doesn't happen here.
Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up.
He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn't be heard.
Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high.
So, if you've been doing the math?
Yes.
The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin's rally that got all the national media coverage!
Feel free to spread the pictures around to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans.

COLOMBIAN

MAPUCHE INDIAN WOMEN PROTEST IN CHILE

Several Mapuche native women jumped into a fountain in front of the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile.

They were protesting the jail sentencing of Patricia Troncoso another Mapuche activist, who is in her 104 day of a hunger strike.

She has been accused of "terrorist acts" due to setting fire at a ranch in the south of Chile.

Six of the Mapuche women were arrested by police.

WOMEN IN SPACE

HARD WORKING WOMEN

OLD POSTER

WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers;
they lived only 90 years ago.
Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.
The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.
(Lucy Burns) And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.
(Dora Lewis) They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.

Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail.
Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. (Alice Paul)
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited.
She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press. http://memory.loc.gov/amen/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.puff
So, refresh my memory.
Some women won't vote this year because- -why, exactly?
We have carpool duties?
We have to get to work?
Our vote doesn't matter?
It's raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say.
I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion.
But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too.
When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry.
She was with herself.
'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use, my right to vote?
All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but
those of us who did seek to learn.'
The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'
HBO released the movie on video and DVD .
I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather.
I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.
It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized.
And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.
The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

PALIN: WRONG WOMAN, WRONG MESSAGE

Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton.
She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008
Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president.
We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote.
We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
But here is even better news: It won't work.
This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman.
It's about making life more fair for women everywhere.
It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that.
It's about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters.
Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton.
Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does.
To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs.
"This is not to beat up on Palin.
I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me.
I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father.
I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.
Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know.
When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?"
When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."
She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident.
Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax.
Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.
Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence.
The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain.
He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom.
If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.
McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality.
She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling.
She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
I don't doubt her sincerity.
As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself.
She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town.
She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child.
She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.
So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family.
Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.
Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time.
A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.
This could be huge.
Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center.
She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.