OK, as promised, here’s the report from the past few days of cross-state rabble-rousing. The big event was a protest at the DEA offices in Montgomery, as part of a national day of direct action at about 60 DEA offices across the country, fighting back against the federal government’s nation-wide crackdown against medical marijuana dispensaries.

We drove up to Birmingham on Monday night to petition at the primary election polling places to get Dr. Jimmy Blake on the ballot as an independent candidate for Jefferson County Commission in the November general election. The sun was beating down on us all day, and the breeze couldn’t bother itself to blow for more than about five minutes. Nevertheless, the pay was good, and Vestavia Hills was a hopping place for getting signatures. One poll worker said she’d sign the petition because she supported Jimmy Blake, but she didn’t think we should be outside a primary polling place to petition. Well, OK, I thought, and I don’t think you all should be using state funds to subsidize the internal party business of the two major parties. I’d be glad to stop petitioning out front of primary polling places if Demopublicans actually had to go through the same shit to get on the ballot that independents do. But I held my tongue. A signature is a signature.

On Wednesday morning we drove down to Tuscaloosa and began to plan the big event for Thursday 6/6.

Thursday we met Floyd Shackleford in Wetumpka The Montgomery TV press had arrived thanks to the efforts of the media collective assisting ASA, and we got a chance for some great film of Floyd delivering our Cease & Desist order from 73% of the American people to the DEA. We held a banner (DEA: Stop Arresting Patients) and distributed the fake WANTED posters I put together for the event, while Floyd and I talked to the interviewers.

We had prepared Burma-Shave signs which we hoped to hold by the side of the road for passing motorists to see, but we arrived a bit late and all we had time to do was deliver the Cease & Desist order and talk to the press. We had also run off lots of copies of flyers to hand out to passing pedestrians, but the DEA building was off in a office building ghetto a bit off the main streets, so there was no foot traffic for handing out our flyers. I was a bit disappointed that it turned out to be more of a press conference than an actual demonstration. Nevertheless, the newsmedia coverage was a lot more sympathetic than I thought it would be, and it came together pretty well for something we had thrown together in less than a week of active planning. The day was beautiful, the drive home peaceful, and the remainder of the day restful.

Take action! Thanks to the publicity from participating in the national event, we are quickly gaining contacts around the state for future actions toward taking the high ground in the drug war. If you are in Alabama and would like to join the network we are developing of activists who are fighting to end the federal government’s assaults on states’ rights and compassionate care, get in touch and ask me to add you to the contact list.

Vote.com recently put up an online vote on a local concern: the comments of our beloved Chief Justice Roy Moore and his most recent tirade on homosexuality. Vote.com has put up an online referendum on whether Roy Moore should be removed from office.

Vote.com puts out a huge number of up/down online votes, with the gimmick that every time someone votes, the message is sent by e-mail to relevant decision-makers. It has, for a variety of reasons, traditionally been dominated by Right-wingers, and so votes tend to come out wildly skewed to the Right. This vote is no exception. After my vote on the issue (Yes! Roy Moore should be removed from office), the vote totals came out to 918 for removal (34%) and 1,819 against removal (66%). This is despite the fact that this vote was put directly under Vote.com’s new Gay issue topic.

Let’s see if we can’t turn that vote around. These e-mails are going straight to Governor Siegelman and state legislators, so it would be excellent to [rally a voice of protest][1] for the removal of Chief Jackass Moore. And I think with some concentrated effort, we can definitely do it.

Your Secretary of Defense

According to CNN, Donald Rumsfeld has claimed that the Iranian government may have aided Taliban and al-Qaida agents to escape from Afghanistan into Iran, in a desperate attempt to justify Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the axis of evil with Iraq and North Korea.

What CNN has not reported, nor has the New York Times, nor TIME (who first broke the story), is that the Iranian government has angrily denied the administration’s allegations (this was reported in the British paper, the Guardian), and pointed out what our own press had been saying (TIME, MSNBC) earlier: Iran hates the Taliban and al-Qaeda and has no desire to have ties with them or help them out (We hated each other and we never had any commonalities, the head of Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, said Friday). Why? Because:

• Iran’s government, and most of Iran’s populace, are Shi’ite Muslims, whereas the Taliban and al-Qaeda are Sunni, and have participated in persecution and massacres of Shi’ites
• Iran’s strategic interests in Afghanistan have traditionally been head-to-head in conflict against those of Pakistan. Iran backed the Northern Alliance against the Pakistan-backed Taliban for years before the US ever got involved.
• Iran nearly went to war with the Taliban after ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist were murdered during the Taliban conquest of Mazar-i-Sharif

So, where did Rumsfeld get the ludicrous idea that Iran is helping out the Taliban and al-Qaeda? From that extremely reliable source, Ismail Khan, the brutal warlord of Herat province (see the TIME report). The main interesting fact of all this is that Khan has historically been backed by Iran, and took refuge in Iran twice while the Taliban was in power. However, Afghan Prime Minister Karzai wants to negotiate with Khan about concerns over Iranian influence [Afghan Radio]. Khan has long been in conflict with other powerful United Front anti-Taliban fighters such as Gul Agha Shirzai, the warlord of Kandahar, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, a northern warlord. There may be reason to believe, then, that Khan wants to solidify his position within the new government by cutting his ties with Iran, which have traditionally been a source of friction between him and the rest of the mujahedeen.

The real issue here is that Rumsfeld thinks we are stupid enough to swallow this ludicrous report. Or if the report does turn out to be true, he doesn’t think he needs to give any kind of explanation for such a bizarre turn of events. He just assumes people will think Oh, Iran, yeah, they’re terrorists, so naturally they’ll help out anyone else who commits terrorism against the US. And the US newsmedia are doing their best to help ensure that happens, since they refuse to report on Iran’s statements or to provide any background on the conflicts between Iran and the Taliban.

Ever since Iran revolted against the US-installed Shah in 1979 and established an anti-US government, many on the Right have been chomping at the bit to conquer Iran and install a new pro-US government. Here is their perfect opportunity. If they can make this story stick, the Bush administration has a sure-fire reason to insist that Iran is a state which harbors terrorists the United States is trying to apprehend — the same reason they used to wage war on the Taliban. And the Right-wing hawks have a sure-fire way of expanding the war on terror into Iran.

Don’t let Rumsfeld take you for a fool. Contact the Department of Defense and demand further explanation of the basis for their allegations against Iran. Contact national media outlets, particularly CNN, and demand that they do responsible research into the background of claims made by the Department of Defense and Afghan warlords, particularly when another war is on the line and everyone is asking where we will start bombing next.

Read the rest of He Thinks That You’re An Idiot …

(link provided courtesy of one angry girl)

Brothers in Spirit

Domestic Violence: endorsed by dipshit porn stars

The Klan: endorsed by dipshit frat boys

The day after I had a perfectly lovely evening watching the vigilante-feminist classic Girls Town, and on what had been a perfectly good morning of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I had my day ruined by this. It is such a fucking insult to the simple decency and intelligence of humankind that I can barely convince myself that it is real and not some kind of ill-conceived feminist parody. James Doolin of Dallas has set up Wife-Beaters.com T-shirts, an online catalogue selling white undershirts (often called wifebeaters) with the words Wife Beater across the breast of the shirt. The festive website features a posed background image of a man spanking a woman in his wife beater shirt, Prodigy’s song Smack My Bitch Up blaring in the background, a Wife Beater Hall of Fame including celebrity batterers, rapists, and murderers such as Ike Turner, Mike Tyson, John Wayne Bobbit, and O.J. Simpson. I wish to God I were making this up—as added jokes Doolin offers a Lil’ Beater shirt for infants, and offers a special rewarding convicted batterers: he will send a second shirt at half price if you enclose proof of a domestic violence offense you committed.

Look, I know this dipshit is trying to be provocative. I know that he’s exploiting controversy to sell his dumb-assed product. But what the fuck is wrong with him that he could possibly even begin to think this is remotely amusing? Listen, in the United States there are three times more shelters for animals than there are for battered women. One out of every four women will suffer partner violence in her lifetime. The overwhelming majority of murders, stalkings, rapes, assaults, and all other forms of violence against women are committed by their partners or spouses. I have seen domestic violence inflicted on too many people I love—a friend’s sister was sent to the emergency room by her stepfather beating the shit out of her; in my own family, a cousin and aunt of mine were viciously beaten by a motherfucker who thought wife beating was not a big deal. And Doolin thinks that this is all hy-larious? Look, bucko, not everything is a joke. This shit has a very real, blood-soaked, meaning. And I wish I had some words other than inarticulate swearing to express how horrendous, how enraging this is. I’m sure it’s really fucking funny to you, Doolin. We’ll see how funny it is when it’s someone you love in the emergency room.

For further reading:

• GT 11/14/2001 on the moral crippling of laid-back liberalism
• More on laid-back liberalism and why we need activism
• GT 8/1/2001 Partner violence rampant in teenage dating
• Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence: The Facts about Domestic Violence

Take action! Write James Doolin at his oh-so-droll e-mail address bruised@wife-beaters.com and let him know exactly what you think of him. Then, go to StopFamilyViolence for what you can do to help stop domestic violence. Finally, if you have any money, please consider contributing to the Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence or your own state’s chapter of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence so that they can continue to do their life-saving work in providing safehouses for battered women.

An Auburn fraternity brother dresses as a member of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween

[The incident of AU fraternity members wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes for Halloween] could portray Auburn as a racist community. I do not believe Auburn is a racist community.

–Grant Davis, secretary to the Auburn University Board of Trustees

Funny that it keeps happening, then. Davis’s comments were made two years ago in 1999, when members of Pi Kappa Alpha dressed as Klansmen for Halloween and were mildly punished once it came to the eyes of the administration. The hate images put on display this Halloween 2001 by two all-white Auburn fraternities are shocking and horrifying in their own right, but they are not anything new to the Auburn community. Just in the past few years, the Auburn community has seen repeated incidents of racial hate and remains deeply engaged in institutional racism on many levels.

• As previously mentioned, two years ago there was a parallel incident where Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity members dressed as Klansmen for Halloween.

• Auburn’s historically white fraternities are, and have always been, almost completely racially segregated against Blacks.

• Among Auburn’s registered student organizations is a campus chapter of The League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that is tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• Numerous complaints of racial discrimination by Bourbon Street Bar managers in downtown Auburn, including managers inventing phoney dress codes on the spot and lying about city ordinances in order to exclude Black patrons from the bar.

• Pervasive racism in hiring, promotion, and benefits in the Facilities Division (whose workers are overwhelmingly Black, managers overwhelmingly white) has prompted marches, demonstrations, and finally a federal civil rights lawsuit against the University. In response, Auburn dealt with the problem by… ignoring worker complaints and shifting building service workers to a night shift of 4:00pm to 12:30am, which will result in many of them having to quit in order to keep family commitments.

• The Auburn University Board of Trustees consists of twelve white men, one white woman, and one Black man. The senior administration is almost exclusively white (one exception, of course, is the director of Multicultural Affairs). Auburn remains under a court desegregation order to increase hiring of Black administration and faculty and to increase Black student enrollment, but the much-vaunted 24% increase in Black enrollment still leaves Black students at Auburn as only 7.2% of the entire student population.

And there’s a lot more that I couldn’t put together for this hastily-compiled list. Of course, none of this was mentioned or responded to in the administration’s white-washing diversity rally media event. Instead there was everything I had hoped for in a serious, harsh response to the individuals who committed the most recent acts–and everything I had feared in distancing, disavowal, and refusal to deal with the larger environment that nutured the kind of moral obliviousness that would allow frat boys to think that their vicious re-enactments of hatred and genocide were all just a big stupid lark. Look, this is a serious problem in the Auburn community, and one that we’d better get damned serious about dealing with. If we fail, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, I fear that very shortly we will learn that racism is a sickness unto death.

Take action!

Please send polite and carefully-considered e-mails to Vice President for Student Affairs Wes Williams and Interim President William F. Walker urging them to take this hate incident seriously by ensuring that the individuals who committed it and the fraternities who hosted it are severely punished, urging them to permanently dissolve the local chapters of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi. Further, politely but firmly ask them to make sure that their response to this incident include a careful look at the broader racial environment at Auburn and that concrete new programs be implemented to address racism in the Auburn University community.