Vote Naked, mainly, just vote naturally

Well, big whoopie, we been voting naked for years here in Oregon, but what the heck, we do a lotta things naked, especially when it ain't raining. One of the favorite things in P Town, Portland, is naked bike riding just to show that a lot of the folks there are demanding bicycle rights.


Here's some information about this by Glowing Fish

In the state of Oregon, all elections are conducted by mail, and have been since 1998. Oregon is currently the only state in the United States to use this system. (Washington will begin to use this system statewide in 2010).

The system works fairly simply: several weeks before the election, ballots are mailed out to all registered voters in Oregon. Along with the ballot, the envelope also includes an explanatory statement of the ballot measures, and a secrecy envelope, and a postal return envelope. The voter fills in bubbles for candidates and ballot measures that they support, as well as filling in write-in candidates if they desire. They then seal it in a secrecy envelope, and then put it in another envelope that they sign and return either by postal service, or by dropping it off at a designated place.

The system has been in place since 1998, when Ballot Measure 60 was approved broadly by the people of Oregon. Many of Oregon's ballot measures tend to be politically polarized, supported by either urban or rural counties, but Measure 60 passed by wide margins in all counties of Oregon. It seemed to have wide cross-partisan support, and in the ten years since, there have been no serious challenges to vote-by-mail. Also, as far as I know, there has never been any serious election fraud connected with it. Although wider voter participation is often considered to be of benefit to the Democratic Party, the convenience of Vote-by-Mail seems to be something that no one wants to challenge.

Kudos to everything2.com

Hmm, I wonder if Rahm Emanuel has something to do with this? I hear that he's fleeing the scene in DC to run for Mayor of Chicago. Hope not though, things are bad enough there without him, not that I am worried about his moral practices, it.s more about his family ties with the IDF.
The stockyards there are something to behold, and after seeing the documentory, food inc., I have reservations about ever eating another hot dog again. Maybe it's just a hunch, or maybe pure unadulterated fear, but, even if Rahm were an immigrunt farm worker, I would worry about the food in the supermarkets. Not that I'm not cautious anyways.

Local legal coalitions to protect environment against big agrabusiness

We are rapidly approaching the era of Frankenfood and if the Agrocorp's have their way we won't even be able to grow our own. There is a movement to re-instate small farms and organic methods, but large corporations like Monsanto are buying influence in government, in our educational system, and even the corporate media.

In the farming department, Monsanto is so busy buying up the leading seed companies that the only way you can grow untainted food is to buy or borrow heirloom seed. So entrenched is this devious purveyor of poison and herbacides that, in some cases, it is actually illegal to grow organic food in your own garden.

All is not lost yet though, the folks in Chambersburg PA have formed their own legal coalition called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Here's an article from their web site...

"Small Farm Extermination"

celdf.org

Submitted by:

Thomas Linzey, Esq. 675 Mower Road, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania 17257

Multinational agri-business corporations set out almost forty years ago to exterminate family farmers and take control of food production in the United States. That chilling proposition, which has been asserted by farming communities across the Country over the past decade, gained support last week with the release of a document authored by several agri-business corporations.

The 1962 strategy memorandum, entitled "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture", was drafted by a group of multinational corporations called the "Committee for Economic Development" and it lays out a detailed plan for the decidedly un-American corporate takeover of an American institution - the family farm.

Chapter 6 of the memorandum calls for a two pronged strategy, either "(a) leakproof control of farm production by agri-business corporations" or "(b) a program, such as we are recommending here, to induce excess resources - primarily people - to move rapidly out of agriculture."

One of those "excess resources" - an Illinois hog farmer named Keith Bolin - was one of the farmers who read the paper. In an interview done shortly after Farm Aid, Bolin spoke of the absolute control being exercised over hog prices by agri-business corporations. He explained that "Many factory farms are packer owned and packer controlled. And when the packers are short of hogs and they don't want to bid up for my hogs, they flood the market with their own and drive the price down. They force me to chase the market down. They use their own hogs to drive the price lower." Last year, Bolin lost thirteen months of net worth. Last month, he canceled his health insurance to cut his operating costs. Next year, he sees himself taking a job off the farm.

In blunt testimony before the Senate Ag Committee, he stated that "this is not about efficiency or inefficiency. It's about control of our food supply by a few multinationals who are not loyal to Main Street, or rural America, or the American flag."

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