Dangerous Ideas

I just saw this on a mailing list I’m on. Anti-choice activists gather annually on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to protest a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Reproductive freedom activists also stage a demonstration at this time, and are calling out for anyone who believes in the cause to join participate:

Defend Reproductive Freedom, Rally/ March Sat. Jan. 19, San Francisco

Please join community members and activists at the “Forward– Not Back! Reproductive Justice for All!” rally and march to counterprotest the anti-abortion “Walk for Life– West Coast.” Spread the word:

Resist the religious right! Protest their anti-choice march with a vibrant reproductive rights presence on the 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade! Saturday, January 19th, 2008. Assemble at Justin Herman Plaza, Market and Embarcadero streets in San Francisco at 10:30am.

This will be the 4th year that 10,000 right wingers will be bussed in to San Francisco for their annual “Walk for Life– West Coast.” Organizers of the “Walk for Life” want to strip women of their rights to a safe and legal abortion.

We need YOU to participate in forming a counter-demonstration by joining the January 19th Coalition. Your ideas, energy and outreach are urgently needed.

We demand: free, accessible abortion on demand; no forced sterilization; health care; pre- and post-natal care and childcare for all; safe and accessible contraceptives; the end of discrimination of GLBTQI and queer communities; sexual freedom and quality sex education.

The next January 19th Coalition meetings are Wednesday January 9th and Wednesday January 16th from 7:00-8:30pm at New Valencia Hall, 625 Larkin Street, Suite 202, San Francisco (a few blocks from Civic Center BART and on the Muni lines 19 and 31).

For more information, please call (415) 864-1278 or email the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights at bacorrinfo@gmail.com. Or check out www.bacorr.org. Everyone is welcome.

If you can’t make a meeting just show up at 10:30am on 1/19/08, Justin Herman Plaza, SF.

I’m glad to hear that Hillary Clinton and John McCain won in Hew Hampshire. I hope the rest of the early primary states continue a trend of mixed results so that those of us voting later feel like we’re actually participating in the election (of course, states voting after Super Duper Tuesday might not be so lucky).

Absentee ballots are going out this week in California. Given that more than 40 percent of the voters for the last California election voted by mail, it’s possible that a huge number of Californians will vote before the results of the other early primaries are known. Which means that some voters in California might actually vote without using earlier primary results as a criteria.

For a while, it looked like once again a small number of voters would have a hugely disproportionate effect on the presidential race. Headlines kept reading like Clinton was almost out of the running and that Barack Obama was the new front-runner. I find this so disturbing. As John Edwards said today after his 3rd place finish, even after NH has voted, less than one half of one percent of the country’s voters have had a shot at this. Why should so few people determine who’s the front-runner and who isn’t? And they really can because in addition to the media, polls showed a marked difference before and after the Iowa caucuses. Fortunately, the polls did not accurately predict the actual votes.

I completely understand that the idea with staggered votes is to give smaller states a chance to have presidential candidates visit them, but is what we have now really better than a national primary? It’s always the same two states that vote first. And Iowa and New Hampshire are not exactly representative of the rest of the country (for one thing, both states have relatively few people of color voting).