Protest Palin Visit Sept. 25!
On September 25, Democrats and progressives in the San Francisco Bay Area will have a rare opportunity to show Sarah Palin and the Republicans exactly what we think of them. Between 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. that Thursday, Silicon Valley Republicans Tom and Stacey Siebel will host a fundraiser luncheon with Palin at their home in Woodside. The address is 3000 Portola Road, Woodside/Redwood City CA 94062 (see MapQuest, Google). Local Republicans will be shelling out a minimum of $1000 per person to attend the luncheon, and those who raise $50,000 or more will get a seat at the headtable and three photos with Palin. The California GOP lists Caitlin Ashlock (310-309-2101, cashlock@mccain08hq.com) as primary contact for those interested in attending.
The Bay Area is not friendly territory for Republicans, so it seems a little unlikely that McCain/Palin will be planning any protestable public events here. A fundraising event such as Palin's at the Siebel home Sept. 25 does provide an opportunity, however, to make the Republicans feel unwelcome and to draw some negative media attention to the McCain campaign. Tom Siebel, founder and CEO of Siebel Systems, is well-known as a Republican donor and fundraiser. His home is in a hilly, wooded part of San Mateo County about 30 miles south of San Francisco, Portola a rather narrow road along which demonstrators may form an "avenue of protest" to greet Palin and her donors as they arrive.
Bay Area Democrats and progressives should organize for this event and tell Sarah Palin to go back to Alaska.
See also: San Jose Mercury-News, Indybay, Valleywag.
Mark C. Eades
People, stop the emotional nonsense and focus on the issues. Go read Obama's detailed plan for our country for crying out loud.
What would you rather have? Cut taxes for those making over 5 million (=McCain/Bush/Palin) or cut taxes for those making under $250,000 (Obama/Clinton/Biden)?
And if that didn't scare you, think of this - remember John Ashcroft, Bush's attorney general? He's been building hundreds of CONCENTRATION CAMPS right here in the US for US citizens who oppose the government to be thrown in indefinitely, with a capacity to hold hundreds of thousands of citizens. Legislature has already been passed legalizing this, but no, Sarah Palin is more important news. Just google it, blind America.
Any sort of camp like that would surely be overthrown and many guards would be killed, and then those who could be locked up in concentration camps would have a real reason to violently take out every politician who participated in that non-sense.
People who oppose the government pay most of the taxes and if McCain lets the rich get wealthier, and we all know the rich don't pay taxes, then America would surely have to be bought out by Foreign interest groups. And then a Civil War would begin and this country would once again be thrown into turmoil.
So please take your concentration camp idea to Iran or even Iraq where they really have those camps for terrorists.
It is also against the law to force the military to shoot, or arrest, their own people. Read the Constitution.
As to concentration camps, the US government has been seriously prepared to round up anyone to the left of the John Birch Society at least since the 1950s, and this is the latest round, all of which should be taken seriously. Round ups of the Left have occurred in American history, including but not limited to attacks on the IWW, socialists and communists at the beginning of the 20th century, especially right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which ended the imperialist slaughter known as World War 1, officially ended in 1918. The US military has been proven to be active perpetrators of concentration camps, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to secret prisons on military ships to the military brig where an American citizen was horribly tortured for years in South Carolina, and then they dared to try him for a completely different reason, after he literally lost his mind. A soldier by definition is a paid professional killer around the world, and the racism and brutality in the military is training for perpetrating all kinds of heinous crimes, including concentration camps, torture, mass murder and all the other crimes against humanity the Nazi military perpetrated. The US military perpetrated these same heinous crimes in Korea and Vietnam, and throughout history from slaughtering Native Americans to slaughtering Filipinos in the "Spanish-American War" to the slaughter of the people of Haiti many times, to the slaughter of many Latin Americans many times, to the slaughter of the people of the Middle East, to the slaughter of the people of Yugoslavia and much more. The US military exists to guarantee maximum profits for the capitalist corporations represented by the Democrat-Republican.
When you get done picketing McCain/Palin, be sure to picket Obama/Biden, as they have the same reactionary agenda, and the Obama campaign says so every chance it gets. For more information, see:
1. “The Obama Craze: Count Me Out” of 2/27/08 by Matt Gonzalez
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5413
2.. Twelve Issues that Matter for 2008:
http://www.votenader.org/issues/
3. ""US Political Establishment Lines Up Behind Barack Obama" by Patrick Martin, 2/4/08, World Socialist Website,
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/feb2008/obam-f04.shtml
"Among those backing the Obama campaign are such pillars of the US political establishment as Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and an arch-Cold Warrior; retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak and a host of other retired military brass; billionaire Warren Buffett, the second-richest man in America; and an array of Wall Street and corporate executives, none of whom could be suspected of any sympathy for radical social change."
4. Barack Obama's Crown Dynasty Connection, 2/24/07 at http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/76429/index.php
5. "Barack Obama and the Euphoria of Madness by Larry Pinkney, a former Black Panther Party member and Editorial Board member of BlackCommentator.com, at
http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/81347/index.php
6. "The Obama Illusion" by Paul Street, February 2007, Z Magazine at: http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2007/streetpr0207.html (This has lots of references to comments by The Black Commentator
7. Supporting war and repudiating the protests of the 1960s, supporting religious programs, promoting the death penalty. See http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jul2008/obam-j02.shtml
Further, Obama supports "faith-based" programs violating his oath of office to uphold the Constitution, including the church/state separation mandate of the First Amendment. He also supports that US military base in the Middle East which exists to protect US oil profits, namely Israel. He is also anti-gay marriage but claims he opposes Prop 8, the anti-gay California initiative. The Republicans also support promoting religion with our tax dollars, support Israel,oppose gay marriage and support the death penalty. Both Obama and McCain support medical insurance companies. Neither want universal health care paid for with our tax dollars as exists in the rest of the industrialized world. These 2 millionaires cannot possibly represent the workingclass.
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