By Debra Sweet
Despite what you may have seen on the screen Tuesday night, there were little pockets of truth-telling at Hofstra University.
World Can’t Wait and the kNOw Drones tour were out with two drone replicas driving home the message “Stop the Drone War!” and “Humanity and the Planet Come First!” Act-Up and Queerocracy brought the real lives of people suffering with AIDS to the media. Access to abortion and birth control was a contended question, too.
And Green Party candidate Jill Stein called the debate commission, which kept all third party candidates out of the debates, “entirely illegitimate.” Jill and her running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested trying to enter the Hofstra campus, and held for eight hours in a warehouse set up for protest detainees. They were chained to chairs until after the debate ended. Democracy Now reported:
Like other third-party candidates, Stein was blocked from participating in the debate by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties. Stein and Honkala were held for eight hours, handcuffed to chairs. As she was being arrested, Stein condemned what she called “this mock debate, this mockery of democracy.”
World Can’t Wait activists reported, “There was a group of Obama supporters apparently organized by the campaign, some of whom took the palm cards we were passing out and some of whom tried to deny Obama was using drones and had a kill list. We challenged the teenagers among them to go home and do their research about those and the other things we say on the card the next president will continue to do.”
Share this video from a news show in Cincinnati with those you know who don’t believe Obama has a kill list. Nick Mottern (kNOw Drones) was quoted by patch.com:
Not only are these drone strikes terrorizing and killing innocent Afghan civilians, says Know Drones’ founder Nick Mottern, of Hastings on Hudson, but they are breeding more hatred among those in the Middle East toward America.
“It’s a heavy weight to bear morally, but to think you can kill people in other countries with no consequences, no blow-back, is infantile … It’s adding gasoline to the fire,” Mottern said. “The people in Afghanistan not only don’t like that we’re killing them with drones, but they are insulted that we would send this machine to kill them like bugs rather than sending someone to fight them.”
 |
 |
View more photos here and here.
If I don’t spend much time in these messages demolishing illusions that Mitt Romney would be fit to be run things, it’s because we value the political astuteness of our audience. You came together to drive out the Bush regime. I appreciated the woman who asked Romney, within the confines of last night’s debate, why he wouldn’t be the same as Bush. The problem is that both Romney and Obama advance policies to the right of Bush on key questions.
For those who have written me heartfelt messages — I hope I’ve answered all you personally — asking whether to vote, or who to vote for in this election.
Be very engaged in the real issues affecting humanity and the planet. Join World Can’t Wait in speaking and acting in defense of people’s rights against domestic political repression and mass incarceration; for a real end to U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and threats to bomb Iran.
{jathumbnail off images=”images/abortion/prochoiceatHofstra.jpg,images/stories/Hofstra/Hofstrastudentsforpeace.jpg”}