Author: Ruby Sinreich

Posted by an acquaintance on alt.music.chapel-hill:

Population of Washington, DC (just the city, not the metro area) in
2000: 572,000
Population of US Troops in Iraq: approx. 150,000

which gives us:

Fatalities per 10,000 population in DC since May 1: 1.15
Fatalities per 10,000 US Troop Population in Iraq since May 1: 3.47

Good comparison!

And let’s not even think about the Iraqi fatality rate.

Bring them home now!

At times like this (when I’m a slack ‘blogger), it’s great to see some other folks kicking ass. The Daily KOS covers mainstream politics from a smart, insider-Democratic perspective. The author watches the polls much more closely than I can stand to, so it’s a pleasure to read his analysis of how the candidate cattle call is doing.

The Howard Dean campaign’s “Blog for America” is a great idea, but it really only appeals to religious Deaniacs. I am getting excited about his campaign. When’s that last time we saw a energetic, smart, progressive Democrat who understood grassroots organizing? But still, I don’t buy the cult of personality, and the guy is way right of me. (No duh, I am a socialist.)

ImNotSorry.net allows women to tell positive stories of abortion. This responds to the many right-wing activists (including Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) who perpetuate the myth that all women feel remorse and regret over their abortions.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention Behind Every Choice is a Story by my boss, Gloria Feldt.

Nice to see the quick death of one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, the Policy Analysis Market. DARPA officials defended this, comparing the fate of entire nations of people to pork belly futures. This is beyond belief, I feel strange even having to point out the moral repugnance and inhumanity of this.

“Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective
and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information,” the
Defense Department said in a statement. “Futures markets have proven
themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they
are often better than expert opinions.”

I’m too lazy and outraged to write more, here are some links:

For those of you holding your breath in suspense (yeah, right), I have received no other response to my e-mail to the president than the autoresponse enumerated below. I have also e-mailed him on other matters with the same response. In fact, I was very disturbed to learn this week that my (Democratic) Congressman is taking a cue from the President! Here is his entire response to an e-mail I sent about defunding Plan Colombia:

Thank you for contacting me via electronic mail. I appreciate your taking the time to let me know of your concerns and your views on issues before the Congress.

Because of the tremendous volume of non-constituent email that I receive, I am no longer able to process and respond to email sent directly to this address. If you are from the Fourth District of North Carolina, please use the link below to visit my Web Site and send me a message online:

http://www.house.gov/price/Email_David.htm

Again, thank you for your interest in the important and difficult issues facing our country.

Sincerely,

David Price, Member of Congress
www.house.gov/price

I just sent this via e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov, the autoresponse is below. If I get a substantive reply, I’ll post it here.

Dear Mister President,

I read in the news of the changes to your policies on how people can contact you online. I have a few areas of concern about this new policy. The biggest is that if you no longer accept messages through this e-mail address, it will be very much harder for people to reach you. I’m sure you realize that frequent and vigorous contact with the people you serve is a cornerstone of representative democracy.

The web form is quite onerous, especially for people with slow Internet connections. In addition, your PDF-formatted response is not accessible to everyone. Having your own computer with Adobe Acrobat on it shouldn’t be a requirement for civic engagement. What about folks using public computers in libraries where they cannot add extra software?

The first page in which you ask the disposition and topic of the writer was quite shocking to me. If nothing else, the first question (I am writing a “supporting comment/differing opinion”) will have a chilling effect on dissent. Any social studies teacher will remind us that our country was founded on the need for citizens to have effective channels to express their opinions (be they positive, negative, or simply questioning) about their government and it’s policies.

Finally, your provided topics are quite limited. What choices are available for someone who wants to discuss the domestic economy or unemployment? In fact, my comment itself doesn’t fit into your categories, hence I am forced to write you directly via e-mail. May I suggest that you add an “Other” topic to let citizens know that all comments are welcome.

Thank you for your time and service to the country.

Sincerely,

Ruby Sinreich
313 Sunset Drive
Chapel Hill, NC 27516

The heartfelt reply from Autoresponder@WhiteHouse.GOV [sic]:

Thank you for e-mailing President Bush. Your ideas and comments are very
important to him.

Because of the large volume of e-mail received, the President cannot personally
respond to each message. However, the White House staff considers and reports
citizen ideas and concerns.

In addition to President@WhiteHouse.gov, we have developed White House Web
Mail, an automated e-mail response system. Please access
http://www.whitehouse.gov/webmail to submit comments on a specific issue.

Additionally, we welcome you to visit our website for the most up-to-date
information on current events and topics of interest to you.

As I explained yesterday (and as reported in the Times) the President’s mandatory web contact form requires that the writer indicate which of a limited range of topics she is addressing and whether she intends to agree or disagree with the President in her comments.

Today I got a reponse to my letter from Desiree Thompson, Special Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Correspondence. Problem #1 is that it is in PDF format. So it prints all pretty, but if I do not have access to Adobe Acrobat, I can’t read it. Bigger problem #2 is that it is a form letter based somely on the topic I chose on the form (and probably my disposition to the POTUS as well). Since there was no topic for “bitching about access to my elected officals,” I chose “Foreign Policy : Human Rights,” since I beleive democratic government is a human right. Here’s their resonse to my letter (original text in yesterday’s post).

(click to download the PDF, 18k)

By the way, there must have been some kind of huge outcry, as the president@whitehouse.gov address now shows up on the Whitehouse web site again. Wonder what happens when you mail it? Stay tuned…

The New York Times reports today that it just got much harder for us to contact our President. Rather than accepting simple e-mails, people with something to say now have to complete several pages of webforms including questions regarding our agreement with Bush policies, and then reply to an autoresponder to confirm our e-mail address. This is a substantial barrier to that pesky ol’ civic engagement. The obvious fact is that the White House – and an increasing number of federal and state legislators – doesn’t want to hear from you. And what do you think of that?

I just went to check out the situation at their website and was disturbed to find that it looks like someone hacked CNN. That is, the site acts as a news service more than a public government agency. So after seeking around for a while, I found a tiny contact link at the bottom of a page. On the resulting page I clicked the link that says White House Web Mail, and I got an error message.

I clicked a few more times and I eventually got a page with all the graphics broken and a seriously disturbing form! This is what it actually says (lines between each page of the form, my comments in italic):

So of course I wrote a “supporting comment:”

Congratulations on your new web-mail-form system! I love how the very first question asks whether the person agrees with you or not. That way you can easily sort all the junk into the “circular file” without wasting any valuable staff time, right?

By refusing to accept e-mail and erecting such comprehensive barriers to communication, you have once again stifled the voice of the American people. You must be proud of how thoroughly you have eroded the democratic system by outlawing the kind of civil dissent our nation was founded on.

Keep up the good work. At this rate I’m sure I will be able to stop voting entirely soon. Or is that, I will not be allowed to? Oh well. I sign off, your loyal American patriot.

Sincerely,
Ruby Sinreich

I am a little concerned that doing this will re-activate my FBI file, which has probably been dormant since I graduated from college about 10 years ago. Oh well, it’s long past time for looking out for ourselves. It’s time to make some sacrifices before our hands are completely tied – metaphorically or literally.

An interesting project cataloging thousands of self-potraits in reflective surfaces.

Well, it’s of little use, but it’s nice to see the mainstream media using the term “Bush’s credibility firestorm.” Wonder how long that will last before we’re whipped into the latest frenzy about some far-away weirdo threatening our great nation…