L.A.’s DTS ballots to be counted

I’m still around, just quiet. I’ll be back sometime next week, probably.

In the meantime, though, the Courage Campaign reports that Los Angeles County’s “double bubble” ballots will be counted.

Two links

I’m probably going to be updating very sporadically for the next few weeks. In the meantime, two links:

- CENSORED NEWS: This is a blog detailing the northern route of the Longest Walk 2. A group of Native American activists and their supporters started in San Francisco and, at last check, are now in Pollock Pines, California (there is apparently a second group starting in the southern part of California as well). They’re headed for Washington D.C., supporting Native American rights. From what I’ve been seeing so far, there seems to be a lot of support for this from the APIA community around here, which is fantastic. I love hearing about it when we realize that we’re not cut off from each other — all of us are hurt by injustice, no matter who the victim is.

- hexpletive’s Sorry Day…. at last: Hexyhex comments on Australian PM Kevin Rudd’s speech apologizing to indigenous Australians for past injustices. Also, Hoyden about Town has a running list of commentary on the apology.

Blog Redirect: The New Jersey Four

BFP has an update on the New Jersey Four and a link to a new website up at her place. Click.

Teen drowns crossing the border

For once, someone in border patrol is showing some compassion.

PROGRESO - A teenage boy apparently drowned Sunday night trying to illegally swim across the Rio Grande River, officials said.

His body has not been recovered, but apparently the boy screamed to his mother and two other siblings who were unable to help him. A family relative reported the incident to Border Patrol who spent the afternoon in the area of the Progresso International Bridge searching for his body.

“The mother is hurt and she really could not have seen (her son) in the dark,” said Oscar Saldaña, a local spokesperson for the Border Patrol. “She did hear her son cry out for help that he was drowning last night.”

At this point, Saldaña said Border Patrol agents are not investigating the crossing of the other family members.

“There will be another time for the issue,” Saldana said. “We would just like to bring closure to this assistance call.” [Full story]

Via hermana resist, who draws attention to the disgusting comments some people are leaving in response to this story. [Source]

I can’t imagine ever making a comment like this one: “did they find his bloated body yet? maybe we can put it on our side of the river as a PSA to quit coming over illegaly. then maybe we can poke it with a stick” All I can think of is, “How would I feel if that were my sister? My mother? My niece?” I can’t imagine what that poor boy’s family must be going through.

You know, I’ve been poor. There were a couple of times when my family had to borrow money to eat, a couple of times when that meant nothing but Kraft Mac and Cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for a week or two at a time, occasionally supplemented by packaged foods rescued from grocery store dumpsters. But even so, we were never at the point where we had to sneak into a country where the government taught people to hate us just so my parents could feed us kids. We were never at the point where our family would have risked life and limb to get somewhere else, where hard work for low pay in unsafe conditions would have looked good.

It’s time for people in the U.S. to stop hating people in that position, and start solving the issues that cause those problems. Because the U.S. has had a major role in causing them. NAFTA has made it extremely difficult for farmers in Mexico to compete with market prices for crops. Biofuel research is driving up the cost of basic crops everywhere, and people are turning to those crops rather than raising food. It’s not even helping the environment — in fact, it might be increasing global warming. [Source]

A loud majority of people in the U.S. do not think of people in other countries as people. It’s time that stopped.

The other Obama

I haven’t meant to focus so much on U.S. election politics in the past few days. In a way, these entries are the more naive part of myself warring with the cynic; do I believe in the presidency, or don’t I? Do I believe in politics, or don’t I? The answer to both of those questions have been, “No, I really don’t.” So why do I care?

It’s not just that Barack Obama has inspired me — though he is a damn good speaker, and he has, in fact, inspired me a bit.

It’s also a lot to do with Michelle Obama. So I’m going to link this speech (broken up into seven parts), in which Michelle Obama speaks a lot of truth, and then move on to other topics that are less entwined with the Democratic primary.

Friday Night Dance Party: Hip hop meets tinikling

I would never, ever be able to do this, even if my knees worked.

Double bubble trouble update

A group of voters has come together and demanded a hand recount of DTS ballots in Los Angeles County. However, the registrar of voters has refused to do such a count. So they’ve started a petition here. Anyone can sign the petition.

They also have a form for those who had difficulties voting DTS in L.A. County to fill out, here.

Just passing it along.

Media makers, media changers

Today is a day for media makers and media changers, at least in my world. A couple of the things that have come across my path so far today:

• From Rachel, a link to a Washington Post article.

  You could call it a sit-in, of sorts. Perhaps a sketch-in would be more appropriate, a comic call to arms, with cartoonists of color protesting for greater presence in newspaper pages. Protesting in the best way they know: drawing about it, en masse, all on the same day.

  Because, these artists say, “Candorville” does not equal “Boondocks” or “Curtis” or “Wee Pals” or “Herb and Jamaal.” And “La Cucaracha” does not equal “Baldo” or “Gordo” and especially not “Cafe con Leche.”

  But for one day — this Sunday — 11 cartoonists of color will be drawing essentially the same comic strip, using irony to literally illustrate that point. In each strip, the artists will portray a white reader grousing about a minority-drawn strip, complaining that it’s a “Boondocks” rip-off and blaming it on “tokenism.” “It’s the one-minority rule,” says Lalo Alcaraz (”La Cucaracha”). “We’ve got one black guy and we’ve got one Latino. There’s not room for anything else.” [Full story]

• From my sister, a link to several documentary projects by young filmmakers sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities. How I See It follows teenagers in Fresno as they create a documentary about Hmong, African American and Latino farmers and farm workers, teens in Siskiyou County and from the Karuk Nation as they explore the history of the area, Khmer girls in Long Beach as they explore the refugee experience, formerly homeless young people in Los Angeles as they tell their stories, and several other groups of young people sharing their views of the world.
• The National Conference for Media Reform will be held in Minneapolis from June 6 to 8. The conference will be bringing together “activists, media makers, educators, journalists, policymakers and concerned citizens in calling for real and lasting changes to our nation’s media system.” This sounds pretty awesome.
• And I realized that the Allied Media Conference has gone live with the date for the next AMC: June 20-22 in Detroit. Also awesome!

I really want to go to both conferences, but with moving and two weddings this summer, I don’t know if I can swing it. But I wanted to share the info in case anyone else wanted to head out there!

Barack Obama on Latina Lista

Latina Lista sent invitations to the major presidential candidates, to write a guest post for her blog. Well, Barack Obama took her up on it. He writes:

… when I’m President, I will put comprehensive immigration reform back on the nation’s agenda during my first year in office, and I will not rest until it is passed once and for all.

We must create an immigration system that strengthens our security while strengthening our families and reaffirming our heritage as a nation of immigrants — a nation dedicated to giving weary travelers from around the world the chance to achieve their dreams.

That’s the America that answered my father’s letters and his prayers and brought him here from Kenya so long ago.

But the struggle does not end there.

At 21 percent, the national Latino high school dropout rate is more than twice the national average. Once more, under current law students who do excel in and out of school that were brought here as undocumented immigrant children have no hope of attending college with affordable in-state tuition.

We need to close the achievement gap between Latino and other students, reduce the high school dropout rate, and finally enact the DREAM Act so that every child can have the chance to attend college. [Full story]

There’s more. Go take a look.

Call ’shenanigans’ on Los Angeles County

Hundreds of thousands of non-partisan voters in Los Angeles County may have been disenfranchised yesterday.

Almost 20% of California voters are registered as “Decline-to-State” (DTS). About 776,000 of these DTS voters live in Los Angeles County. To vote for President, like other DTS voters across the state, LA County DTS voters had to ask for a “Democratic Party ballot” on Tuesday (see funny, now prophetic video here).

However, in Los Angeles County — and only Los Angeles County — these DTS voters were given a special “Democratic Party” ballot that required voters not only to fill out a bubble for their favorite Democratic Party presidential candidate, but ALSO to fill in a bubble at the top that they wanted to vote “Democratic” — a redundant requirement. According to the Los Angeles County ROV, if the DTS voter didn’t fill in the redundant “Democratic” bubble, their vote would not be counted.

This is what we are calling “double bubble trouble”.

The Courage Campaign, thanks to our lawyer Steven Reyes’ eagle eyes, discovered that a failure to mark the “Democratic” bubble resulted in the vote not being counted. Regardless of the clear-cut intentions of voters, the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters (ROV) is refusing to do what is necessary to count these ballots. [Full story]

In addition to disenfranchising voters, this may have also changed the outcome of the Democratic race in Los Angeles County.

Non-partisan voters are demanding that their ballots be counted, regardless of whether they filled in the “Yes, I’m voting Democratic on a Democratic Party ballot where I voted for a Democratic candidate” bubble or not. They won’t get a recount if they don’t get attention, though. L.A. city attorney Rocky Delgadillo is also demanding an investigation. [Source]

Please spread this around. If you can get it to members of the news media, do so. Write letters to the editor (ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE IN THE L.A. AREA). The more attention this gets and the more of an issue people make of it, the more likely the non-partisan ballots will be recounted. But please do not use this situation to represent for either Clinton or Obama — neither deserves to have their campaign tainted the way Al Gore’s was, with accusations of childish recount demands.

Regardless of who non-partisan voters chose to cast their ballot for, if they cast a ballot, it should be counted, whether they filled in the “Yes, I’m voting Democratically on a Democratic ballot for a Democratic candidate” bubble or not.