From Maggie Zhou, MA delegate to GPUS, to the peace contingent gathering for the 10/2/10 One Nation Working Together march in Washington, D.C.

Brothers and Sisters,

We are here today because we are angry at the multitude of problems that our government is responsible for, the many ways the system has failed us, and we recognize the root causes of all these problems are the same, and therefore they require common solutions.

Many of us here are peace activists.  For nine years, we have been trying to stop the ongoing US wars for oil and for the expansion of the military-industrial complex.  In fact, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are epicenters of the larger war we’re waging against Mother Earth & her children.  It is where our death-dealing empire bombs the planet, drill her, bleed her for her oil, poison her with radioactivity, and rape her out of the life she had, the innocent lives of men, women and children, and the fertile soils that once was the food basket of the Middle East.

But, there are many other epicenters in this larger war against Mother Earth.  A massive hemorrhage was just inflicted in the Gulf of Mexico by one of the worst perpetrators in this war.  Mountain Top Removal coal mining has been denuding, defacing & poisoning the beautiful mountain ranges and streams of Appalachia and the entire coal country.  Hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, for “natural gas” extraction, has been poisoning our groundwater, and consequently food production, anywhere it touched, and it’s taking over America with a vengeance.  Looking around the globe, the gazillion mines where we humans extract the insides of Mother Earth & poison her outside with it, the many shopping malls and pavements and parking lots we built in place of her life-giving forests and grasslands, the many dams we built that chokes the life out of her ecosystems, the diversion of her rivers & streams & precious groundwater reservoirs for monoculture, chemical-laiden farming operations, and now devastatingly, the crazed worldwide expansion of “energy crops” for biofuel, biomass & biochar production…  

The Boston Herald’s Hillary Chabot finishes her State House Insight series with this interview of Jill Stein. See the article here. All 4 videos below.

Woo-frickin-hoo!!!!!!!!

From the Jill Stein for Governor campaign:

Dear friends and supporters,

YOU DID IT!  YOU blew past the $100,000 we needed to ensure our place in the media consortium debate. Our voices will be heard! Voters will get to hear real vision and practical proposals for our common wealth and common health – not just the petty bickering of Beacon Hill insiders avoiding real issues.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!  Today just before the 5 p.m. deadline campaign staffers turned in qualifying contributions of over $129,000 to the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) – exceeding the required threshold for state matching funds. We are optimistic that the application will be approved, and we will keep you posted. If it is approved, we will have qualified our campaign for public financing, and every dollar we raise between now and the end of October will be matched by the state.

No matter what happens, though, it’s clear that a groundswell for democracy is rising up in this campaign. People sacrificed, people dropped everything, people put their lives on hold to make sure that we reached the threshold for debate inclusion and would not be silenced by the corporate press – and that we qualified for public finance matching funds. Your hard work and inspiration made it happen. Money is continuing to come in from all over the commonwealth, from everyday people who are fed up with the bailouts, layoffs, ripoffs and payoffs, and who are ready for  the healthy, secure green commonwealth that’s within our reach today!

Jill Stein’s campaign has about 24 hours to raise $25,515 in order to ensure that Jill’s voice will be included in these debates that are so important to the future of the Commonwealth. She has expanded the public dialogue and political discourse, and the media drumbeat to shut her out from future debates is raging. If Jill can qualify for state matching funds, however, the media will have a hard time trying to justify excluding a candidate receiving public funding for her campaign.

Two recent polls of U.S. voters confirm 2010 as an interesting political moment for America, and I think the implication for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election is quite striking. A USA Today/Gallup poll finds record support for a major third political party. While 62% of Tea Party supporters want a third party, 61% of liberals want the same! The poll’s conclusion is that “fifty-eight percent of Americans believe a third major political party is needed because the Republican and Democratic Parties do a poor job of representing the American people.”

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll, meanwhile, finds that women voters, who historically outnumber voting men, and historically support Democratic Party candidates, are less likely to vote this year. While the Times is opaque about the actual poll results, they claim “the poll suggests that they may stay home this year, giving more of the decision-making to men by default” and that “so far in this election, women have not been nearly as attentive as men and have expressed less enthusiasm about voting.”

Taken together, I think Jill Stein’s gubernatorial bid in Massachusetts just might serve as an impetus for women to voice their distaste, and for Massachusetts voters on the whole to advance a potent political alternative.

Let me start with the caveat that I think polling is a distraction from the important issues in any election, as is the obsession with the horse-race as the candidates surge and falter. In this election in particular, I think our very democracy is being called into question as media institutions using the public’s airwaves are deciding for their listeners, viewers, and readers just which candidates are worthy of hearing out. And they’re making some very anti-democratic decisions.

There’s also one polling institution, Rasmussen Reports, which has consistently approached this year’s gubernatorial race with an oddly biased lens. Since credible polling should be objective by definition, Rasmussen’s sweeping of Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jill Stein under the rug is, by all considerations, quite odd. If I was after an accurate read of how Massachusetts voters were likely to vote in November, I would, well, include all ballot-qualified candidates in my phone interviews. Why Scott Rasmussen would exclude and thereby undercut a capable, articulate, and thoughtful Green Party candidate is a question that can only be answered with speculation, or by Rasmussen himself. Some have called him a Republican pollster, but Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has ranked him quite favorably in his pollster-induced error ratings (he fares better than Suffolk University, for example), and he is not listed as a Republican pollster.