———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle – kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 2:01 PM
Subject: Piglets Of The Flood – Iowa Rescues Give Birth

KINSHIP CIRCLE PRIMARY – PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST

10/14/08: UPDATE: Piglets Of The Flood – Iowa Rescues Give Birth

DATE: 7/28/08…9/9/08
SOURCE: Midwest Flood Pig Rescue Blog, floodrescue2008.blogspot.com/
Images From A Flood, www.kinshipcircle.org/disasters/relief/08-07-03.html

PHOTOS COURTESY OF FARM SANCTUARY, www.farmsanctuary.org

FROM KINSHIP CIRCLE

When Iowa floods saturated nearly 80% of the state this summer, Iowa’s Veterinary Response Coordinator enlisted Kinship Circle Animal Disaster Aid Network to staff staging areas at Johnson County Fairgrounds in Iowa City and Lee County Fairgrounds in Donnellson, Iowa. By June 14, 2008 we were in daily conference calls with the state EOC (Emergency Operations Center). We contacted Best Friends Rapid Response Team and asked Iowa officials to form an agreement with them (MOU) for water rescue in Louisa, Des Moines, Lee, Johnson or Linn counties…. Over June and July, Kinship Circle volunteers traveled to Iowa for emergency pet sheltering, transport and rescue operations.

PHOTO: Molly Wald, Best Friends, www.bestfriends.org

IN THE MEANTIME, PIGS WERE EVERYWHERE…Adrift from flooded hog farms, some still encased in crates. While 40,000 were pre-evacuated, an estimated 4,000 (or more) pigs died. Some who’d scrambled atop levees were shot dead by officials concerned they’d ruin sandbags. Many more drowned. Kinship Circle contacted Farm Sanctuary to ask their Emergency Rescue Team to come to Iowa. KC volunteers Cheri Deatsch, Bob Rude, David Halperin and Craig Hill assisted Farm Sanctuary in initial pig rescues. Eventually “Operation Pig” grew so large, a coalition of Farm Sanctuary, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), American Humane Association (AHA), and Animal Rescue League of Boston recovered pigs from levee systems and treated many for severe sunburn, dehydration, etc. at a triage site in Iowa.

IOWA FLOOD RESCUE PHOTOS & TALES:

www.kinshipcircle.org/disasters/relief/08-07-03.html

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Writer-slash-environmentalist Nick Jans gives us an Alaskan’s view of Sarah Palin and her run for the White House.

It’s a great piece – really, I could excerpt the whole damn thing – but this piece in particular is worth noting:

Palin pushed hard, along with sport hunting and guiding interests, to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have stopped the state’s current aerial wolf control program, which had been criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council for flawed science. Now her administration has pointedly refused to respond to repeated public information requests (I’m one of the petitioners, and a potential litigant), regarding the apparently illegal killing of 14 wolf pups at their dens on the Alaska Peninsula this spring by state personnel, including two high-level Department of Fish and Game administrators. A biologist at the scene admitted to an independent wolf scientist that the 6-week-old pups were held down and shot in the head, one by one. This inhumane practice, known as “denning,” has been illegal for 40 years. But a simple request for information on the details of this operation, including to what extent the governor was involved in the decision, has resulted in a typical Palinesque roadblock and a string of untruths.

Sarah Palin, “my friends,” is a “pro-life,” God-fearing evangelical. And yet (according to her and hers), it’s atheists like moi who lack morals.

Anyway, Jans explains how Palin can claim to be a genuine Alaskan while simultaneously working to destroy the land she calls home, vis-à-vis her policy of pillaging the environment, to hell with the consequences:

In the broadest sense, Palin is a poseur. Alaska is too large and culturally diverse (it’s only a bit smaller than the entire lower 48 east of the Mississippi, and once was divided into four time zones) to be summed up by some abstract, romanticized notion. And even if it could be, it sure wouldn’t be symbolized by Palin. “The typical Alaskan? She couldn’t be farther from it,” says Alaska House Minority Leader Beth Kertulla.

Still, Palin is a genuine Alaskan — of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the ’70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.

Palin’s Alaska is embodied in Wasilla, a blue-collar, sharp-elbowed town of burgeoning big box stores, suburban subdivisions, evangelical pocket churches and car dealerships morphing across the landscape, outward from Anchorage, the state’s urban epicenter. She has lived in Wasilla practically all her life, and even now resides there, the first Alaska executive to eschew the white-pillared mansion in Juneau, down on the Southeast Panhandle.

Go read the whole thing.

Note to the rest of the Salon staff: this is a perfect example of how to criticize a female politician without resorting to misogyny and sexist slurs. It’s the policies, stupid! (As opposed to, you know, the vag-n-mams.)

(Crossposted from.)

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare 2008 elections sarah palin wolves aerial hutnign hunting aerial gunning denning pups wolf pups environment alaska nick jans

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle – kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 3:19 PM
Subject: ACT/ Palin¹s Pro-Death Platform

KINSHIP CIRCLE PRIMARY – PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST AS WRITTEN

9/27/08: Palin’s Pro-Death Platform On Animals

Next Thursday, October 2, Washington University in St. Louis hosts the vice presidential debate featuring Republican Sarah Palin and Democrat Joe Biden. With the spotlight on vice-prez nominees, you have a great opportunity to send comments to newspapers, blogs and discussions. Let voters know about Governor Sarah Palin’s relentless assault on wildlife and environment.

Whatever your political affiliation, Palin is clearly NOT the candidate for animals….and animals are the focus of this list.

Below are talking points and ideas for your comments, but NEVER COPY AND SEND A FORM LETTER to a newspaper or other media. As soon as an “organized campaign” is suspected, comments are discarded.

======================

SARAH PALIN: THE CLIFF NOTES

======================

Top Facts Everyone Must Know About Sarah Palin

www.grizzlybay.org/SarahPalinInfoPage.htm

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My bathroom flooded last night, so no blogging today. Go watch this instead.

(Crossposted from.)

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Tagged: 2008 elections sarah palin gina gershon video funny or die the killa from wasilla animal rights animal welfare hunting

Via Feminist Majority:

Deadlines to register to vote are approaching rapidly. With so much at stake in this historic election, be sure you are registered to vote. If not, in most states you must register immediately. Look up voter registration rules by state here.

You can sign the pledge to vote and forward it to your friends and family here.

(Crossposted from.)

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Tagged: action alerts feminist majority feminist campus video 2008 elections vote register to vote

Campaigning in Durham, North Carolina this morning, Obama p0wned Hillary re: her parroting of McCain’s supercilious “gas tax holiday” idea:

Senator McCain was the first one to propose a gas tax holiday. And then Senator Clinton immediately said, “Me, too.” And most of you probably have been reading the reports, if we suspended the gas tax for three months, as they propose, the most you could hope for would be a 30-cent-a-day savings for a grand total of $28 for the entire summer. That would be the savings best case scenario that you would get. But the fact is we tried this back in Illinois, back in 2000, and it’s been proposed in the past. And other states have done it. And typically, what happens is you eliminate the gas tax, and the oil companies simply make up the difference. They fill the gap. They stop up whatever perceived savings the consumers might have.

You’re paying the same amount of gas except now we no longer have the money going into the highway trust fund that builds our roads and our bridges, keeps us safe and puts thousands of people here in North Carolina to work. It’s a shell game.

Seriously, Hills, wtf are you thinking?!

Related: The green Democrat’s choice; Obama or Clinton: who’s greener? on Grist

(Crossposted from.)

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Tagged: 2008 elections hillary clinton barack obama john mccain gas gas tax gas tax holiday scams politics

One of my least favorite things about presidential elections – aside from the bitter partisanship, the misogyny and racism, the fear of additional conservative Supreme Court Justices, and the loss of my very personhood, of course – is all the dogdamn pandering to the redneck hunting lobby. (C’mon, like anyone took this seriously. Pffft!)

This cycle, it’s Hillary who’s selling out her humanity for the “sportsmen’s” murderer’s vote. Clinton’s comments of this morning, made in response to Obama’s comments of April 6, are what set me off, but in searching for the exact quote on teh internets, I found quite a few references to her Duck Hunter days. (See, I can condemn the misogyny directed at Hillary without blindly throwing her my vagina vote. Nay, nay, nay boiz!)

Here’s Clinton on February 18:

“I’ve hunted. My father taught me how to shoot,” she told a crowd at the Labor Temple in rural northern Wisconsin. “I remember standing in the cold water. It was so cold, you know, at first light. I was with a bunch of my friends, all men.

“And they all were playing a trick on me, and said, ‘We’re not going to shoot, you shoot,’ ’cause you know what they wanted to do. They wanted to embarrass me.

“So the pressure was on. So I shot, and I shot a banded duck.”

Awww! Isn’t that special. I think I’ll vote for her, because she’s snuffed out at least one life in the name of sport. She’ll be perfect to take over the war in Iraq!

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91% Mike Gravel
86% Dennis Kucinich
81% John Edwards
78% Chris Dodd
78% Barack Obama
77% Bill Richardson
74% Hillary Clinton
70% Joe Biden
39% Rudy Giuliani
36% John McCain
33% Mike Huckabee
30% Ron Paul
25% Mitt Romney
22% Tom Tancredo
18% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

I knew there was something I liked about Mike Gravel, creepy campaign ads aside. Although, they really should add in a question on dietary restrictions, since our shared veganism certainly would have put my score more in line with Kucinich’s.

(Crossposted from.)

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Tagged: quiz 2008 elections dennis kucinich mike gravel the internets

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle – kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Jan 17, 2008 1:13 AM
Subject: Which Candidates Speak For Animals?

KINSHIP CIRCLE PRIMARY – PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST

www.KinshipCircle.org

1/17/08: Which Candidates Speak For Animals?

The next leader of the free world faces one of the biggest “repair jobs” in modern history: The Iraq war, economy, domestic security, healthcare, education, international relations…and a host of other problems.

While animal advocates represent the entire political spectrum, many agree the current administration has failed miserably with regard to environmental and animal protection. Bush, Inc. has a miserable animal track record, and in fact, is known to staff animal-related agencies with industry insiders who speak for logging, oil, hunters, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals…

In spite of this, we’ve seen victories for animals in recent years. Imagine what we could achieve with an animal and free-speech friendly administration. Cast your vote with the animals in mind…

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