GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





The event of the day is VOTING in the City and school elections...

...Early voting is open from 7-7 today. Just go do it!





Great TDW lunch on Saturday

Two $500 scholarships were given to Sarah Hall of AMCHS and Dionysius Williams of BHS. Congratulations to them. If you would like to contribute to the scholarship please send your check to TDW at P.O. Box 4568, Bryan 77805

Go to our website in a few days to see pictures of the young women as well as pictures of the TDW state convention in Austin. Ima Blue, the TDW mascot donkey made a star appearance. www.brazosdems.org





This is why we vote: Because we can!

The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and with their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic." They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on November 15, 1917 (a mere 87 years ago), when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food -- all of it colorless slop -- was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie "Iron Jawed Angels." It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was -- with herself. "One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie," she said. "What would those women think of the way I use -- or don't use -- my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn." The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her "all over again."

HBO will run the movie periodically before releasing it on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum.

We are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order. It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. The doctor admonished the men: "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."

Please pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women.

-Connie Schultz, The Plain Dealer, 1801 Superior Ave.,Cleveland, OH 44114, Cschultz@plaind.com, August 2004





Probe of USS Cole Bombing Unravels

Plotters Freed in Yemen; U.S. Efforts Frustrated

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 4, 2008; A01

ADEN, Yemen -- Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.

Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Yemeni authorities jailed him again after receiving complaints from Washington. But U.S. officials have so little faith that he's still in his cell that they have demanded the right to perform random inspections.

Two suspects, described as the key organizers, were captured outside Yemen and are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Many details of their alleged involvement remain classified. It is unclear when -- or if -- they will be tried by the military.

The collapse of the Cole investigation offers a revealing case study of the U.S. government's failure to bring al-Qaeda operatives and their leaders to justice for some of the most devastating attacks on American targets over the past decade.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/03/AR2008050302047_pf.html





Dear MoveOn member,

Remember the Pepsi-Coke Challenge? Here's a new twist: Try the Bush-McCain Challenge--our new online quiz--and see if you can tell the difference between Bush and McCain!

We challenge you to tell them apart--it's harder than you'd think.

Ready to get started? Just click a button below to start this new 3-minute challenge:

Q: After Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003, who said "Mission Accomplished"?

Play a round, then send it to your friends.

The Bush-McCain Challenge is a great way to show that voting for McCain is basically like voting for a third term of Bush. On every important issue facing our country, they stand together.

John McCain has built a moderate image (much like George W. Bush, who first ran for president as a "compassionate conservative" promising a "humble" foreign policy)--but the Bush-McCain Challenge tells the real story.

This email is just the start. Next week, ads will go up on CNN.com and other top news websites. MoveOn members will set up tables outside of McCain events and do the Challenge. And we may even take it to TV.

It starts with you. Will you take the Bush-McCain Challenge right now, then send it to your friends? If you get five friends to play, we'll send you a new bumper sticker. Click here to play:

http://www.Bush-McCainChallenge.com/?id=12561-546643-Ox3ogE

Thank you for all you do.

--Noah, Karin, Lenore, Daniel, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Friday, May 2nd, 2008





Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America