Granny D's 96th

[nofoil]

This came to me via e-mail today. Granny D is such a wonderful character!

Dear Friends,

January 24th, this coming week, is Doris "Granny D" Haddock's 96th birthday. She will spend it in travel, returning from a speech in Wisconsin to support their effort to enact the public financing of campaigns--a key issue in this Abramoff age.

On Saturday, February 4th, she will speak in Washington, D.C. at a counter-State of the Union rally, 11 a.m. at 17th and Constitution.

The latest move of the Bush junta to make us cower in fear is their sweeping up of all web search engine data. Will that work? I think it will instead make millions more Americans understand that this Administration must go. As for speaking out, there are still fearless people among us, and one of them is Doris.

Birthday idea: Please take a look at her project to get some street action going: http://TARandFEATHERS.org and, after you read it, send it along to your lists and to the orgs you belong to. Second idea--and I will lead the way with a contribution of my own--let's keep her on the road speaking out with small donations--no one is paying her way to DC, for instance, and she lives on Social Security. Checks should be payable to Doris Haddock and sent to her at P.O. Box 492, Dublin, New Hampshire 03444. Those envelopes will be great fun for her to open next week!

Sincerely,

Dennis Burke
volunteer in Phoenix, AZ

Ps. Bob Ney, U.S. Rep from Ohio, has been in the news for his ties to Abramoff. He was one of the guys who threatened to filibuster the McCain-Feingold bill in the U.S. House (where it was called the Shays-Meehan bill). Doris said, if he likes filibusters I will show him one, and she went into his office on Capitol Hill and stood her ground at a little podium, reading the endless list of his special-interest donors. She expected to be arrested of course, but Ney's chief of staff (who later went to work for Abramoff and is now also in hot water) was smarter than that and called Republican, Chris Shays, to ask her to stop. She wouldn't go against Mrs. Shays, so she ended her filibuster, but it was all over the newspapers on the Hill, and the filibuster was never attempted. The bill passed the next night.

A year earlier, when the measure was about to be debated in the Senate, Ney and his gang had come to Arizona and rented the city council chamber to put on a little circus of a U.S. House hearing, trying to show a C-Span audience that McCain had no support for soft money reforms even in his own state. We were in DC protesting, but Doris said, "you better run home." I got on the speakers list, somewhat under false pretenses, and had a fine time blasting Ney, Doolittle and others for their corrupting contributions. The hearing played on C-Span several times on the first day of Senate debate, so I would say Doris got the better of Ney twice.

I have also been reminded in recent days of a protest speech Doris made on the west steps fo the Capitol, after which she led a group of law students to the front door of the Justice Department, upon which they pasted a copy of the federal bribery statute. I'm glad they are finally reading that fine law. --db