Salon.com > Alix Christie

Suppressing the overseas vote

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:49:00 +0000

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat is pumped. Two weeks ago, sitting in an Internet cafe on Munich's Odeonplatz, the software marketer who crafted a hugely successful voter registration Web site, pulls up numbers that show a remarkable spike in Americans overseas mobilizing to defeat George W. Bush. Between her site and another out of Hong Kong, Democrats have registered 140,000 new voters, 40 percent of them from swing states -- and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Americans abroad, roused to a boiling fury by a Bush doctrine that has smeared America's good name across the globe, are looking like the "silent swing vote" in several key battleground states. Overseas registration for both parties is up by 400 percent over 2000; estimates put the tally of possible civilian votes as high as 2 million.

Anti-Semitic — or anti-Sharon?

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 22:26:00 +0000

Two springs ago, the streets and Web sites of Europe erupted in a paroxysm of anti-Israeli rage summed up by one word: "Jenin." Across the continent, leftists organized to protest the deadly Israeli raid on the Palestinian refugee camp. One leaflet showed Uncle Sam with a hooked Jewish nose dangling the globe on a string. Another urged a trade boycott on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. There were dark mutterings of an "East Coast" Jewish lobby and tracts describing suicide bombings as the "independence movements of oppressed minorities" on the Net. Demonstrations contained banners equating the Star of David with a swastika.

By the following spring, when America invaded Iraq, the European left had mobilized the largest antiwar protests in memory. In Paris, Berlin, London and elsewhere, millions marched in a massive rejection of the Bush administration's policy. There were unionists and socialists, communists and peaceniks and greens -- and in their ranks, like little unexploded mines, neo-Nazis in Palestinian kaffiyehs and radical Muslims who chanted "Death to Jews" and decked their kids out as suicide bombers. Some marches ended in fisticuffs: In Strasbourg, France, extremists trying to attack a synagogue were forcibly restrained. But at others, demonstrators reacted to the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric belatedly, if at all.

The cord-blood controversy

Mon, 17 Jul 2000 19:26:00 +0000

First we were told to bury the placenta in the backyard under a full moon -- unless we were willing to dice it into a risotto and share it with our closest friends. Now my husband and I -- awaiting the birth of our second child -- are informed of the miraculous new properties in the afterbirth. Now we are supposed to put it in a private "bank" as medical salvation for our unborn child.

As a person who only reads baby magazines in the obstetrician waiting room, I had remained ignorant of the brisk new business in umbilical cord blood banking that had sprung up since my last pregnancy. Suddenly I was the bloated target of ads promising "biological insurance" for a mere $1,500 plus $100 per year in storage fees. All I had to do, according to the Cord Blood Registry, was realize "why it is so important to store your baby's umbilical cord blood stem cells." Once I was with the program, I would need to decide whether to freeze this purported "gift of life" or simply waste it. (It was, it seems, less a choice than a matter of life and death.)