(Mar Vista, CA) Anti-war Activist Cindy Sheehan and Reverend Lennox Yearwood of Louisiana join 36th District Progressive Candidate Marcy Winograd for an Out of Iraq Rally and Winograd for Congress launch party in Mar Vista Park just east of Venice.

One of several stops made by Sheehan and Yearwood on this day in April, the trio delivered an effective message that resonated with their audience - that it is time to elect truly progressive candidates to public office. Reasonable points included 1) the fact that U.S. citizens elect their leaders and are thereby accountable to people around the world who are affected by disasterous foreign policies (administered by our elected government), including victims of torture and weapons of mass destruction, as well as 2) the exploitation of our patriotism at home and the unnecessary death of thousands of U.S. troops and an untold numbers of citizens in Iraq. Tuesday, June 6th is the Primary Election. Please vote.

Cindy Sheehan, on Being Pro-American:
"To stand up, to be out here and work for people like Marcy is to be pro-American. (applause) And not only to be pro-American, because like the rest of what Marcy said, 'we are human beings first and Americans second', and we can not allow our government to keep doing this to other people. And if we had a Congress full of Marcys, we could build a peacful paradigm in this country - without pre-emptive war, without crimes against humanity. We can shut down the war machine, and build an economy based on peace."

Marcy Winograd, On Privately-coded Electronic Voting Machines:
"I am President of Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles. Also, the co-founder of the California Election Protection Network, a state-wide organization that was formed in response to the confirmation of a Republican Secretary of State who was waltzing into Sacramento into the Secretary of State's office with a Diebold lobbyist on his transition team. This was alarming. I said to the Assembly Rules Committee at this juncture, I said, 'We are allowing a corporate raid on a public office'. And my fear was, that California would go the way of Florida, 2000, when we saw massive voter purging of innocent African-Americans falsely-accused of being felons. And with this kind of practice we might see a proliferation of electronic voting equipment that either was not certified or should never had been certified to begin with because perhaps it had no 'paper-trail', or perhaps, because its basic software was not secure - that there were ample opportunities for those who are skilled in...the manipulation of voting machines to approach this through the backdoor and throw elections! We've seen it happen, and it can certainly happen in California. So I say, let us be very careful before we certify any more electronic voting machines, certainly when they are owned by private corporations. Why do we have proprietary software? Why do we have private corporations making a profit on what should be owned by the public - our right to vote? And so we want to be very careful before we certify these machines, and we want to question a Secretary of State who, very late on a Friday afternoon would certify a Diebold or an ESNS machine when clearly the public is up in arms about this. Let us look at the open voting consortium, at software that is transparent.

"In other words - we know what the codes are. It is not up to a private company to take custody of our vote and to run the show. Let the People run the show. Let the People own their own elections. And I ask all of you who have been concerned about election protection, to contact the Secretary of State Bruce McPherson and communicate your concerns."

"It's time for a change right now...Republican or Democrat...we need you to be progressive. And so today we are out here in this process..." - Rev. Yearwood