The Health Care Community Discussion Project was organized by Senator Tom Daschle, Secretary-designate for Health and Human Services, to reach out to the American people for ideas and stories on how the existing health care system could be revamped.
I signed up to host a discussion where I live in Congress, Ariz. on December 28, 2008. The Host and Moderation guide said to invite friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors and aim to invite at least 15-20 people, although smaller gatherings were fine as well.
My house is quite small and what with all the books, computers and photo gear there isn't room for more than eight people. So I decided to e-mail people on a combined mailing list: physical neighbors in Congress; people who subscribed to the mailing list for the website I manage (see Congress Arizona) ; people I talked with at various political/cultural events (see Oh My News International); people I talked with during my 20-day journey up US 89 from Mexico to Canada (see Open Salon and/or Actual Life).
The e-mail I sent invited people to come to the Discussion or fill out the Survey included in the Participant Guide and perhaps write up Compelling Stories that would be good features to highlight the need for health care reform.
Out of the 157 e-mails sent out, 21 people clicked to send a Receipt, 55 people actually opened the e-mail (a total of 219 times), 21 people sent in the survey, 11 people sent in stories, seven people took part in the face-to-face discussion, including me.
AFTER WE HAD BRIEFLY INTRODUCED OURSELVES, we watched Senator Tom Daschle's video introduction to the Health Care Community Discussions (see Signup Page) and read the Participant Guide, we used the questions in the Participant Guide (see Health Care Discussion FAQ) as the basis for discussion.
My self-appointed task for the last six months has been to write on-the-ground stories about the coming election. So when a friend put me on to the US 89 Society, it only took a day or so before my imagination had fired up a plan for traveling its 1,800 miles from the Mexican border to Canada.
Here's the list of 12 articles along with the names of the people who voiced their thoughts and a link to each of the twelve reports on OMNI (Oh My News International, Seoul, Korea).
Although I'm registered as an Independent, I did my best to volunteer to help the Democrat Precinct Committee in my home town of Congress, Ariz., but it turned out the members were only names on a piece of paper, thus my self-appointed task has been to write on-the-ground stories. I only recently began to be published on The Huffington Post: the full list is on OMNI (Oh My News International) in Seoul, Korea. In addition, some have also been published on CNN's OMNI, www.azcentral.com (home to The Arizona Republic newspaper), and www.barackobama.com.
The articles have been mostly about Obama (12 stories) as they were easy to find on www.barackobama.com where individuals can hold events, and only a few about McCain (2 stories) as events on www.johnmccain.com are almost only where McCain himself is present. What with all the people I've met and the comments that have appeared on my articles, it's been a fascinating and rewarding experience at the same time it's been a lot of blood, sweat and tears getting up to speed.
A day or so ago I received an e-mail from The Huffington Post asking for reports on being a volunteer so I wrote the above and covered a Second Debate Watch party on 2008.10.07 hosted by Lynne Gallipo and her daughter, Courtney, in Phoenix, Ariz. where 15 people showed up. I asked two questions: 1) "What's been your experience as a volunteer?" and 2) "What's your take on the debate in terms of both style and substance?"
Before the debate started, I talked with these people:
Kelly Kaye and her husband Jason Pohlman said they volunteer by designing, making and selling Obama T-shirts with everything above cost donated to the Obama campaign. Both work full-time so their volunteer work is limited to evenings and on weekends. Asked if there had been a good response, Kelly said, "Absolutely, people can't find T-shirts any more because they sell out so quickly, there's a need for them."
Nazlah Hassan said she has been volunteering since September doing phone banking, e-mailing, contacting young people so they would get registered to vote, things like that.
Bob Fieg said he had thought of going up to Oregon for the primary but it was going to cost him too much money so now he's thinking of going to New Mexico. For the moment he's donated a bunch of money by responding to the e-mails he gets asking for support.
Howard Jones said he writes articles, political stuff, for a paper in Arizona and also has a blog as he's tired of the paper censoring what he writes. He added, "The beauty of it is the publisher is quite conservative, not so conservative that he cuts me out of the paper altogether, but every now and again he's censoring a little -- I shouldn't say censoring -- but he minor edits." The blog is www.54candles.com, where he writes under the name Allen Sherpa.
Courtney Gallipo, one of the organizers of the event, said she volunteers by helping with voter registration drives and is going to Colorado for a week … at that point the debate started.
People were pretty quiet at start -- even though Tom Brokaw had said the No Applause Rule didn't apply to those at home -- but as things got going, there was more action. At first only laughter at McCain's allegations, then jump-up-hands-in-the-air shouting when Obama made a major point.
After the debate almost everybody stayed for an hour or more and there was lots of stand-up, move-around discussion which was hard to record in detail, except for two people:
Nazlah Hassan had this to add to what she'd said about volunteering: "Generally speaking Senator McCain's style is old-school and stagnant. It appears that it's difficult for McCain to think in an innovative and pro-active manner. He provides as little details as possible in regard to policies that he has proposed.
"McCain does not value the importance of meeting with world leaders that we disagree with. This is an example of old-school thinking, alienating those who don't agree with Americans.
"Obama's style is presidential. He's pro-active and open to new and innovative ideas.
"For the sake of peace, Obama understands the importance of meeting and speaking with world leaders that we may disagree with. He knows that we cannot afford to alienate other world leaders nor so-called American enemies."
Annrenee Jones said she was going to Sante Fe, New Mexico for a week, that she had received calls from various cities in New Mexico but Sante Fe got her first.
As for the second question, What was her take on the debate, she said, "I think Obama was very presidential in his demeanor and considerate in the way he answered questions. It struck me, even though I was too young to be around for the Kennedy-Nixon debate, they seemed similar from the things I learned in high school history classes, with one person seeming calm, considerate and presidential and the other twitchy, nervous and jumpy the way John McCain seemed in manner. I thought Barack Obama instilled more confidence in the way he approached the questions.
"And the last question was wonderful [What don't we know, and how will we learn it?] and both actually answered it in much the same way, that we still don't know what we don't know, that we'll face challenges."
At this point I asked if she had read the Sun Tzu. She said she hadn't so I continued with a brief introduction and suggested that the answer to the question could lie in out-of-the-box thinking where we think about things we have thought about before.
Annrenee agreed, and said, "Yes, people need to approach things from a different, from a broader perspective."
I went on and said that according to The Rules of Victory, this lies in the area of contemplative thinking: It's not good enough to know about reality; you need to change how you see reality.
While Annrenee hadn't known about Sun Tzu, she did know something about Asian thinking and said, "As a songwriter I know how songs are delivered to me almost verbatim. But I had to clear my mind; thinking about it, struggling with it, it went away. I had to be open to receiving it."
Adrienne said she was a volunteer at the West Valley Democratic Headquarters making calls to voters to get their applications in for early ballots. Since she lives in New River, it's quite a hike to get there.
As for the debate, she said, "I think Senator Obama is much more comfortable with his messaging and where he is. He was cool, calm, but not dispassionate, because he was eager to jump in there and refute anything that was malarky. And I saw Senator McCain gasping for air, he seemed very tense, and very ill at ease. His whole body image was very ill at ease. He's still in Vietnam."
I said I would have to check out the transcript but it seemed that McCain used the word 'I' so many times. Adrienne agreed and said, "I can, I know how to do it, I can do it … but if you know how to do it why haven't you done it!?"
I brought up the last question in the debate by saying that since we live in a changing world, there are things we don't know; how we will learn is a question for everybody. Adrienne replied with, "Yes, nobody knows what the future will bring, but the best thing we can do is to anticipate some things based on history. But life is uncertain and what it comes down to is judgment, and that's what I had hoped he [Obama] would have said. That you can't know, but what it boils down to is judgment."
As far as I could tell, these same two themes were echoed in the stand-up, move-around discussions. In addition to Bob, Courtney and Annrenee talked about volunteering in New Mexico. When I asked if they were interested in becoming Grassroots Correspondents for The Huffington Post, they were fired up and ready to get with the program so I sent them the link.
Watching the Biden-Palin debate in the Fiesta Room at El Peñasco in Tempe, Ariz. on October 2, 2008 was indeed a fiesta. Hosted by Linna Thompson of Drinking Liberally, there was applause and laughter from the more than two dozen people but no booing like at previous watch parties.
While many people were members of Drinking Liberally, a nation-wide organization with more than 300 chapters, five in Arizona, many were also members of Progressive Democrats of America, True Majority, and similar organizations. Naturally they were all above drinking age except for one family with a babe in arms.
Before the debate began I talked with Eric Mitzel, a school teacher who said, "It seems like she [Palin] addresses a crowd that I'm not used to but I grew up in a city on the west -- on the left coast, as some people say -- so I don't really understand her. My opinion is that Biden is going to kick her barbie-butt all over, but that's just me."
After the debate Linna Thompson, the organizer of the event, said, "She kept tilting her head to the side, that's a flirting maneuver. When you do that you're flirting, you're not having a serious conversation. She's popular with Republican women because she's flirting with her man.
"I'm a professionally-trained speech pathologist. I work with families and as a vice president she is making her husband be a single-parent and that child will have physical therapy, speech therapy, development therapy; how is she going to pull this off? She's going to be busy, who's her backup? How does this embrace her family values?"
Eric Mitzel had this to say, "It was scripted: she [Palin] said what she wanted to say, but it wasn't genuine. I thought he [Biden] was genuine. But I don't think she gave a horrible performance."
Catherine Miller chimed in with, "He had an excellent summation but she didn't take advantage of being the last person to answer the question." To which Eric added, "He didn't let her have the moment."
Rachel Pollack, a member of Women in Black -- who had punctuated the debate with both her laughter and homemade lipstick-on-a-pig hand puppet -- added, "She gave the appearance of being genuine. Each little talking point was a bead and she'll string them together. Sometimes it would look like a pattern, sometimes it's completely incoherent."
Katherine Ingram had a wider viewpoint: "Everywhere across Europe when I traveled France, Italy, and Greece I was asked, Do you think -- as in hopeful -- do you think that Obama can win? And it was always this hope that America would stop going down the road we've been going down for the past eight years.
The Senate Voted To Bailout The Wall Street Crooks We Can Still Influence The Vote In The House !!!!
Arizona Advocacy Network, Progressive Democrats of America, Democracy for America and Arizona ACORN took action Thursday, October 2, 2008 with a protest and press conference at Congressman Ed Pastor's Office , 411 N. Central Ave. #150 Phoenix, Ariz.
Later, they took their demands to the offices of Representative Trent Franks, Representative John Shadegg, Representative Harry Mitchell and Representative Jeff Flake.
Send an email to Congress and tell them “No bail out for Wall Street—we want a Fair Deal for Main Street!”
Organize or attend an action in your area using this easy organizing tool.
When I opened my inbox Thursday morning around eight o'clock on September 25th, I found mail from Dan O'Neil saying there was going to be a protest down in Phoenix: "If you are unhappy with the bailout of Wall Street as proposed by the Administration, please join us at the corner of 7th Street and Camelback at 5 p.m. on Thursday, near the Faith Lutheran Church. Bring your signs." Kind of short notice, and the sign-up page said less than 20 people had registered but my wife-partner, Sueko, and I decided to go.
Traffic was light so we reached the church in plenty of time. There were already three TV satellite trucks in place so maybe it was going to be a bigger event that we thought. As we were getting our gear ready some people in the neighboring gas station asked what was going on: three women and two children. When we said it was a protest against the Bush bailout the older woman began talking about hard it was for her family to make ends meet and told us a long, convoluted tale of woe. It turned out to be just kind of situation that's left out of the bailout plan so I turned on my recorder and asked her to repeat the story:
"My name is Kathy Brittman. My kids are losing their apartment because my daughter got sick. Social Security has stopped over half of my son-in-law's disability payments. I've been using my credit cards to feed my grand children and help them to stay afloat. I've run my Wells Fargo credit card up to $10,000; my payment was $117 a month. I was one day late and it went to $880, which is what they want now, in late fees, overdraft fees, all this other stuff they just tacked on. I was just keeping it less than $10,000 with the $117 a month payment. They want $800 now and I don't have it!
"So I'm sitting here saying, OK, how do I feed my grandchildren now? What am I going to do? We can't help from the churches. The church says they don't have the funds. Their refrigerators are empty. They can't help us . . ."
I asked if we could come to her house and gather material for a story just about her and she agreed. For the moment we had to cover the people who were gathering along Camelback.
There were only some 30 people holding up their signs chanting, "No more closures, We want jobs," and "No Bush Bailout," "No Bush Bailout." While there really weren't enough people to make the protest a major, news-media event, the TV reporters and cameramen were interviewing people and going live for the 6:00 news.
After Dan O'Neil, the coordinator from PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) in Phoenix who had sent the e-mail, was interviewed for the TV news, Sueko asked him how far advance he had planned the event: "Just a couple of days ago as the Bush administration just sprung this on people. Out of fear, they're trying to force people to react [by] bailing out the Wall Street crooks who got us into this mess in the first place.
"So they're doing essentially what they did in Iraq, spending billions and billions of dollars. In Iraq the billions went to war contractors, it went to the oil companies, and things like that. And what happened? We have hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and we have 4,000 dead Americans. So now they want to bail out the Wall Street crooks and criminals."
The e-mail Dan sent had the logos of some 16 like-minded organizations and many people had the logo of their group on their signs. There were two guys holding signs with the ACORN logo but we couldn't talk with them as they only spoke Spanish. The best we could do was to look up the ACORN website and see what the About page had to say: "ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country."
Helen Hortter didn't have a logo on her sign but was wearing a small button for 911truth.org whose basic mission is "To expose the official lies and cover-up surrounding the events of September 11th, 2001 in a way that inspires the people to overcome denial and understand the truth; namely, that elements within the US government and covert policy apparatus must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened in the way that they did."
When asked why she came to this event she said, "I do a lot of street actions, about waking up the people. They don't know what is going on as the media, they come out, take some pictures, and give us two seconds on the news. We're in dire straits in America; we're getting screwed as a society.
"We're going to be taken over. I don't really believe there's going to be an election. Nobody knows about his [Bush's] signing statements. That under catastrophic conditions, he can declare martial law. Nobody knows this."
Do you think the bailout was the October surprise? "Anything could be the October surprise. There's trouble going on in Pakistan, in Russia. Who knows what it is. …. I would like to say Power to the People, but what they have in place, on a whim, it would take everybody going to Washington for a revolution. These people need to be removed from office."
Janet Higgins was wearing a PDF T-shirt and looked, at first, like an organizer but said, "I'm not involved in the organizing of this event. I just learned about it today. I'm a member of PDA, Progressive Democrats of America, and we have a local chapter, but I'm not, officially, an organizer of this group.
What do you think about Bush's bailout? "I think if he's going to bail out corporations, he needs to bail out the American people. He needs to put a stop on foreclosures, we need better healthcare in this country, we need better education, we need affordable college, we need to put the money into the people in this country, we're the investment."
What do you think is the next step? "The next step after the election is to make sure this country moves in a more progressive fashion. We need to be more enlightened, and more open minded in America."
Can Obama do that? "Yes, he can."
NOTE: According to True Majority, this event was one of some 251 held throughout the country.
Get this. Apparently, John McCain invented the BlackBerry! Today, McCain's top economic adviser waved a BlackBerry in front of reporters and said, "He did this...You're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create."
A miracle indeed. Who ever would have guessed that the BlackBerry was invented by a 72-year-old man who recently called himself computer "illiterate," talked about "a Google," and said he "watches" blogs?1
Today's news took even McCain's biggest admirers by surprise. In fact, we just "found" an amazing video from Billy Mires, the "real" bus driver of the Straight Talk Express reacting to McCain's impressive technological feat.
See Billy's video and Facebook "fan" page here.
We have it on good authority <wink> that Billy's going to keep posting videos pretty frequently. His fans will be the first to get them. Enjoy!
Source: 1. "Holtz-Eakin: McCain helped create BlackBerry," Politico.com, September 16, 2008
The Five Faces of John McCain, courtesy of Jill Greenburg.
For more information see here: http://tinyurl.com/5nd3s9
Meanwhile, I'm hoping these photos will allow McCain to take first prize in the 25:25:50 Club: 25% Fiction, 50% Fantasy, 50% Failure.
[Originally Posted on Mudlats: Tiptoeing Through the Muck of Alaskan Politics]
I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.
After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.
The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.
Full text is here.
Whatever happens, the McCain campaign could never pull this off. Patience, steel... triumph.
Hundreds of supporters filled the streets at the Grand Opening of the Arizona Headquarters for the Barack Obama Campaign on September 11, 2008 in Phoenix, Ariz.
Many in the crowd had brought homemade signs, brandishing them as way of applauding, waving them in time to the Obama's signature campaign slogan, "Yes, We can!" which broke out spontaneously from time to time, and using them as shields against the blistering sun.
ABC New, September 05, 2008 12:13 PM
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was named to the Republican ticket one week ago, and she has yet to answer questions from reporters. So what are we to expect from Gov. Palin?
Time magazine's Jay Carney tried to get McCain spox Nicolle Wallace to answer this question the other night.
-----Begin Quote -----Carney: We know now that Sarah Palin can give one hell of a speech, she’s a natural, and that’s no mean feat. We don’t know yet, and we won’t know until you guys allow her to take questions, you know, can she answer tough questions about domestic policy, foreign policy –
Wallace: Wait, wait. Questions from who? From him, from you? Who cares? No offense, but –
Carney: I think the American people care –
Wallace: I think the American people want to see her, but who cares if she can talk to Time Magazine? She can talk to the American people. They want to see "How am I going to save my home?"
Carney: The American people need to know, just like they need to know about Joe Biden and Barack Obama –
Wallace: That she can talk to you?
Carney: Not just to me — that she knows things about domestic and foreign policy that presidents and vice presidents need to know.
Wallace: Right. But, but here’s the thing… the media did something to this family that I’ve never seen before. In my life. And I think she took the stage last night and, you know, she made her own points. She put this discussion and this race and this convention in her own terms. And she didn’t do it by talking, all due respect, to people like you. She took the stage and talked to the American people about things they care about, how they’re going to save their homes.----- End Quote -----
So what does that mean, practically speaking? Will the woman seeking to be a heartbeat away from the presidency avoid talking to the media? Obama sat down for an interview with Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly Thursday -- hardly friendly terrain. Is Palin willing to do the same?
Full Text http://tinyurl.com/6plnc7
AS SEEN ON iREPORT!!!!
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Up until now, I've donated four times to the Barack Obama Campaign. Not a lot in the total scheme of things, but for me it's a fair amount. But the house and the car are paid for and there's no credit card debt. Still, it's not easy street so I put what I have where I think it will do the best and right now, if I'm loath to donate any more to any campaign because as far as I can tell they have degenerated in a cheap school-yard name-calling fight with each side claiming the other telling "lies" whey they, of course, are telling the "truth."
Yet if we look up the meanings of these the handy-in-a-cheap-dog-fight words, we find that to lie is "to make a statement that one knows is false" and we find that one of the main definitions of "truth" is "the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality."
Long long ago, in a century far far away when people lived in what they imagined to be mono-culture, these terms and definitions were useful as their meaning was shared by the majority of people. But this is 21st Century America is no longer a mono-culture and Americans no longer live only in America. If you have doubts of this, check out who owns most of our national debt (China and Japan), check out the made-in labels at Walmart (not much made in the USA), the check out where the food we eat comes from (you name it).
So at least we need to get up to speed with being both citizens of America and citizens of the world which means coming face-to-face with the fact that words like "lie" and "truth" have no universal meaning: they depending highly on the view we acquired as children before we learned to lift the left leg before the right. Thus even though both Obamaites and McCainites may use the same words, they aren't necessarily talking about the same thing.
Not just my idea. Have a look at "The Palin Choice and the Reality of the Political Mind", George Lakoff, http://tinyurl.com/66xbfo:
Number of sentences in John McCain's acceptance speech about his experience as a POW in Vietnam: 43.
Number of sentences about his 25 years in the House and Senate: 8.
The convention ended as it began: a commemoration of McCain's hellish years in a Hanoi prison cell four decades ago. The political equation was a simple one: POW equals patriotic hero equals a fighting president. Before McCain walked down the long runway at St. Paul's Xcel Center, a baritone voice declared over the P.A., "When you've lived in a box .... you put your people first." Case closed.
Full Text http://tinyurl.com/5z5yyx
At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be brought to scale, as it were. In fact the Politico is reporting just that: Palin reignites culture wars.
Full Text http://tinyurl.com/589ysb
Rambo and the Mean Girl will tell you that they are the squeaky clean Republicans, not like all those other Republicans, and we should focus on them, not on all the crooks.
The Republican Party has massively grown the size of the federal government, including especially of the Pentagon, but Rambo and the Mean Girl are all of a sudden promising to fire every other government employee.
The Republican Party oversaw the mortgage crisis. But won't admit it,and neither will these two.
You want a narrative, about a war hero tortured by the confession he signed, or about a feisty hockey mom who cleaned out the Augean stables of Seward's Ice Box, then you have got it.
You want real policy positions and a rationale for them that goes beyond "I will make my friends rich," then you won't find that in the convention in Minnesota.
Full Text http://tinyurl.com/6dklp9
But before everyone gets all smug and self-righteous about the Palin selection, remember where you live. You live in a nation of gun owners and hunters. You live in a country where one out of three girls get pregnant before they are 20. You live in a nation of C students. Knocking Bush for being a C student only endeared him to the nation of C students. Knock Palin for having kids, for having a kid who's having a baby, for anything that is part of her normalness -- a normalness that looks very familiar to so many millions of Americans -- well, you do this at your own peril. Assuming she's still on the ticket two weeks from now, she will be a much tougher opponent than anyone expects.
Full Text http://tinyurl.com/6ngg7q
