MsMaeven's Blog

The results

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:49:00 EST

I've checked the final results of my 3 precincts, and I wanted to share them with you. If you ever doubted if you were making a difference, check out these numbers.

We had 6 "turfs" in Precinct 67; we sent out each turf twice on Tuesday alone (meaning my volunteers canvassed each turf two separate times between 10 am and 5 pm on election day), in addition to the canvassing and calling we did on Saturday - Monday and the weeks leading up. We won that precinct, 75% to 25%. Over 1000 people voted for Barack; in 2004 less than 500 voted for Kerry, and only about 750 voted in the entire precinct.

In 2004, John Kerry won my own, relatively Republican, precinct (74) by 4 votes. In 2008, Barack won by over 300. We won our precinct 63% to 36%. Also, we have about 1300 registered voters in our precinct. 1260 voted on or before Tuesday. That's about 95% turnout. That's amazing.

We also worked Precinct 69. Barack won 73% of that precinct's votes. Over 800 people voted for Barack. In 2004, fewer than 750 voted in the entire precinct.

Probably each one of you will see results similar to these in your own precincts. WE did this. Be proud. And know that our country is deeply grateful.

This is only the beginning. Keep being the change!

2008

67
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT   Barack Obama   1008   Democrat (11/8 now 1012)
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT   John McCain   328   Republican (11/8 now 329)

69
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT   Barack Obama   819   Democrat (11/8 now 847)
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT   John McCain   295   Republican (11/8 now 301)

74
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT   Barack Obama   789   Democrat (11/8 now 794)
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT   John McCain   450   Republican (11/8 no change)

2004

67
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT POLK COUNTY   JOHN F. KERRY   498   Democrat
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT POLK COUNTY   GEORGE W. BUSH   255   Republican

69
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT POLK COUNTY   JOHN F. KERRY   489   Democrat
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT POLK COUNTY   GEORGE W. BUSH   246   Republican

74
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT POLK COUNTY   JOHN F. KERRY   427   Democrat
PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT POLK COUNTY   GEORGE W. BUSH   423   Republican

http://www.gis.co.polk.ia.us/election/Election_PrecinctDetail.asp?Election_Date=20081104&Precinct_Number=67

Thank you

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:01:35 EST

My bones are weary but my heart is soaring this night, when we achieved the beginning of our dreams. It has been a long, hard road, and the one before us won’t be any easier. But I know change is coming to America. I have seen it, in each one of you, and in each one of my phenomenal volunteers who helped make sure Iowa had Barack’s back. And we will continue to have his back as we go forward. Because this election isn’t about him, it’s about us, and what we want for this country. And today we declared it with a resounding roar.

I’m too exhausted, too exhilarated, and still in a bit too much of a daze to be very coherent. But I wanted to give some special shout outs. A year ago, I came to this blog, already a precinct captain, but still a novice in the beauty that the blog could bring. Maryt, you were my first inspiration on this blog. Dan, Leila, and meta, you built that inspiration even more. Nancy, Tamsin, EM, and Joy, you have been my rocks. And then came Christine, and the blog was even better than before. Rick, Sharon, Marcus, Strong Heart, Jedi Master Matt, you lifted me up from even before the caucuses, and you truly have been gifts that keep on giving.

Curious, thanks for representing the best of Hillary supporters who were Barack curious. Lace and Lulu, your energies are unmatched—except maybe by Joe Ruwe. Diana, Val, Cee, Tracy and your whole family in Ct plus your super twin in DC, Kevin Winterfield—each day of this journey I have been stronger because of you. I have been more informed, more engaged, and more entertained. And Sarah, deep, deep thanks for the cookies. They gave incredible delight to my canvassers today, as well as to my boys. And Carey, your efforts in KY have inspired me beyond what you will ever know. In 2012, we will see it a beautiful Barack blue.

Apologies to those I haven’t mentioned; each one of you has been crucial to our success, and I am profoundly grateful for it.

Today we shouted to history and the world, Yes we can. Yes we did. And yes we will.

Thank you for making this possible. See you on January 20.

My meeting with Barack 10/31/08

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:24:50 EDT

I had the great fortune of being able to meet with Barack this morning before the rally in Des Moines. I could wax lyrical about the rally (the first one to actually bring me to tears—partially from exhaustion, but mainly from this awesome achievement that is finally within our grasp) but I want instead to share an observation that particularly struck me today.

I was also fortunate to meet Barack before he was well known. I met him at a small house party in 2003, when his Senate race was just beginning. Though I lived in IL the whole time he was a state senator, I don't know that I'd ever heard of him before then (though my husband had, as they had worked together on judicial issues). But I knew of the good he'd done, even if I didn't know his name. I knew of his capital reform work, I knew of his work passing health care for children, I knew of Project Vote! and the good it had done, etc. I may even have marched with him against the war (don't know if he was there at marches and rallies I participated in or not). And that is the mark of an extraordinary leader: someone you know by the good he does, even when you do not know his name.

When I met him in 2003, his common sense, compassion, commitment to justice and sense of the power of our own possibility struck a chord deep within me. He spoke with an authenticity and integrity that few people possess, least of all our politicians. His wisdom was simple without being simplistic, and he offered a concrete course of action to translate high ideals into a better reality. He spoke of the profound connections between members of a community, how each one suffers when another cannot get adequate education or health care, how all are diminished when any endure injustice. He spoke many of the same words that you’ve heard him repeat throughout this campaign. And before that night was through, I knew I had found my President, even though he was just running for Senator.

But though I was profoundly inspired by Barack that night, I didn’t for a moment see him as a superstar. I saw him as an extremely grounded, self-aware, brilliant man, a man who honors his words with actions to accomplish great things, but a man who is also just a regular guy. Not a “celebrity,” not a “savior,” not any of the hype that gets thrown at him, or that all the fanfare helps to cultivate.

Today, as I waited to meet with Barack, we were first greeted by an array of politicians. A governor, a senator, a congressman, and various others of that type. Some do quite a bit of good, some not so much. But they were each consummate politicians—trying to schmooze you, trying to win you over, trying to get you to vote for them primarily for them, not for you, and not necessarily for our country or state.

The difference with Barack could not have been more striking. I have been so fortunate as to shake Barack’s hand and exchange a few words with Barack on several occasions throughout the past year—this is Iowa, after all. And this observation didn’t strike me as much on those occasions. But this time, in a quieter setting, with a roaring crowd of 25,000 outside the door, with the presidency almost within his reach, and with a host of big name politicians and performers coming just before him, I realized it quite clearly: Barack is still a regular guy.

When you meet with him, he isn’t trying to win you over. He thanks you for all you’ve done, he asks you to do more because more needs to be done, and he listens and responds to whatever you have to say. He relates to you, personally, authentically, just like he’s the guy down the street who cares about your thoughts, your concerns, your hopes, and wants to help figure out a way to improve upon our neighborhood, our city, our state, our country, our world. He wants this not for him, but for us, for all of our futures.

It surprised me to realize that, despite everything that has happened in Barack’s life in the past 5 years, despite the fact that he is now one of the most famous people in the world and that most of the world is clamoring for him to be our leader, he is every bit the regular guy that he was back in the fall of 2003, and no doubt long before that. Before the 2004 convention speech. Before the Iowa caucuses. Before he became the Democratic nominee. Before he was just four days away from becoming the next President of the United States—if we all work as hard as we need to, because our futures do depend upon it.

My theory as to why: he is the most grounded and self-possessed person I have ever had the good fortune to spend time with. Clearly, he’s got to have a fairly large ego, or he wouldn’t be running to be leader of the free world. But that ego is so tempered with self-awareness and appreciation of others’ great gifts as well that it is balanced with a genuine humility.

When Barack says this election isn’t just about him, he means it. While few of us may be as brilliant or as grounded as Barack, we are all capable of greatness. And together we will achieve it. Even if the world doesn’t know our names, it will know us by the good that we do.

In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.

America, our moment is now.

Let’s go change the world!

Barack's consistency

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:19:16 EDT

Al Giordano has a good piece on how Barack's campaign is coming full circle, with his closing argument to be essentially the same as the opening argument he made at the 2004 National Convention (http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/ ). Al's absolutely right that Obama's message has been consistent since he first came on the national stage 4 years ago, but his consistency long predates that. I met him in 2003, when he spoke of how we are all our brothers' and sisters' keeper, how we all are invested in each other, how we all are diminished when any of us suffer injustice. I have heard him say the same things, even using the same examples, throughout the past 20 months. Some criticized him for being repetitive; I appreciated his consistency and his adherence to the same core principles and values.

When Michelle relates a talk he gave to a community group 19 years ago (as she did at the convention), we hear more than an echo of the message Barack still gives today: "He talked about 'The world as it is' and 'The world as it should be.' And he said that all too often, we accept the distance between the two, and settle for the world as it is - even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations. But he reminded us that we know what our world should look like. We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And he urged us to believe in ourselves - to find the strength within ourselves to strive for the world as it should be." (http://www.barackobama.com/2008/08/25/remarks_of_michelle_obama_and_1.php )

Watching Countdown the other night, I heard another blast from Barack's past that demonstrated his consistency. Turns out Keith O's history teacher invited Barack to speak at Keith's old high school back in 1991. According to the student newspaper's 1991 account, Barack emphasized how "change is possible" and that we need to take action to be that change (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgiveUdXXw).

That's a strange coincidence, but even more impressive is the extreme consistency of his message. He has been honoring his words--often the same exact words--with action for over 20 years. And, as Al says, that consistency clearly demonstrates "what kind of person he is and what kind of president he would be." The kind of President we can believe in.

My thoughts on the first debate

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:32:37 EDT

Barack did an outstanding job. He demonstrated clear mastery of the material, great depth of understanding of the complexity of international relations and our economy, and an ability to genuinely relate to what most Americans are going through and what our top priorities and concerns are.

McCain did a better job than I expected, I'll admit, but he also showed a cavalier disregard for the truth, blatantly lying again and again, and demonstrated his erratic nature which makes so many Americans uneasy. His answer to how this bailout will affect his budget alarmed me--cut all spending except defense?! That's never going to happen, first of all, and if it did what does that say about our priorities? All other aspects of our government--health care, education, agriculture, etc--should be totally neglected so we can have war and further enrich Wall Street? In what world is that a helpful solution? Furthermore, McCain's condescension--stating 7 times that Barack "doesn't understand" xy or z, and that he doesn't have the knowledge or experience to be President--coupled with his refusal to look at Barack and speak directly to him, played very poorly for McCain.

I was surprised, though, that Barack did not make some of the more obvious points that would have strengthened his performance even further. First, with respect to the surge: Barack has consistently said that he fully expected our military to perform brilliantly, and that if you add more of our highly trained troops the violence levels would go down; that, however, was not the purpose of the surge, which was to enable the Iraqi government to make political progress. That has not happened, which is why the surge was a failure, with even the Bush administration acknowledging that the vast majority of the benchmarks had not been adequately met. Secondly, McCain's mischaracterization of Barack's withdrawal plan as some random date circled on a calendar could have been more forcefully rebutted, especially by pointing out how even the Iraqi government and now the Bush administration have acknowledged that a timetable for withdrawal is necessary--nobody but John McCain wants us in Iraq for 100 years or more. Thirdly, Barack could have pointed out how interested he was to McCain's response to the situation in Georgia, which was belligerent and ill-informed, demonstrating his Cold War mentality and his shoot first, aim later approach to diplomacy. And lastly, I know Barack is a gentleman, and I admire him for it, but he could have hit him much harder on his own specific role in our crumbling economy. Barack doesn't have to bring up Keating 5, but it is a valid part of the record for voters to consider (and of which most are ignorant).

All in all, Barack did a terrific job, especially considering that this was supposed to be McCain's strongest subject. But, just in case this "Barack was wrong about the surge and won't admit it" spin sticks, please remind people of the intent of the surge, Barack's consistent position on it, how Barack has also been consistently right, and how even the Bush administration has had to acknowledge it.

Useful links for general

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:59:20 EDT

Verify your voter registration, and what you need to do in order to vote (no matter the state)
https://www.voteforchange.com/
http://www.canivote.org/
voter information for Iowa, with link to absentee ballot request
http://www.sos.state.ia.us/elections/index.html
voting rights information from the ABA
http://www.abanet.org/vote/2008/home.shtml

Blueprint for Change and Barack’s plans, proposals and record on various issues, including Civil Rights, Defense, Disabilities, Economy/Taxes, Education, Energy/Environment, Ethics, Faith, Family, Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Immigration, Iraq, Poverty, Service, Seniors & Social Security, Technology, Veterans, Women
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
http://www.scribd.com/barackobama

Correcting misinformation

http://factcheck.barackobama.com/
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sliming_obama.html
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/obama.asp

Taxes

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/presidential_candidates.cfm
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/would_obama_tax_my_profits_if_i.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/09/ST2008060900950.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121867201724238901.html
US Senate Record

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/?&Db=d109&querybd=@FIELD(FLD003+@4((@1(Sen+Obama++Barack))+01763))
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/02/dear-chris-matt.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/20/201332/807/36/458633
http://www.statesurge.com/members/923-barack-obama-federal
http://factcheck.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/01/14/obamas_strong_record_of_accomp.php
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/21/164117/783
http://mediamatters.org/items/200612200003

IL Senate Record

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/29/us/politics/20070730_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020802262_pf.html
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/07/30/in_illinois_obama_proved_pragm.php
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/30/obama_hits_chicago_during_coun.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303.html

Pro-Choice
http://www.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/01/08/fact_check_obamas_strong_proch.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVuMYKs8iJs
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20obama.html?pagewanted=2

Present votes in IL
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/mikva-021608/index.html

Frank Schaeffer, Pro-Life and Pro-Obama
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/frank-as-a-former-pro-lif_b_119435.html

Will Samson, Pro-Life and Pro-Obama
http://willzhead.typepad.com/willzhead/2008/09/pro-life-and-pr.html

Kari Lundgren, My Catholic Faith Pushes Me to Obama
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-lundgren/my-catholic-faith-pushes_b_125023.html

Wick Allison, Former Goldwater Republican, A Conservative for Obama
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Former_conservative_writer_and_editor_shifts_to_Obama

Republicans for Obama
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/gophome

Veterans and Military Families for Obama
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/vetshome

Barack’s bio
http://www.barackobama.com/learn/meet_barack.php

Joe Biden’s bio
http://www.barackobama.com/learn/meet_joe.php

Barack’s speeches
http://www.barackobama.com/speeches/index.php

Volunteer for the campaign
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/actioncenter

taxing employer-provided health care benefits

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:45:38 EDT

This doesn't get enough attention:

From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/us/politics/01mccain.html :

Though Senator John McCain has promised to not raise taxes, his campaign acknowledged Wednesday that the health plan he outlined this week would have the effect of increasing tax payments for some workers, primarily those with high incomes and expensive health plans.

The campaign cannot yet project how many taxpayers might see their taxes go up, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mr. McCain’s top domestic policy adviser. But Mr. Holtz-Eakin said in an interview that for some, Mr. McCain’s health care tax credits would not be large enough to compensate for his proposal to eliminate the tax breaks afforded to workers with employer-provided health benefits.

On stops in Florida and Pennsylvania this week, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has emphasized a free-market approach that he said would lower health care costs and make insurance affordable.

To do so he is proposing a major tax change that he hopes will make the insurance marketplace more competitive and less expensive in part by encouraging more people to buy health insurance on their own instead of receiving it from their employers.

The 71 percent of insured Americans who get their health coverage through their employers now enjoy a significant advantage because the money spent by employers on their health coverage is excluded from their taxable income. If employers chose to pay that share of a worker’s compensation as wages rather than benefits, the income would be taxable.

“Anyway you cut it, if you make health benefits subject to taxation, that’s a tax increase,” said Jonathan B. Oberlander, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You can argue with lots of merit that it’s a responsible increase, that it takes away an inequitable exclusion, but it’s still a tax increase.”

thoughts on Barack's statement 9/15/08

IA for Obama ☮ — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:28:25 EDT

Barack said: "Well now, instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up – from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street."

This is all too tragically right, and so obvious (though once again, the common sense, straight talk is coming from Barack, the crazy talk from the opposition). The shambles that our economy has become is evidence that when you so disproportionately favor the wealthy, as the current administration has done for the past 8 years and McC would like to do for the next 4, and when you let the lobbyists set the rules, as the current administration has done for the past 8 years and McC would like to do for the next 4, and you let them exploit the middle and working class, who are the very foundation of our economy and our country, the foundation will crack and all that is based upon it will be thrown into upheaval.

Part of why Barack "gets it" is that he focuses on doing things from the ground up. That's how you build a strong community, country, economy. When the overly favored top crushes the bottom, all will be devastated. There aren't enough golden parachutes to go around.

responses to two questions

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:49:42 EDT

from a probable under the bridge dweller:

"Why do want higher taxes?"-- first, Barack will lower my taxes. Unless you are extremely well off (making more than $600,000), you will either pay substantially less or about the same to what you pay right now in taxes. All others go back to the Clinton rates. But I don't really care about taxes. If someone is going to spend government $ wisely, I'm happy to pay my fair share. Seems like some rich folks are the true whiners when they're asked to pay their fair share. And thanks to Barack, I'm able to keep tabs on how the govt spends my tax $, via USAspending.gov. You may have heard of this legislation, though it was among SP's lies last night that Barack hasn't passed any. It's known as the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, created by Barack and GOP Senator Coburn. And John McCain thought so much of it he became a secondary sponsor.

"Why do you want a candidate that attended an American hating sermon"--Are you folks really going there? You do know about your golden girl's own pastor problems, right? Here's a little something just to get you started: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/anti-jewish-ter.html (Palin in church when Brickner described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianit) . And then there's this: "The founder of the Alaska Independence Party -- a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years -- once professed his "hatred for the American government" and cursed the American flag as a "damn flag." ""The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government," Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP." http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/aip_founder_professed_hatred_f.php

first thoughts on Palin

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:38:09 EDT

McC proved with his pick just how little regard he holds for women. To him, all women are interchangeable. It doesn't matter that SP has no foreign policy experience, scant legislative experience, and is virtually unknown--and with good reason--to the American people. Apparently, all that matters to him is that she's a female conservative GOP, as he stupidly thinks that women only want a woman, any woman, in the WH.

Thank you, Michelle!

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:21:35 EDT

Michelle was phenomenal tonight! Here in Iowa, we got to get to know Michelle very well, over the many months she campaigned here. She hit on the same points then as she did tonight. She comes from a family that knows hardship and struggle, a family that knows the value of love, hard work, and service to others. A family that knows that in America, you can achieve your dreams, but that you need support and fairness in order to do so.

Her story is all of our story. They might not be the same in the specifics, but it is a story that resonates deeply with the American people. Countless members of my precinct were won over to Barack by Michelle's integrity, commitment, and honesty. By the fact that she knows what so many of us are going through, as we strive to find a work-life balance, to provide a solid foundation of love and compassion for our children, and to create a better world for us all. To not be limited by the world as it is, but to commit to helping create the world as it should be.

Michelle did an outstanding job, and she will make an exceptional First Lady.

Thank you, Michelle Obama!

Earmarks

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:55:18 EDT

Can anyone verify whether McCain has made his earmarks public? I know he likes to claim that he doesn't do earmarks, but that doesn't seem to be true (see for example http://www.huliq.com/65524/daily-kos-mccain-still-lying-about-his-earmarks and http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Price_of_power_McCain_action_helped_Arizona_land_developer_2 , and http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/politics/18earmark.html , and http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/An_Old_Earmark_of_McCain_s_Surfaces .

At least as of June 2007, Barack was the only candidate to make his earmarks public (http://www.rollcall.com/news/breakingnews/19093-1.html ), but this source also claims that McC doesn't do earmarks, which again doesn't seem to be the case, at least not throughout all of his career. And as http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803u/mccain points out, his coziness with lobbyists and willingness to do their bidding amounts to much the same thing as earmarks.

So does anyone have more insight into McC and earmarks, and whether or not he has made all his public?

Thanks.

Thanks to all, and keep HOPE alive!

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:52:36 EDT

As we get ready to meet our new running mate, I just wanted to thank everyone who has been here and on the ground for so long, making it happen. We got here by believing in ourselves, in our candidate, and in our country. We got here by working hard, pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, phonebanking, registering voters, writing letters, protesting the MSM and their always biased coverage. We did not get here by kvetching about others, though sometimes we could not help but vent; we did not get here by moping about this poll or that spin. We got here through faith in action. And that’s how we’ll win in November, with all of us working hard together.

Any minute now, we will know who our running mate will be. Please let’s not fight when someone comes on the blog pushing this candidate or trashing that one. The choice has been made, and we will know very, very soon. It is up to us to make sure that person is not just a running mate, but the Vice President of the United States of America.

This is an awesome responsibility, and it is each of ours to win or lose. Our country needs us to win. The rest of the world needs us to win. Our future needs us to win. So be the change and make it happen.

“Hope has been the guiding force behind the most improbable changes this country has ever made. In the face of tyranny, it’s what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire. In the face of slavery, it’s what fueled the resistance of the slave and the abolitionist, and what allowed a President to chart a treacherous course to ensure that the nation would not continue half slave and half free. In the face of war and Depression, it’s what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. In the face of oppression, it’s what led young men and women to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through the streets of Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. That’s the power of hope – to imagine, and then work for, what had seemed impossible before." Barack Obama, Des Moines, IA, 12/27/07

tax lies email

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:35:23 EDT

Someone just posted that tax email lie that's been making the rounds, and is so ably debunked at http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/would_obama_tax_my_profits_if_i.html . This version claimed it was sent by Robert D. Jenkins
Vice President - Investments
Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor
Wachovia Securities, LLC
314-991-7812
800-999-4448 toll-free
robert.jenkins@wachoviaseccom

So, about to send off an email to Mr Jenkins, I decided to google him first. And the only hits I got were tied directly to this email. He does not seem to exist at Wachovia. I'll try calling tomorrow, to see if I can learn more.

My best friend is a bigot

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:31:15 EDT

Make that former best friend now . . .

Shortly before the caucuses, as my mind wandered while I drove on the highway, the thought that this was sort of a test for us as a people came to my mind. We have the best candidate we've had in a generation, maybe many generations, maybe even longer, running at a time when our country is in truly dire straits. Yet his very name--first, middle and last!-ties into some of our nation's greatest sources of angst. Those who judge superficially may become overwhelmed by their fears, and even those who don't will have to resolve whatever association those connections might arouse in their own minds.

I was interested to see what impact that might have in Iowa and the caucuses. I am happy to say little to none, as far as I could tell. Yet, the night after Barack's birthday, I got a call from my best friend from high school, with whom I hadn't spoken in over a year. Soon the talk turned to politics, and I am sad to say that she has bought pretty much all the lies. Her fears have overwhelmed her. If this was a test, she has failed miserably. It's not that's she not voting for Barack; it's why she's not voting for him, because she's full of fear, hate, ignorance and prejudice--which she sure didn't show when we were in high school.

When I told her how sad it made me to hear her say such horrible things about an entire group of people (Muslims, mainly), to hear how prejudiced she's become, she actually responded, "that really offends me to have you call me that." Apparently, she thinks that what happened on September 11 gives her the right to hate all Muslims and spread horrible, vicious lies about them. I told her I was glad that at least being called prejudiced offended her, since it suggests that perhaps that she still has a shred of basic decency and realizes that being prejudiced is wrong.

I can respect Republicans not voting for Barack simply because they disagree with his policies. We don't all think alike, after all. But I can't look past someone being prejudiced, hateful, and hurtful; I see that as a prelude mentality to some truly horrible stuff. And there is no way I can be friends with this person any more (even though she was godmother to my firstborn, one of my bridesmaids, etc), as long as she holds such hate and bigotry in her heart.

The opposition might have hate, but we have HOPE, and we shall overcome!

Thoughts on the new "Activity Tracker"

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:03:22 EDT

I like the idea behind this change. It's always seemed a bit strange to me, when folks try to rack up friends to up their points. I have about 15 requests from people I've never heard of, who seem to be trying to break the 500- or 1000-mark with friends; I just don't see the point of friendship like that.

But a problem that was there with the old system still seems to be there. If you're trying to assign value to the work someone does for the campaign, how can you accurately measure that? This system doesn't seem to do it any better than the old way. When I did things as a precinct captain last fall, it didn't earn me a point, apart from a couple of events I threw. Not a point for the hundreds of letters written, voters registered, doors knocked, phone calls made, etc. And throughout the primary I would often make calls directly for the campaign, given a different Voter ID system than the website used. And again it didn't earn a point. Over the summer, I've done several things for the campaign (hosting volunteers, walking in parades, donating supplies, etc), including going to the office for Barack's birthday and making over 50 calls. And none of this earned me a point. So how does this change? Do I just enter the number of doors I've knocked on or voters I've registered? Do we create other categories for various forms of unrecognized support? Are our already overworked organizers in the office supposed to be entering this information for us? Or is the whole idea of ranking people this way a bit misleading? Especially since now it's to be more central to a person's online identity, being visible to all, including on all group lists, etc? And might it not make some folks feel strange to have so much of their business out in everyone's face? Some folks are very concerned about their privacy, and with good reason.

So, while I agree completely that the point was never points for points sake, I also don't see how this new system is all that much more accurate, nor why it has to be even more central to the system.

I'm working for a President, not for points or credit.

On "flip flops"

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:53:31 EDT

Barack has demonstrated incredible political courage time and again, fighting for issues that others are often too cowardly or apathetic to touch, like capital case reform. I have yet to see a supposed "flip flop" of Barack's that I felt was a true "flip flop," even while I may have disagreed with his decisions.

Barack stays true to the ultimate goal, while he is flexible on the specifics. Too many folks get blinded by the specifics and claim that he's "flip flopped." He compromises by finding the common ground, negotiating on the specifics, but staying true to the ultimate goal. And that's change we can believe in.

O-lympics

IA for Obama ☮ — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:35:31 EDT

Here's a twist on the Olympics logo that a friend and I did for my son's birthday invitations. Hope you like it!

http://picasaweb.google.com/Maeve47/OLympics

"working" women

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:29:33 EDT

I just read Barack's Women and Families Blueprint," found here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/amandascott/gGxyNg . This booklet is great, apart from a fairly major, unnecessary, and uncharacteristic gaffe. It specifies that it aims to help "working" women and families. Specifying certain women as "working" in this way will be read as a big slap in the face to women who work by raising their own children full-time. No one pays them for that, obviously, but it is extremely demanding (and of course deeply rewarding) work. I have worked full-time; I have had flexible hours in a paid position as I raised my family; and I have been a full-time mother (a term that is also inadequate and unfair to parents who work for pay -- parenting is not a part-time thing). We ALL have it hard. We ALL need better work-life balance. We ALL can benefit from virtually everything in this booklet. Why phrase it in a way that may well be insulting to a great number of hard-working but unpaid women?

Hold yourself accountable, too

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:42:17 EDT

I've been a supporter for 5 years, and all these folks claiming Barack's shifting to the center, selling out, or what have you, are speaking more of their own ignorance of Barack's complexity, as well as his integrity. The richest example is those who get indignant over his remarks regarding the recent SCOTUS ruling on the death penalty--remarks that were almost verbatim what he wrote in his bestselling book, remarks that have been consistently reflected in his word and deed.

Barack Obama is not a narrow reflection of your own ideology, however much your ideologies may share in common. Barack Obama is far more complex than that, and he always has been. Try reading his books, his speeches, and studying his legislative record. Don't simply reduce him to the flaming liberal right-wingers love to paint him as, or to some perfect liberal savior with whom you will always 100% agree. Hold him accountable, but hold yourself accountable as well. Those claiming he's changed show how little they know or understand him, and often how little they know or understand the issues. Take some responsibility to become more informed on both counts.

Also, if you're up in arms over FISA or whatever, Al Giordano has some very wise words for you to ponder (thanks to Christine for bringing it to my attention):

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/smart-dissent#new

"[T]he highest calling of patriotism is not dissent. It is smart dissent, that based not on self-indulgence or the blurting of one's frustration's out in ways that seek to share the panic or the misery, but based on - even sometimes against great odds - building the objective conditions by which we will win the important battles worth fighting. We don't need any candidate's permission or endorsement of our issue or position to do that, and we sure don't have to wait for any politician to begin organizing the people to set him straight once in power. Ironically, we, the people have more leverage - if we organize - after a candidate becomes an official, than we do during the heat of an electoral campaign when he or she is so singularly focused on the goal of getting elected. And if we can use his own campaign as the basis through which to become organized, that much stronger will be our ability to move mountains when and if that campaign is victorious."

Now back to work!

Barack and the recent SCOTUS ruling

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:00:46 EDT

A lot of folks are "concerned" about Barack's remarks on yesterday's 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court disallowing the death penalty for the rape of a child: "I think that the rape of small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime," the Illinois senator said. "And if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution." (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/25/obama-splits-with-supreme-court-on-rape-executions/ )

It appears that some folks thought that Barack was completely opposed to the death penalty. Hearing him say that it may be justified for "heinous crimes", they assume that he is now "pandering" or "tacking right" as part of some political calculation, now that he's in GE mode. Those who have such "concerns" clearly have not read the Audacity of Hope, where he spells out this position almost verbatim:

"While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes--mass murder, the rape and murder of a child--so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment" (pp 57-58).

Folks who think he's pandering or suddenly tacking right are just revealing how little they know Barack, and how much they are simplifying the issue. Barack has done more to rid capital punishment of injustices than any politician I know of. His work reforming the system in Illinois demonstrates unparalleled political courage, integrity, and ability. He is also an outspoken opponent of using capital punishment as a deterrent, because it plain and simple does not work. He has spoken forcefully and effectively about the rampant corruption and injustices in capital punishment. Yet he firmly believes that some crimes are so outrageous and offensive that in committing them the person potentially forfeits their right to life. That position isn't pandering. That's a very nuanced position, the result of deep reflection and comprehensive understanding of the law and reality. You might not agree with it, but any claims that this is pandering or tacking right are totally unfounded.

Also, some folks are acting like he's said that all child rapists should automatically be sentenced to death or that punishing the rapist is more important than helping the victim. Such interpretations are completely off base. What he's saying is that the death penalty should not be completely disallowed. The SC ruled otherwise (saying that rape without murder categorically could not be punished by death), and Barack said that he disagreed, that "under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable." And of course he favors counseling and care for the victim, education and other social programs to help reduce and prevent such brutality and abuse from occurring in the first place; see http://www.womenforbarackobama.com/Obama_s_Record.html for multiple examples of legislation Barack has passed to protect victims, help them recover, and help prevent future assaults.

We definitely should hold Barack accountable. We should challenge him when we disagree. But we shouldn't try to distort his positions to bolster our own.

Fierce urgency of now: national secutiry

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:55:09 EDT

We need to help folks get to understand the many reasons we so desperately need Barack for the fierce urgency of now, most especially including national security. There ARE people who wish to do our country serious harm, and tense and volatile situations throughout the world could erupt in any number of catastrophic ways. As a mother of young children, safety and security are critical issues for me. And there is NO ONE I want more than Barack Obama to be making decisions in times of crisis. No one I trust more to understand the complexity of the issues, to not let passion, prejudice fear or whathaveyou interfere with his judgment, to fully consider all options, and to act decisively and wisely.

The idea that McCain is stronger on security is farcical. He's part of the failed mindset that has made bad situations worse. One of the last people I would want making decisions when desperate situations occur is George Bush, and McCain is essentially the same.

Des Moines, 5/20/08 (only 8 months to go!)

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:03:27 EDT

What a night! It was like a family reunion, a homecoming. First, shout outs to Joy and Laura, whom I saw tonight (meeting Laura for the first time). Second, shout outs to all the other thousands of folks celebrating with us tonight. So many familiar faces, some of whom I've seen at district and other events, some whom I haven't seen since the last rallies here, but I used to see them regularly. Remember the dude with the long white beard who was front and center at the Oprah event? He was with us tonight, too. And so many of our staffers returned as well. They got the band back together for IA!

Tonight I got more of a sense of what folks in other states have experienced. First time I had to wait in line, for 2 hours. But that just gave me more time to make new friends, who are all FIRED UP! First time I had to go through metal detectors. Back in the day, you could basically just waltz in. Even at the JJ, they didn't so much as check our tickets, which surprised me. We had the Speaker of the House and several key Democratic leaders. It made me a little uneasy how lax security was back then. But it sure isn't now, thankfully.

As soon as I got in, I saw the lovely Joy, with her beautiful smiling face. She got to volunteer. I was told if I hadn't had my offer to volunteer specifically accepted by the campaign, I couldn't volunteer, although that turned out not to be true. So I'm glad Joy got to do it.

We went to our special precinct captain area, which was just to the right behind the stage, as well as directly behind it. It was a great vibe, though not the same kind of giddy anticipation there was before the caucuses. We settled ourselves in for a long wait, but it turned out to be a lot shorter than we expected. We assumed he wouldn't go on until after OR had been called. But of course as he was only 15 or so pledged delegates away from the majority, he didn't need to wait. His beautiful family came down from the steps behind us, and the joy and excitement was like a damn bursting. He came over to us, shaking our hands, and I took a really blurry photo on my newish cell phone. Sorry I can't share it, but it's not worth it. Maybe Joy and Laura brought their cameras?

The speech was phenomenal, as you've no doubt heard yourself. The best was the ROAR when he announced that he had returned to IA with a majority of delegates--and you couldn't hear anything but the deafening exhilaration of Iowans, thrilled at the achievement that we thought was so closely in our grasp on the night of January 3. I confess, I thought it would be over a lot sooner. In my naivete, I thought on that night that we had essentially clinched the nomination. But then NH taught me a thing or two (especially, make sure you can verify the vote count). And NV taught me more lessons I'd rather not have learned (though I am happy about the ultimate resolution). And, in a way, I am glad that it wasn't decided back then, as each state is having its say, and so many are stepping up in wonderful, glorious ways. Besides, this makes his return tonight, on this night, so much more meaningful. We are very grateful, Barack, that you shared tonight with us.

I waited around to see him off, getting one of his glorious, gorgeous smiles in return. And I met Laura briefly, before I went off in search of food. Hadn't really eaten all day, as I was too FIRED UP! I felt like I did on caucus day for most of today, so excited, inspired, and HOPEful for the future we will create together.

Change is coming to America! And WE are that change! Yes we can!

Obama '08 Playlist

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:31:37 EDT

Here's the playlist I made for my caucus:

Sirius 2:26 Alan Parsons (opening music for the Bulls, also used as Barack's opening music at the Iowa JJ)

All You Need Is Love 3:55 The Beatles

Beautiful Day 4:08 U2

For Once In My Life 2:50 Stevie Wonder

Three Little Birds 3:03 Bob Marley

Eyes On The Prize 4:06 Mavis Staples

Ooh Child 3:18 The Five Stairsteps

Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now 3:41 McFadden & Whitehead

Hello Bonjour 4:52 Michael Franti & Spearhead

Can't Stand It 3:47 Wilco

Hey Young World, Part 2 (Featuring Slick Rick) 4:03 Macy Gray

Get Up, Stand Up 3:31 Peter Tosh

Imagine 3:04 John Lennon

I Shall Be Released (Live) 3:20 Bob Dylan & The Band

Pretty Africa 2:31 Desmond Dekker

America the Beautiful 3:37 Ray Charles

This Land Is Your Land 2:33 Woody Guthrie & Arlo Guthrie

Respect 2:26 Aretha Franklin

City of Blinding Lights 5:48 U2

Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours 2:41 Stevie Wonder

Happy Christmas (War Is Over) 3:36 John Lennon

What a Wonderful World 2:19 Louis Armstrong

Silent reader no more has this list:

-Think Aretha Freanklin
-Imagine John Lennon
-Waiting on the World To Change John Mayer
-People Get Ready Curtis Mayfield (my fave!)
-I Am Changing Jennifer Hudson
-Try a Little Tenderness Otis Redding (for us to keep in mind towards the HRC supporters)
-Change The World Eric Clapton
-Man In The Mirror Michael Jackson (yeah I went there, but listen to it again and then you’ll see why - it was MADE for this campaign!!)
-Coming Home John Legend (in honor of our troop coming home beginning in 09’!)
-Stand By Me Ben E. King
-Georgia On My Mind Ray Charles (swing, baby, swing!!!)
-It's Your Thing The Isley Bros.
-Yes We Can will.i.am

other good suggestions from Joy:

India.Arie - There's Hope

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole ("Iz") - Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World [to honor Barack's Hawaiian upbringing...] This song is *awesome*, been featured on some commercials and played often in the movie Finding Forrester.

Happy Mothers' Day

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:38:56 EDT

"I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book--less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."

Barack Obama, Preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams from My Father

Happy Mothers' Day, everyone!

going forward

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:10:36 EDT

I had strange dreams the night before NC/IN. Let's just say the shoe was on the other foot, and Barack dropped out. It made no sense to me, when I woke up, because I knew no matter how he fared tonight the numbers were on our side and there's no way we would drop out. I had two thoughts about it: that it was my anxiety playing itself out in an illogical, worst-case scenario, and that it was an attempt to cultivate empathy for HRC supporters, to try to help bridge the divide between us.

I don't know any die-hard HRC supporters. Many that I know now support Barack, and those who still support her have made it clear that they would welcome Barack as our nominee/President. But I saw some folks at district a few weeks ago who were as much anti-Obama as they were pro-HRC, and clearly many of them claim that they will vote McCain rather than Barack. This makes no sense to me, given McCain's stance on women's rights and basically every other issue, but clearly it's something personal for these voters. For some I suspect race may also be a factor.

As her supporters face the reality that's been apparent for weeks if not months, no matter how the MSM might spin, how can we best reach out to them? They'll probably take their cues from her, and who knows what cues those might be, but what do you think we can do, for our part? Without indulging their bizarro delusions, fed even by Andrew Sullivan, that her name might still be on the ticket.

response to Sullivan

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 04 May 2008 10:17:21 EDT

Andrew Sullivan writes ("Obama-Clinton: a hate-filled dream ticket; http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article3866584.ece ) that Barack should consider accepting HRC as his VP, which AS claims is her ultimate purpose these days. I reject and denounce his argument, though I often agree with him.

It's riddled with many holes, like this: "Worse: the demographics seem to be hardening into a difficult dynamic for him. (A) White working-class women — crucial to Democratic marginal states — remain resistant to his charms. (B) Hispanics are also iffier than they should be. Somehow, the Clintons' brutal assault on his brand, (C) aided and abetted by conservative media outlets, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, have managed to dent this unifier a little." {letters added}

This analysis is meaningless with respect to the general. Are the A group going to flock to McCain, when McCain is opposed to equal pay for women, and has an atrocious record in general on women's rights? Are the B group likely to support McCain, especially with Richardson and other prominent Hispanic leaders campaigning hard on Barack's behalf? And I call BS on that kind of slicing and dicing. I am sure something similar to Al Giordano's article debunking the white vote claims (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-giordano/operation-anti-chaos-the_b_99965.html ) could be done with respect to the Hispanic vote. Hispanics sure voted for him in huge numbers in Chicago when I lived there (up until Dec 2006), and I bet that a few minutes poking around the internet could refute or at least seriously contextualize AS's claim throughout the US. What does it mean to be "iffier than they should be," anyway?

And lastly, C points to why this is such a stupid tactic for the general. The right is ravenous for HRC's blood; that's why Limbaugh et al are campaigning for her and why they're even voting for her in their primaries (for most recent discussion, see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/us/politics/03crossover.html ). They WANT to run against her in the general; she is the best hope of unifying and galvanizing their party. They won't care if her name comes first or second. And the Republicans who genuinely support Barack would have serious reservations about voting for him if his name was followed by hers. Hell, I'd have serious reservations doing so, and I'm an Independent-turned-Democrat just to support Barack.

Sullivan sells Barack's options so short when he writes of only one other vp possibility, Jim Webb. Please. I know he's a favorite of some here, but he's hardly the most compelling possibility, even just for the narrow reasons Sullivan cites. What of Biden? McCaskill? Lee Hamilton? Richardson? Sebulius? About 20 other strong Party leaders who would truly complement Barack and give us the administration we so desperately need?

This suggestion is just plain wrong on so many levels for so many reasons, I don't know where to begin. But I'll stop myself here, for now.

Kantor clip

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:35:08 EDT

This has been scorching up the blogosphere something fierce. My thoughts:

Having watched the original (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_wKOgMNs0U relevant section starts at 4:47), I am fairly certain that Kantor does in fact say what has been attributed to him. But fixating on this clip is counter-productive to our purpose. We're fighting for ideas, vision, empowerment, government transparency. The other side might gleefully seize on what somebody Barack knows said over 15 years ago and try to twist it to use against him, but we're better than that.

better than Baracky

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:32:16 EDT

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8lvc-azCXY

Current campaign cast as Empire Strikes Back (beyond question the best of the Star Wars films). Very well done.

Digg Defined

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:57:09 EDT

Enough folks ask about Digg I thought I would post its own description of itself. To summarize, this is a way to get the word out about stuff. The more something gets dugg, the more notice it gets, perhaps even getting picked up by the MSM. It's easy to join and digg.

The rest is from http://digg.com/about:

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images to Podcasts — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

And it doesn’t stop there. Because Digg is all about sharing and discovery, there’s a conversation that happens around the content. We’re here to promote that conversation and provide tools for our community to discuss the topics that they’re passionate about. By looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg, you’ll always find something interesting and unique. We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing.

DK blog on Wright anxiety

IA for Obama ☮ — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:14:16 EDT

I haven't been able to be on the blog much of late, and, when I have, I haven't wanted to stay on all that long, as it seems to have morphed into a blog all about Reverend Wright, whom I respect and admire. But this is Barack Obama's blog, and all this time and energy on Wright is a distraction. Not to be dismissive of Wright and how profoundly inspirational he is, nor to be dismissive of how deeply offensive the media's manipulation of his message has been. But all this talk about Wright doesn't help make Barack POTUS. Especially when so much of the talk is hand-wringing about how this hurts Barack, or when we have endless debates between Wright's admirers and his detractors, etc.

LarsThorwald has written the perfect response to all Obama supporters who are getting their knickers in a bunch over Wright. The language is strong, but so right on. Check it out: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/28/165538/015/404/505047 .

Excerpts:

"Now let me tell you something you already know. Barack Obama is not pollyannish. He is not naive. And he sure as hell isn't stupid.

You don't think he and Axelriod didn't sit down months ago to discuss the potential scandals and controversies? You don't think they mapped that out and weighed that in the balance of how to run the campaign? You don't think they saw what was coming a mile away like the punchline to a bad joke?

You must. Because some of you people have been mewling around here like a bunch of hanky-clutching twists, all eat up over how and whether Wright will doom Obama, or whether one poll showing "decline" will doom Obama, or whether this miniscule campaign tactic will doom Obama, or whether that one will doom Obama.

You have gone from hope and change to doom and gloom. You people have gone from "Yes We Can" to "Obama Should..." And where you once saw the possibilities that awaits a candidate who has millions at his back, you now see an abyssmal pitfall at every slight misstep.

Are you so easily defeated?

Well, let me tell you, sisters and brothers, I don't believe you are that easily defeated.

Because you know that this was not going to be easy, and you signed up all the same. You know, as the man himself said, that the battles ahead would be long. That there would be a chorus of cynics who would only grow louder and more dissonant.

You knew that this man--this African American man who dared to challenge, who had the audacity to challenge existing power structures and ideas and the way of doing business--you knew that this man was going to be attacked, and derided, and ridiculed, and scorned.

You knew that his kind of thinking would make too many enemies.

You knew that they would throw more than the kitchen sink at him--you knew that their goal was to make it such that he would feel that the whole of the moon and the stars had fallen upon him.

You knew that in this primary we would see the most jaw-dropping, line-shattering, undignified things ever said about or hurled at one man. You knew he would make mistakes, and you knew those who wanted him defeated would take every mistake and twist it into a lie-filled, pointed cudgel that they would use to bash him again and again and again.

You knew all this.

You knew all this, but still you signed up.

But now a poll or two sends your head into your hands? Now a speech by a Reverend makes you a veritable cassandra, shouting with woe at the defeat this will bring? Now the slightest breeze makes you shutter your windows and fall to the floor crying about the storm?

What a slender reed you must think this man, that he would bend and break under such circumstances. And yet, throughout all of this, has he raised his voice or bared his teeth? Has he angrily confronted a reporter, as McCain did when pressed? Has he poured out emotionally, or lash out with calls of "Shame! For shame!" as Hillary has?

Of course not. His is an even temper. His is a carefully measured countenance. His is even, at times, a show of humor.

He does not moan, he does not rend, he does not gnash. He keeps his eyes on the prize, and he negotiates rocky shoals.

He is not stupid. He knows where the weaknesses lie.

And if I didn't think he couldn't handle this and worse, I'd have abandoned him long ago. But I didn't.

And neither did you.

So calm down. This is not the time to panic, for there is nothing to panic about.

Put on your helmet and tighten your chinstrap. Grab tight your standard, and hold fast.

You march with fourteen million strong. You march with strength. You march with change.

You march, my brothers and sisters, with history.

Onward. "

Thank you, LarsThorwald!

Thoughts on PA

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:15:12 EDT

Posted on 4/23's morning news:

Sparing myself the MSM, I just checked the PA Dept of State website. With over 99% tallied, Barack's at 45.7%, or 46%, and HRC is at 54.3%, or 54%. [As of 4/24 at 10:15 EST, it's 45.4 to 54.6, with 99.51% in, so 9.2 difference; see http://www.electionreturns.state.pa.us/ElectionsInformation.aspx?ElectionID=27] That means 8 points. From 25 points a few weeks ago. In a state she was highly favored to win for multiple reasons.

So why so glum, chums? Don't let the negatives outweigh the positives. Yeah, I thought we could have pulled it off, because I have faith in him and I have great faith in the American people. And because a 3-year-old psychic said we could. And because it was my birthday, and birthdays are magical. But 8 points is still damn good. Anything less than 10 is good for us. And anyone who acts like Barack had to come within 5 or better for this to be OK is letting the opposition and the media spin inside their heads.

Can we do better? Of course. Will we do better? If we work for it.

So let's stop being sick and frustrated. Let's get FIRED UP and fight to take our country back.

YES. WE. CAN.

And then posted later in the day, when someone was being very harsh about PA and claiming the reason we lost is because the whole state is racist and you couldn't pay that person to live there, I replied:

racism saddens me deeply, no matter where it's found.

But let's not dismiss an entire state and paint it all racist. That sounds like the other candidate's approach. When they lose a state, find a reason to dismiss it.

One of the things I most appreciate about this process is seeing great folks stand with Barack in each state across the country. I have lived in several states that I thought were rather racist. And those states Barack won in landslides. Yet one of the most liberal and progressive states I lived in he lost.

Unfortunately, tragically even, race will be a factor for some people in every state in the Union. But no state has the market cornered on jerks.

There are many great people in PA. Over a million of them voted for Barack. Many more would have as well, if they had been able to vote.

ABC's farce of a debate

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:23:39 EDT

My thoughts on last night's shameful ABC debacle, which I didn't watch, so can't speak to specifics.

I spared myself watching this debate, though I still have it on my DVR if need be.

But I think this might help us. Everyone seems to be outraged about what a cr*p job ABC did (except for David Brooks, apparently--what's up with that?!), and pretty much everyone seems to regard it as an all-out assault on Barack, so outrageous that Wolf Blitzer and CNN look good in comparison.

The American people are not as stupid and easily manipulated as some sectors (like ABC, apparently) seem to believe. I doubt they'll fall for ABC's attempts to invent further scandals while rehashing old controversies; rather, they'll contrast Barack's ability to stay above the fray and repeated attempts to get the focus back on the issues.

The "debate" seems like it was an exercise in exactly the kind of cr*p that Barack is reminding us we need to end if we're going to address the real problems facing our nation and our world. Who gives a hoot about label pins, when the war in Iraq rages on, when our civil liberties are under attack, when millions are uninsured and even those with insurance are being financially destroyed by the cost of health care, when our schools are crumbling, etc and so forth. The "debate" pretty much makes Barack's points for him, especially about the politics of division & distraction. What an opportunity for America to stand up and shout, "NOT THIS TIME."

This will FIRE UP Obama supporters in a crucial way, with less than a week to go. This campaign is as much about us as it is about him, and there's nothing more effective than FIRED UP supporters, canvassing, calling, and donating for change. WE are the change we've been waiting for, and we can make this happen. YES WE CAN!

It probably also helped some "undecideds" realize the opportunity we have in Barack, to get beyond this kind of BS, to rise above it and get stuff done.

Cr*p debates like this have a way of working to our benefit. It was a debate such as this, though not quite as bad, that led me to this blog in November. And coming here helped me be that much more effective as a precinct captain in Iowa. And look how that turned out--in my precinct, we got 5 out of 9 delegates (2 to Edwards and 2 to HRC). And once Iowa roared YES WE CAN, well, the whole world knew this thing is ON!

And it still is so ON! It's more than on. Barack will win. The ABC hatchet job, HRC suck up just further attests to Barack's lead, and provides him with even more opportunity to increase it.

Why the Obama campaign is getting all my feminist cash

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:41:52 EDT

One of the worst consequences of HRC's exploitation of feminism and sexism is the multiple ways in which this is setting back women's rights on so many levels.

I am an ardent feminist. I have a Master's in Women's Studies, have been very active for women's rights since high school, and much of my professional and personal life has been grounded in feminism. And right now I am disgusted with too many "feminists" in our country and how they have sold out our cause for this person who may be a woman but is more of an elitist than a feminist (and in my opinion, true feminism and elitism are mutually exclusive). Whenever I get a solicitation for any feminist cause, even if it's just for girls, I toss it in the recycling bin, no matter how much I supported them before. Part of the reason is that I am giving all I can to Barack, as I believe that will do far more to effect the changes we need on every level. But it's also because I no longer trust the "feminist" leadership of this country, and I ain't giving them a single cent, now that I've seen what too many of them have done with their position and power.

I would not have thought I would turn from these causes, but I guess that's just more evidence that HRC really is one of the most divisive people in the world. But I really haven't turned from the causes; I just no longer trust the leadership of these organizations and I believe strongly that Barack Obama and an empowered citizenry can do far more to right the wrongs of sexism (and other wrongs), so that's where I'm sending whatever cash I can.

My conscience allows a vote only for Barack, even if I have to write his name on the ballot

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:46:23 EDT

I have every faith and HOPE that Barack is going all the way to the White House. I find the repeat questions of "what would you do if Barack doesn't get the nomination" to be, in general, a distraction and a diversion. I am totally committed to making sure that does not happen, and we need to keep working hard to make sure that he IS our nominee and our President.

But the question comes up so repeatedly, and the issue is keenly felt by so many, as evinced by the number of bloggers who have adopted Tamsin's middle name, which the title of this blog post also follows. So I thought I'd just post my response to the latest variation of the question (would you vote for HRC, posed by Victoria, said she'd be sending answers to DNC) on my own blog:

Some seriously sketchy stuff would have to happen for that to be the outcome of this primary season. Stuff that would probably be sufficient in itself to not vote for her. But playing along with the hypothetical, and further stretching credulity by allowing for the possibility that she won it fair and square . . .

If Barack asked that we vote for her, I would listen to what he had to say. And if other good leaders did the same, I would listen to what they had to say. But I honestly cannot imagine them saying anything so convincing that I would be moved to overcome my absolute rejection of her approach to politics and government, my feelings of complete betrayal as I witnessed her exploit our nation's deepest wounds in order to scare up votes, my utter conviction that she represents so much of what is wrong with our country and our politics today.

I can answer unequivocally that I would never vote for McCain. And I honestly don't see how anyone who supports Barack could, though I know many good people would. McCain represents Bush's 3rd term. He may be an honorable person, but he stands for virtually everything I believe this campaign to be fighting against. The only argument that I could envision holding any merit for voting for HRC, should all these hypotheticals come to pass, is that she would presumably be the best bet of stopping McCain.

Only thing is, though, I don't think she is much different from McCain. Like him, she's far too cavalier when it comes to war. Not only would she continue failed policies in Iraq, but she would be all too willing to start new failures in Iran and who knows where else. Like McCain and Bush, she favors the wealthy over regular folks, corporations over citizens. I might agree with her more on issues concerning women's rights and education, but the fact of the matter is I trust her even less than I trust McCain. So both McCain and HRC are utterly unacceptable options for me. If those were my only two "official" options, I would write in Barack.

What a nightmare! Let's keep working our everythings off so that doesn't happen!

Obama08now also said:

Ok, for starters. I don't really want people out there thinking that:

If they diss the people and give Hillary the nomination, Obama voters will be more likely to vote for her than her voters would be for us.

For enders:

I have a 14 year old son......changes the whole picture. I can't imagine any mother would dare put McCain in the WH with such a high probability of a draft.

If I were to write in and McCain won, I would be scared to death.

Please.......I know it sounds like I am against the service of our country. Absolutely not, if that is my sons choice, so be it, I just want it to be his choice.

I can't stand anything about HRC, I mean that to my very core, but I would sell my soul for what I think is best for my son.

I replied:

"I have a 14 year old son......changes the whole picture. I can't imagine any mother would dare put McCain in the WH with such a high probability of a draft."

Amen. I have 2 sons. One is 5, the other not quite 3. For their sakes more than anything, a McCain presidency terrifies me. Yet, on this issue, HRC has voted right along with McCain, and I believe on the matter of war her decisions are far more similar to McCain's than to Barack's, no matter what she says while campaigning.

Obama Everywhere PA style

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:44:32 EDT

If you haven't yet (and even if you have!), check out this short video by Earl Pickens. Anybody count how many PA town names he fits in there? Great fun for all!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKFgbsMw0sQ

Hillary's Irish Lies

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:21:43 EST

I lived in Ireland on and off throughout the Clinton presidency, including every time Bill Clinton and occasionally other members of his family came on an official visit to Ireland. I had voted for Bill myself and was reasonably pleased with his presidency, but compared to the Irish I was downright indifferent. That was my first real witness of adulation for a living political figure, standing with the raptured crowd as Bill addressed us outside the gates of Trinity.

I also was trying to go about my business on Nassau Street when HRC and her daughter decided to shut down all traffic downtown so they could go shopping. That was the only interaction I saw HRC have with the people of Ireland, some of whom thought she was divine by virtue of being Bill's wife, but plenty who were more than a little annoyed with her for shutting down the busiest part of the city for such a frivolous reason.

I followed the peace process relatively closely and do not once remember seeing HRC's name mentioned as participating in the negotiations or in playing a role other than accompanying her husband on trips or at social functions.

So I thought it laughable when she claimed that she was integral to solving Ireland's problems. I thought the claim was so blatantly false and borderline offensive that she would be mocked for making such claims and it would go away. But apparently people believe that if you repeat a life often enough it becomes true. And too many people are just accepting this lie, tucked into a nest of other lies that prop up HRC's claims of foreign experiences. But for those who reject dwelling in HRC's bizarro world, here are a few folks who refuse to drink her kool-aid.

http://www.counterpunch.org/mccann01272008.html
"I Brought Peace to Northern Ireland"
Hillary's Lie

By EAMONN McCANN

Ask not what you can do for the peace process, but what the peace process can do for you.

Thus the approach of US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton.
Some may say that Hillary distorting beyond recognition any role she played in the North may not be a big deal. But it's the matter which involves us, and it's telling in its way.

Marcella Bombardieri of the Boston Globe has described Clinton

"telling and retelling one particularly moving story about bringing together Catholic and Protestant women in Northern Ireland ...

"Clinton said she had hosted a meeting of enemies in the conflict. They had never been in the same room before, and 'no one thought this was going to be a very good idea.'"

Sad, benighted people of Belfast. Never in their lives in the same room together. Such hostility that "nobody" thought it advisable even to try to bring them together. Until Hillary Clinton happened along aglow with goodness and, ignoring scepticism all around, insisted on "hosting" an unprecedented coming together.

By her account, this brave initiative where all else had failed succeeded in breaching the centuries-old sectarian barrier to produce an epiphany.

"A Catholic woman shared her daily fears that her husband wouldn't come home at night. Across the table, a Protestant woman described the same worry about her son.

"And for the first time they actually saw each other not as caricatures or stereotypes, but as human beings who actually had common experiences as mothers and wives and people. One of the reasons why I'm running for president is to be constantly reaching out to try to bring people together to resolve conflicts and not let them fester and get worse."

These events, according to Clinton, took place at Belfast "town hall."
You'd have thought she'd have found space to mention this episode in her 2003 autobiography. But no. The 560-page Living History does include a description of an occasion in a community facility in Belfast to which she had been invited, attended by women community activists well known to one another, who had regularly been in the same room together. The meeting had been organised by the NIO.

Clinton's fanciful new tale isn't an exercise in personal aggrandisement. Nor is it a vague reminiscence mentioned in passing. It is a nicely-structured, detailed story which has come to form part of her standard campaign presentation. Marcella Bombardieri observes: "More than an isolated stump speech snippet, her Northern Ireland story speaks to the larger issue of whether her travels around the world as first lady qualify as serious diplomacy. That experience is a crucial element of her argument that she is the most qualified presidential candidate."

The deft distortion has been professionally designed to fit into the presidential photofit constructed for the campaign. It is implicitly offered as a model for the Clintons' style of engagement with a troubled world generally, soothing ancient enmities, bringing peace -- in present circumstances, a very attractive message for an anxious US electorate.

It is a view which is reflected back here. The notion is about, and is rarely challenged, that the Clintons are held in equally high regard by all sections for their generous efforts to encourage us towards peace. We are even told explicitly that we "owe" the Clintons for this selfless beneficence.

The truth, and everybody knows it, is that the Clintons are much more warmly regarded by Nationalists than by Unionists. Bill Clinton is seen as having ranged himself on the Nationalist side since February 1994 when, against the wishes of John Major, he granted Gerry Adams a US visa.

This was, true, an important moment. It helped speed the IRA ceasefire seven months later by enabling the leadership to convince the membership that there was something tantalizing on offer if they changed their ways. Give up the guns and we'll be well-got in the White House, was the message.

This was a factor in ensuring that when the Republican Movement abandoned the path of armed struggle, it veered to the right and not to the left.

This has been the most specific and identifiable effect on our politics of the involvement of US administrations, most importantly the Clintons', in the political development of the North.

That done, now we are just being used.

Eamonn McCann can be reached at Eamonderry@aol.com

*******************
Nobel winner: Hillary Clinton's 'silly' Irish peace claims

By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 9:30am GMT 08/03/2008
Page 1 of 2

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

# David Trimble: Hillary Clinton mere "cheerleader" in Ireland

Hillary Clinton with the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness
Hillary Clinton with the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness after their meeting in Washington last year

"I don't know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don't want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.

Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in 1998. Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the talks, said: "There would have been no contact with her either in person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in the months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was taking calls from the White House and they were invariably coming from the president."
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Central to Mrs Clinton's claim of an important Northern Ireland role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a group of women from cross-community groups. "I actually went to Northern Ireland more than my husband did," she said in Nashua, New Hampshire on January 6th.

"I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room where they had never been before with each other because they don't go to school together, they don't live together and it was only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there.

"And I wasn't sure it was going to be very successful and finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said, 'You know, every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I worry he won't come home at night.

"And then a Protestant woman on the other side said, 'Every time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won't come home again'. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as caricatures and stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the slow, hard work of peace-making could move forward."

There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the Christmas tree lights in November 1995. The former First Lady appears to be referring a 50-minute event the same day, arranged by the US Consulate, the same day at the Lamp Lighter Café on the city's Ormeau Road.

The "Belfast Telegraph" reported the next day that the café meeting was crammed with reporters, cameramen and Secret Service agents. Conversation "seemed a little bit stilted, a little prepared at times" and Mrs Clinton admired a stainless steel tea pot, which was duly given to her, for keeping the brew "so nice and hot".

Hillary Clinton meeting with Belfast women in 1995 and the teapot she admired
Hillary Clinton meeting with Belfast women
in 1995 and the teapot she admired

Among those attending were women from groups representing single parents, relationship counsellors, youth workers and a cultural society. In her 2003 autobiography "Living History", Mrs Clinton wrote about the meeting in some detail but made no claim that it was significant.

Rather than it being the first time the women had met, Mrs Clinton wrote: "Because they were willing to work across the religious divide, they had found common ground." Mary Fox, the wife of a former IRA prisoner and one of the seven women at the meeting, said she had been there on behalf of the Footprints community centre. "It was quite a political change for the women's sector after the visit of Hillary Clinton. We would love to see her as president. She spoke to each of us and was very interested in our work. She was lovely."

Mr McDevitt said: "I've always had a theory that these people were already well networked. Maybe they needed a bit of bringing together and she [Mrs Clinton] was an ideal focus point." Once a peace deal was in place, Mrs Clinton supported women politicians and was always available if they visited Washington "to give them a pat on the back, give them moral support", he added.

"So in a classic woman politicky sort of way I think she was active...She was certainly investing some time, no doubt about it. Whether she was involved on the issue side I think probably not." Some of the people Mrs Clinton met went on to help found the Women's Coalition, which took part in the Good Friday talks. Lord Trimble said: "The Women's Coalition will think they were important. Other people beg to differ."

Steven King, a negotiator with Lord Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party, argued that Mrs Clinton might even have helped delay the chances of peace. "She was invited along to some pre-arranged meetings but I don't think she exactly brought anybody together that hadn't been brought together already," he said. Mrs Clinton was "a cheerleader for the Irish republican side of the argument", he added.

"She really lost all credibility when on Bill Clinton's last visit to Northern Ireland [in December 2000] when she hugged and kissed [Sinn Fein leaders] Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness."

Responding to inquiries from this newspaper, Hillary Clinton's campaign issued a statement from Mr Hume. "I am quite surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform important foreign policy work as First Lady," the statement said.

"I can state from firsthand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland. She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace process.

"There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton's support for our peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/08/wuspols108.xml

**********************

Clinton's experience claim under scrutiny
Hillary Clinton may have influenced foreign policy, but evidence is scant she played pivotal role

By Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, WASHINGTON BUREAU Tribune correspondents Jim Tankersley and Rick Pearson contributed to this report

March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON

Surrounded by military leaders in a Cabinet-style setting, Hillary Clinton on Thursday said she has "crossed the threshold" of foreign policy experience to serve as commander in chief.

Supporters of rival Barack Obama fired back immediately, arguing that the former first lady's trips abroad hardly constituted a practice run for managing global crises.

"She was never asked to do the heavy lifting" when meeting with foreign leaders, said Susan Rice, who was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and is now advising Obama. "She wasn't asked to move the mountain or deliver a harsh message or a veiled threat. It was all gentle prodding or constructive reinforcement. And it would not have been appropriate for her to do the heavy lifting."

The debate over readiness for the global arena is emerging as the flash point in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, crystallized by a dramatic Clinton campaign commercial asking who is best prepared to answer a 3 a.m. phone call to the White House during a crisis.

Clinton says she is the answer, arguing that Obama's major achievement was his early opposition to the Iraq war in 2002. Indeed, Obama doesn't have much in the way of experience managing foreign crises, nor does Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, for that matter. In fact, it is rare for any president to have that kind of experience before coming into office.

In Clinton's case, she may well have exercised influence on foreign policy that is hard to document because she had a unique opportunity to offer private counsel to her husband, President Bill Clinton.

But while Hillary Clinton represented the U.S. on the world stage at important moments while she was first lady, there is scant evidence that she played a pivotal role in major foreign policy decisions or in managing global crises.

Pressed in a CNN interview this week for specific examples of foreign policy experience that has prepared her for an international crisis, Clinton claimed that she "helped to bring peace" to Northern Ireland and negotiated with Macedonia to open up its border to refugees from Kosovo. She also cited "standing up" to the Chinese government on women's rights and a one-day visit she made to Bosnia following the Dayton peace accords.

Earlier in the campaign, she and her husband claimed that she had advocated on behalf of a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda to stop the genocide there.

'Ancillary' to process

But her involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process was primarily to encourage activism among women's groups there, a contribution that the lead U.S. negotiator described as "helpful" but that an Irish historian who has written extensively about the conflict dismissed as "ancillary" to the peace process.

The Macedonian government opened its border to refugees the day before Clinton arrived to meet with government leaders. And her mission to Bosnia was a one-day visit in which she was accompanied by performers Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, as well as her daughter, Chelsea, according to the commanding general who hosted her.

Whatever her private conversations with the president may have been, key foreign policy officials say that a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda was never considered in the Clinton administration's policy deliberations. Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign.

"In my review of the records, I didn't find anything to suggest that military intervention was put on the table in NSC [National Security Council] deliberations," said Gail Smith, a Clinton NSC official who did a review for the White House of the administration's handling of the Rwandan genocide. Smith is an Obama supporter.

Prudence Bushnell, a retired State Department official who handled the Rwanda portfolio at the time and has not allied with a presidential candidate, confirmed that a U.S. military intervention was not considered in policy deliberations, as did several senior Clinton administration officials with first-hand knowledge who declined to be identified.

Clinton has previously described her role in the Northern Ireland peace process as meeting with women's groups to encourage them to build a political climate for peace.

Former Sen. George Mitchell, who was the lead U.S. negotiator, said Clinton's visits were "very helpful."

"She was especially involved in encouraging women to get involved in the peace process," which was a "significant factor" in the agreement, Mitchell said in an interview.

But Tim Pat Coogan, an Irish historian who has written extensively on the conflict in Northern Ireland, said the first lady's visits were not decisive in the negotiating breakthroughs in Northern Ireland.

"It was a nice thing to see her there, with the women's groups. It helped, I suppose," Coogan said. "But it was ancillary to the main thing. It was part of the stage effects, the optics.

"There were all kinds of peace movements, women's movements throughout the 'Troubles.' But it was more about the clout of Bill Clinton," added Coogan, who said Clinton administration decisions to grant visas to leaders of the Irish Republican Army's political wing and appoint a U.S. negotiator were the keys to changing the political climate.

Beijing speech

One of Clinton's most noteworthy forays onto the foreign stage came in 1995, when she delivered a speech at the United Nations' women's conference in Beijing. That speech was widely noted and hailed as a bold call for women's rights, especially because Clinton explicitly spoke out against forced abortion and other practices of the host country.

"In the years since, I have met many women from many places who tell me they were at Beijing, or had friends who were, or who were inspired by the conference to launch initiatives," Albright wrote in her 2003 memoir.

The speech might never have happened if the first lady had not pressed for it, said one former Clinton administration official sympathetic to her candidacy who traveled with her and Albright to Beijing. The administration was conflicted about whether Hillary Clinton should go to Beijing at all because of the regime's record on human rights.

"Yet she was determined to go and was convinced that her going would send a very strong signal of support for human rights," said the official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named. "Everyone at the end of the process almost certainly would have said, 'How could we be so foolish to question the wisdom of the trip?'"

Still, Rice questioned whether that trip amounted to the kind of preparation for a global crisis that Clinton has claimed.

"How does going to Beijing and giving a speech show crisis management? There was no crisis. And there was nothing to manage," Rice said.

Macedonia visit

In 1999, Clinton visited Albanian refugee camps in Macedonia during the NATO bombing campaign to force Slobodan Milosevic's troops out of Kosovo. Macedonia had sealed its borders in an attempt to stop the arrival of refugees but, under Western pressure, reopened them the day before Clinton visited the camps.

A former Clinton administration official sympathetic to her candidacy said her presence "played a very important role in helping to shore up support for the Kosovars."

But Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton NSC official with responsibility for the Balkans and author of a history of the Kosovo conflict, said the border opening had nothing to do with her negotiating skills.

"It was her coming that helped. But she had absolutely no role in the dirty work of negotiations," said Daalder, an Obama supporter. "This had nothing to do with her competence."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-experiencemar07,1,4483372,print.story

******

BELFAST, Northern Ireland, March 9 (UPI) -- David Trimble, who helped broker peace in Northern Ireland said Sen. Hillary Clinton's role in those negotiations was that of a cheerleader, not a participant.

Presidential contender Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., told CNN Wednesday that she "helped bring peace to Northern Ireland" as foreign policy experience becomes the latest issue in the Democratic presidential race.

"I don't know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill (Clinton) going around," Trimble said, adding, "I don't want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player," The Sunday Telegraph reported.

Conall McDevitt, who served as the chief negotiator during the Good Friday Agreement talks that ended the conflict between England and Northern Ireland, said there was "no contact with her" during the negotiating processes.

McDevitt said Clinton played a supporting role following the signing of the agreement.

"So in a classic woman politicky sort of way I think she was active ... She was certainly investing some time, no doubt about it. Whether she was involved on the issue side I think probably not," McDevitt said.

The Clinton campaign responded to the statements saying they were "quite surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform important foreign policy work as First Lady."

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/03/09/irish_blast_clintons_foreign_policy_claim/9676/

Some links to digg and read:

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Irish_blast_Clinton_s_foreign_policy_claim
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Nobel_winner_Hillary_Clinton_s_silly_Irish_peace_claims
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Boston_Globe_Hillary_s_Claims_on_Northern_Ireland_Unclear
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Associated_Press_Clinton_Foreign_Policy_Claims_Overstated
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_s_experience_claim_under_scrutiny
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/On_Foreign_Policy_Claim_Clinton_is_a_Wee_Bit_Silly
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Fmr_NIreland_1st_Minister_Clinton_s_Irish_Peace_Claims_Silly
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Former_Irish_Minister_Clinton_Irish_Peace_Claims_Silly
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_Says_She_Risked_Life_on_Goodwill_Trips_Not_Really
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_s_Ireland_Claims_Debunked
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Give_Me_A_P
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Fact_Check_Hillary_Clinton_s_Foreign_Policy_Claims

This is IOWA--hear me ROAR!

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:53:27 EST

So I just got back from a night of socializing and drinking wine with my neighbors. Those of you who have been around long enough might remember me blogging a bit like this before the caucuses; whether you have or you haven't, please bear with me.

Every single person, whether they caucused for Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Clinton, Obama, or sat it out because they were undecided, was FIRED UP! Every single one. EVERYONE wants Obama now.

This did me no end of good. Today hit me hard. Losing Samatha Power, especially over such stupidity, was BAD. It was like losing family. I think the world of Samantha; she is part of what makes this campaign so meaningful, so real, so invested in actually doing good and not merely talking about the problems facing our world. Samantha represents solutions. Seeing her go, especially under these circumstances, that was a challenge. It caused doubt, anger, even fear and pessimism. I felt it all as I walked into that neighborhood gathering.

But my neighbors, who hail me as "our Obama woman," some of whom I've never met before, most of whom I know because I am our precinct's Obama captain, got me all FIRED UP once again.

Iowa has opportunities other states don't have, as far as this political process goes. We start paying attention earlier, we get to know the candidates before and better than the rest, and we are heavily invested in the outcome, once it leaves our state. All night long I talked politics, and not once did I initiate the conversation. EVERYBODY is FIRED UP and WE WANT OBAMA!

It is our responsibility to share this with the rest of the country, and it is my pride to do so. We hate how negative HRC has made it. She would NEVER get away with that in IA. Here she was reduced to making up stuff about him in kindergarten, so tame did the negativity have to be. We despise what she has done with the political process since.

We want Obama because we know he is the one to deliver on health care. We want Obama because we know he is the one with the best chance of resolving the situation in Iraq. We want Obama because he will restore our standing in the world. And we want Obama because he inspires people from all walks of life to embrace the political system and work to reform it. That is NOTHING to scoff at. That is huge. Our ability to make the world a better place may well depend upon it.

So please, the rest of the United States, consider the voice of us Iowans. We have reflected long and hard about our options. We know that there is a vast gulf between HRC and Barack. Please don't kid yourself that there are enough similarities in what they say they will do. We believe that only one will honor any pledges that they make on the campaign trail: Barack Obama. We don't trust a single word that comes out of HRC's mouth; she basically promised us anything and everything we wanted to hear, and then turned around and said we didn't count when she lost our state. We have watched and watched closely; we believe the saying, "if you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention," applies especially to witnesses of the Clintons' conduct. We thought she was a worthy candidate, too--until she started getting challenged. Then we saw her true nature. We saw her exploit the worst wounds in our nation in her efforts to scare up votes. We have seen her lie repeatedly about Barack and his legislative record. We have seen her push CANAFTAGATE, only to learn, unsurprisingly, that she is the pot calling the kettle black. She represents the worst of what is wrong with our government today.

We've already voted. We've had our say. But we still have plenty more to say. If you care about our future, if you want a real alternative to the failed Bush policies that have crippled our nation for so long, if you want to raise children instead of soldiers for unnecessary and immoral wars, then vote your hopes, not your fears.

Obama '08

--Iowa.

Why HRC needs to go--digg it

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:53:05 EST

Why HRC needs to go:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/It_s_your_call_Hillary_Los_Angeles_Times
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/There_s_only_1_winner_from_this_Democratic_battle_the_GOP
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/How_Can_Hillary_Win_the_Nomination_With_Fewer_Votes
and
http://digg.com/politics/What_s_REALLY_behind_Hillary_s_surge_of_wins_in_TX_OH_RIand
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_s_Big_State_Myth
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Limbaugh_Urges_GOP_To_Vote_For_Hillary
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_Wins_Limbaugh_is_Laughing
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_owes_debt_of_gratitude_to_Texas_Republicans
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Rush_Limbaugh_Gets_Hillary_the_Win_in_Ohio_and_Texas

and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Adam_Hanft_Why_Won_t_Hillary_Clinton_Release_Her_Tax_Return

and endorses McCain
""I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002," Clinton says." http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0308/Clinton_on_Obama_and_McCain.html

""That's what you say when you want to be John McCain's Vice Presidential choice. That's not what you say when you are trying to become the democratic nominee for president." Rachel Maddow
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/3/203910/3644/635/468212
and she did it again 3/6
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/6/163937/4561/364/452219

NAFTAgate--Oh, Canada! Digg it

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:40:54 EST

Will the machinations never cease! From the start, both the Canadian government and the Obama campaign have denounced and rejected this story as false, but the MSM and the Clinton campaign continued to push the fabrications. And of course it turns out that it was actually the Clinton campaign that told the Canadians that her words on NAFTA were only so much political posturing.

Let this be further evidence (NV voter suppression, caucus cheating--anyone else feel free to add more) that when the Clintons are accusing you of some sort of misdeed, that that is to cover the very same misdeed that they have done/are about to do.

Anyway, diggs on the topic:

http://digg.com/politics/NAFTA_call_to_Canada_was_actually_from_the_Clinton_Campaign
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/BREAKING_NAFTA_Gate_Leak_Said_Hillary_Was_Reassuring_Canada
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Report_Clinton_Camp_At_Heart_Of_NAFTA_Gate
and
http://digg.com/politics/NAFTA_gate_started_with_Clinton_not_Obama
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/CLINTON_Campaign_Told_Canada_Not_To_Worry_About_NAFTA
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Breaking_Hillary_behind_Canadian_NAFTA_Smear
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTAgate_began_with_remark_from_Harper_s_chief_of_staff
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTA_gate_started_with_HILLARY_2
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Multiple_reports_NAFTA_gate_started_with_HILLARY
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTA_gate_started_with_HILLARY
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Canadian_PM_orders_probe_into_memo_leak_on_Obama_s_NAFTA_pos
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Harper_says_Obama_leak_might_have_been_illegal
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTA_gate_sunk_Obama_in_Ohio_Clinton_Aid
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Canada_NAFTA_leak_blatantly_unfair
and
http://digg.com/politics/globeandmail_com_PM_s_top_aide_set_off_storm_with_Obama_NA
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/CA_s_PM_s_chief_of_staff_was_NAFTA_leak
and
http://digg.com/world_news/Canada_says_leak_was_blatantly_unfair_to_Obama

HRC's double-standard on tax evasion--digg it

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:29:54 EST

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Obama_Memo_on_Clinton_Tax_Returns
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Why_are_Hillary_and_McCain_refusing_to_release_their_taxes
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/More_Clinton_Campaign_Hypocrisy
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Obama_camp_What_s_Clinton_hiding
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_Demands_the_Release_of_Tax_Returns_of_Rick_Lazio
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_Demanded_Rival_s_Income_Tax_Returns_Back_in_2000
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Flashback_Clinton_Demands_Opponent_Release_Tax_Returns
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_s_double_standard_on_releasing_tax_returns
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Wolfson_Taunts_Hillary_s_Opponent_to_Release_Tax_Returns
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Will_Thomas_Flashback_Clinton_Called_It

and similar but different (WH recs)
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_Braces_for_Release_of_White_House_Records

We Digg Barack

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:51:22 EST

Good Diggs

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Superdelegate_Endorsement_List
and
http://digg.com/politics/Support_Obama_Contact_these_Undecided_Superdelegates
and

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Obama_wins_the_most_delegates_in_Texas
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Consortiumnews_com_21
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_Clinton_Did_Not_Win_Texas_Obama_Ahead_In_Caucuses

Why HRC needs to go:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/It_s_your_call_Hillary_Los_Angeles_Times
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/There_s_only_1_winner_from_this_Democratic_battle_the_GOP
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/How_Can_Hillary_Win_the_Nomination_With_Fewer_Votes
and
http://digg.com/politics/What_s_REALLY_behind_Hillary_s_surge_of_wins_in_TX_OH_RIand
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_s_Big_State_Myth
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Limbaugh_Urges_GOP_To_Vote_For_Hillary
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_Wins_Limbaugh_is_Laughing
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_owes_debt_of_gratitude_to_Texas_Republicans
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Rush_Limbaugh_Gets_Hillary_the_Win_in_Ohio_and_Texas
and
http://digg.com/politics/What_will_Republicans_throw_at_Hillary_Clinton_in_the_fall

and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Adam_Hanft_Why_Won_t_Hillary_Clinton_Release_Her_Tax_Return

Bad Diggs:

CA NAFTAgate:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Canadian_PM_orders_probe_into_memo_leak_on_Obama_s_NAFTA_pos
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Harper_says_Obama_leak_might_have_been_illegal
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTA_gate_sunk_Obama_in_Ohio_Clinton_Aid
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Canada_NAFTA_leak_blatantly_unfair
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/BREAKING_NAFTA_Gate_Leak_Said_Hillary_Was_Reassuring_Canada
and
http://digg.com/politics/globeandmail_com_PM_s_top_aide_set_off_storm_with_Obama_NA
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Report_Clinton_Camp_At_Heart_Of_NAFTA_Gate
and
http://digg.com/politics/NAFTA_gate_started_with_Clinton_not_Obama
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/CLINTON_Campaign_Told_Canada_Not_To_Worry_About_NAFTA
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Breaking_Hillary_behind_Canadian_NAFTA_Smear
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTAgate_began_with_remark_from_Harper_s_chief_of_staff
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTA_gate_started_with_HILLARY_2
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Multiple_reports_NAFTA_gate_started_with_HILLARY
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/NAFTA_gate_started_with_HILLARY
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/CA_s_PM_s_chief_of_staff_was_NAFTA_leak
and
http://digg.com/world_news/Canada_says_leak_was_blatantly_unfair_to_Obama
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Liberals_accuse_Tories_of_undermining_Obama_w_leak_on_NAFTA
and
http://digg.com/politics/Embarassed_Canadian_apologizes_for_Obama_NAFTA_lie
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Canadian_Parliament_blames_PM_for_leaking_Obama_Memo

Race-baiting
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Vote_Did_The_Clinton_Campaign_Ad_Make_Obama_Blacker
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Hillary_s_Ad_Debate_Footage_Doctored_To_Make_Obama_Blacker_2
and

HRC voter suppression/election shenanigans
http://digg.com/politics/Clinton_Camp_Engages_in_Voter_Purging_in_Texas
and

HRC praising McCain
http://digg.com/politics/Clinton_Crosses_Party_Line

Limbaugh/GOP voting for HRC so can beat Dem in Nov
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Rush_Limbaugh_Texas_Republicans_Vote_for_Clinton
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Limbaugh_Says_Vote_for_Hillary
and
http://digg.com/politics/GOP_voters_crossing_over_in_large_numbers
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Republicans_Crossed_Over_to_Vote_for_Hillary
and
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/How_Rush_Succeeded_in_Swaying_the_Texas_Vote
and

Raise your hopeful voice II

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:23:03 EST

Desert Rat Dan made a beautiful Obamage set to Falling Slowly that I encourage everyone to see. Some of my favorite moments are the clip of the TX students marching for their right to vote and chanting Obama (though you can't hear that in this video) to "raise your hopeful voice", to "and games that never amount to more than they're meant will play themselves out" clips of HRC saying how she was honored to be with Barack contrasted with her "shame on you" attack the very next day and her mockery of the inspiration many find in this campaign, an extremely moving selection on the costs of the war to "Moods that take me and erase me And I'm painted black, You have suffered enough And warred with yourself, It's time that you won," and the beautiful shot of Barack to "eyes that know me."

Do yourself a favor and watch this video. You'll be glad you did.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=P2gZl_j-qiU

letter to an IA Edwards delegate

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:13:37 EST

Here's a letter I wrote to one of our county Edwards delegates. Our county convention is March 15. Hopefully, it will be decided before then.

Thanks for the opportunity to discuss a few of the reasons why I support Senator Obama as fully as I do. I know you’re a very informed voter and you have considered the candidates fully, so forgive me when I repeat information you already know. I will try to be as succinct as possible by limiting myself to three reasons with further discussion of health care, since you mentioned that as one issue on which you disagreed with Barack.

The first reason is his varied and compelling experience. Accusations that he’s just talk and no action are completely off-base. As a resident of Illinois the entire time he was a state Senator and as a strong supporter since 2003, I know he honors his words with actions. Indeed, I heard of his actions (e.g., capital reform, health care for children, Project Vote!) long before I heard his words, or even knew his name. As I am sure you are aware, he has been a dedicated public servant for over two decades. Shortly after college, he worked to rebuild a struggling inner-city, standing with the members of the community, learning of the problems facing our society from their perspective and effectively addressing them. That gives him deep understanding of the multi-faceted challenges facing our inner-cities, which have suffered for too long and desperately need to be rejuvenated. His experience as a community organizer led him to law school, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, and then to become a civil rights attorney, a constitutional law professor, and a voting rights activist, before becoming a state senator in IL. Here he passed some of Illinois’ most significant legislation, including over 230 concerning health care, 125 on poverty and public assistance, nearly 100 concerning business and the economy, over 60 on education, and 60 on civil rights (a handy graph depicting the 800+ bills he passed can be found here http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/29/us/politics/20070730_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html ). One that stands out is his capital case reform, which was an utter mess, as I’m sure you’re aware, and which many felt was too broken and too sensitive an issue to fix. But Barack was able to bring disparate groups together like the ACLU and the police, as well as Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, to pass legislation that greatly reformed the system, including requiring interrogations to be videotaped to ensure that confessions weren’t coerced. This law in particular speaks to me, as it demonstrates his political courage in addressing challenges that others avoid, his commitment to helping those who need it most but others don’t feel particularly invested in, and his ability to listen to diverse perspectives and help them work together to create substantive solutions.

Some maintain that those years in Illinois don’t really count; I of course disagree, as I feel each facet of his experience speaks to his ability to address a wide range of challenges facing our nation. Yet his time in Washington, though brief, points to equally compelling reasons for my support; though he has served in Washington for fewer years, I find his legislative record to be far more impressive than Senator Clinton’s (this contrast between the two legislative records is particularly helpful, though the author omits some of my favorites: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/20/201332/807/36/458633 ). This stands as my second reason: he is able to truly listen to and reflect upon diverse perspectives, often in a bipartisan way, to build consensus and develop meaningful solutions.

You mentioned that you have been working for the Democratic Party since you were 17. I have been a Democrat for less than a year, registering as such primarily so I could caucus for Barack. Though I have voted in every election, nearly always for Democrats, and I have been proud of my representatives in Congress (Obama, Durbin, Schakowsky; still learning more about the Iowans), I had been too alienated by partisanship to embrace any Party. Too often politics is about scoring points rather than finding solutions, and I feel that it has had seriously detrimental effects not just on our government but on our country as a whole. Barack, however, isn’t interested in “turning up the heat” on those with whom he disagrees, but in sincerely listening to their concerns and expressing his own, and in finding common ground to move forward. People scoff and say that’s impractical or that it shows a sign of weakness, but he has a proven record of doing so, resulting in significant legislation, and I personally think it takes greater strength and is more effective to work with your opponents, respecting their perspective while defending and promoting your own. Working with one of his more conservative Republican colleagues, Senator Coburn, he developed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (signed into law in September of 2006). This bill is an excellent example of Barack’s commitment to making the government accountable to the people and empowering the people to hold their government accountable; via USAspending.gov, the search engine resulting from the FFA&T Act, an individual can search all government contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans, to see how our tax monies are being spent by the government and consequently to hold our representatives accountable. He has further demonstrated his commitment to transparency by releasing his tax returns and making his earmarks public (Senator Clinton has not). Other examples of his bipartisanship in the US Senate are the Lugar-Obama proliferation and threat reduction initiative (signed into law 1/11/07), his ethics and lobbying reform work (similar to his bipartisan ethics reform in the IL senate), and his work with Sam Brownback on Darfur.

The third reason may sound trite, but that makes it no less true: he is genuinely inspirational. You have seen it in Iowa, and then in every state that has voted since. People who have long felt alienated by the political process are embracing it, believing again in the power of their government to do good and, even more significantly, believing in their own power to make a difference. Over 1 million donors have given to this campaign, with the average donation just over $100, many of them first-time donors to a political campaign, myself included, because we have been inspired by Barack and want to make a difference. Barack’s campaign isn’t just about him and his policies, it’s about the people. Again, I know that sounds trite, but I also know that it’s true. I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime, and it’s amazing. You commented how impressed you were by the Obama organization; partially that is no doubt due to Barack’s own background in community organizing, but it’s also because people feel so personally invested, so inspired, and so newly aware of the power of their own voice. I myself have never been involved in a political campaign before, and I was a newcomer to our neighborhood, but because Barack inspired me I threw myself into the role of precinct captain completely—and months later, I’m still at it, helping out in Texas and Ohio, as I have in nearly two dozen states now. It’s prompted me to take a more active interest in other campaigns and local politics, as well. We will need this energy and engagement, as we address the very real challenges facing our nation. With the support of the American people, with a supportive Congress, and with the political will to work together to develop solutions, I am confident that we can make real progress on so many issues, not least of all being the Iraq War.

OK, so this is not as succinct as I had hoped, so just a quick word on health care. Now, my preference would be if the government were mandated to provide all citizens with health care, paid from tax monies (perhaps by taking a fraction out of the military budget), but I realize that’s not going to happen in this country any time soon. And I respect that there are informed experts on all sides of this debate who favor different plans. But I honestly don’t see why mandating the citizens to pay for insurance is a compelling solution. The problem isn’t that we aren’t forced to buy insurance, the problem is that it is too expensive and often too inadequate. Barack’s plan focuses on making health care affordable and comprehensive, and I think it will be far more effective at protecting our rights as the insured, at ensuring quality among competitive health-care providers and plans, and at actually getting passed by Congress.

I apologize for going on at length. I did try to limit myself, though! I thank you again for allowing me this opportunity to talk about a few of the reasons I support Barack. I am sure you have considered these factors and more, but I am glad to have the opportunity to share my perspective with you.

Raise your hopeful voice

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:52:26 EST

If you watched the Oscars you may remember a young woman, Markéta Irglová, who came back out after a commercial break to give her acceptance speech for her song, Falling Slowly. She spoke about how HOPE connects us all. The movie, "Once," holds a special place in my heart, as my uncle produced it, but it stands out for its singular beauty and inspiring message. It was made by people who didn't have much else besides HOPE and talent. Below is Markéta's speech, the lyrics for the song (written by Markéta's partner), and links to their video, their speeches, and their perfomance. I hope you enjoy it, and that it inspires you as well while you raise your hopeful voice.

Yes. We. Can.

Markéta: "Hi everyone. I just want to thank you so much. This is such a big deal, not only for us, but for all other independent musicians and artists that spend most of their time struggling, and this, the fact that we're standing here tonight, the fact that we're able to hold this, it's just to prove no matter how far out your dreams are, it's possible. And, you know, fair play to those who dare to dream and don't give up. And this song was written from a perspective of hope, and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are. And so thank you so much, who helped us along way. Thank you."

Glen Hansard - Falling Slowly Lyrics
I don't know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can't react
And games that never amount
To more than they're meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You've made it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can't go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I'm painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It's time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You've made it now

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
You've made it now
Falling slowly sing your melody
I'll sing along

video with clips from film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoSL_qayMCc

video of their Oscar perfomance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7Haa2r7ujg

Oscar acceptance speeches

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5ybN3eh-A

Foreign policy

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:58:03 EST

Some quick thoughts in reply to a post on the blog tonight. Will flesh it out more.

There are so many reasons why I think foreign policy numbers among Barack's many strengths, no matter who his opponent might be, and those strengths are that much more sharply defined when his opponent is John McCain.

First off, have you familiarized yourself with this resources http://www.barackobama.com/issues/foreignpolicy/ ? The opening quote encapsulates so many of his strengths, particularly vis-a-vis McCain: “When I am this party's nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I supported Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don't like. And he will not be able to say that I wavered on something as fundamental as whether or not it is ok for America to torture — because it is never ok… I will end the war in Iraq… I will close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus. I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. And I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, 'You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.'"

Repeatedly Barack has demonstrated that he has greater understanding of the world stage than have others, especially including McCain. Just look at his 2002 opposition to the Iraq war (which has remained consistent since) http://www.barackobama.com/2002/10/02/remarks_of_illinois_state_sen.php. While he recognized that war is sometimes a necessary evil out of which great goods can come, and that “the world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without [Saddam Hussein],” he laid out a case against the war that is all the more compelling for its clarity and foresight:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income—to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. . . .
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. . . .
We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not—we will not—travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain. (Chicago, 10/02/02)

Barack’s speech, given over five years ago, encapsulates many of the reasons why I firmly believe that he is the president our country needs today. It demonstrates his acute understanding of diplomacy and the world stage, informed by the time he spent as a child living abroad. It demonstrates his great wisdom and commitment to speak the truth, no matter how unpopular that position may be; not only did few American politicians publicly oppose the administration’s plans at the time of this speech, but roughly half of the speech emphasizes the necessity of war, even though it was given at an anti-war rally. Most importantly for me, however, it demonstrates his commitment to social justice, and how complex that commitment must be. He has demonstrated this commitment throughout his life, shaped no doubt by the diversity that makes up his own heritage. That he has family and friends from so many different places and positions in America and abroad gives him a unique perspective on what it means to be an American and on the multifaceted ramifications of our military, social, economic, and legal policies, at home and abroad.

A couple of other issues where folks like to baselessly spin Barack as weak on forein policy: that he has offered to meet not just with our friends but with our enemies. I’ll take Barack’s aproach, which concurs with John F Kennedy’s (“We must never negotiate out of fear but we must never fear to negotiate”), Roosevelt (http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/7-2-188/188-12.html ), and Reagan (http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed061404c.cfm ), among others, and is as usual a common sense, beneficial approach. Given that we have very real enemies, this approach to diplomacy is critical; it will strengthen our relationships with our allies and lessen the likelihood of misunderstandings and rash decisions. It is too easy to demonize the opponent when you do not speak with and listen to them.

Another area is the Pakistan thing. He has been vindicated there, and even Bhenazir Bhutto recognized the merits of his argument.

Clearly I could go on and on, but I’ll limit myself to one last thought. Barack has the best probability of being able to work with a majority of the Congress and actually see his legislation enacted, as well as a greater likelihood of seriously listening to congressional and other people’s concerns and perspectives.

And here's an article I really enjoy that highlights just one of the many ways an Obama Presidency will restore our standing in the world http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/opinion/15cohen.html?hp .

Foreign policy isn’t the number one reason why I think Barack will excel as President, but it’s a great one. McCain will lose this argument. McCain continues Bush diplomacy. Americans and the world reject that. Barack doesn’t just offer us something different. He offers something far, far better.

OHIO!

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:04:02 EST

Early voting has begun!

From http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/PublicAffairs/VoterInfoGuide.aspx?Section=16

When does absentee voting begin and end?

Absentee voting begins 25 days before the presidential primary and 35 days before the general election and - except for voters hospitalized due to emergencies, as further described under the "Absentee Deadlines" section beginning on page 13 of this guide, - ends the day before the election. (Note: Absentee voting does not always begin 35 days before a special election. You may contact your county board of elections to learn if a special election is being held in your precinct and, if so, when absentee ballots will be available.)

Once absentee ballots are available for voting, any voter may receive and return an absentee ballot in person at the county board of elections office, or receive and return the absentee ballot by U.S. Mail.
Who is eligible to vote by absentee ballot?

Any qualified Ohio voter may request and vote an absentee ballot without stating a reason.
What is the application process for obtaining an absentee ballot?

Ohio law provides separate application processes for different classifications of absentee voters (militia, armed services, overseas, etc.). In all cases, absentee ballots must be applied for in writing. If you are properly registered to vote, you must submit your written request to the board of elections of the county in which your voting residence is located. Your request must contain certain information (described in the following sections) and your original signature. You may, but are not required to, use an application form prescribed by the Ohio Secretary of State (Form 11-A).

Regular absentee voters

If you are a regular absentee voter, you may use the application form prescribed by the Secretary of State (Form 11-A) to apply for your absentee ballot. If you choose not to use the prescribed form, your written
application need not be in any particular format, but it must contain all of the following information:

1. Your name;
2. Your signature;
3. The address at which you are registered to vote;
4. Your date of birth;
5. One of the following items showing proof of your identification:
(a) Your Ohio driver's license number; or
(b) The last four digits of your Social Security number; or
(c) A copy of your current and valid photo identification, military identification, current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document that shows your name and current address.
(Note: You cannot use a notice that the board of elections mailed to you as proof of identification.);
6. A statement identifying the election for which you are requesting an absentee voter's ballot;
7. A statement that you are a qualified elector;
8. If the request is for a partisan primary election ballot, your political party affiliation; and
9. If you want the ballot to be mailed, the address to which you want it mailed.

Absentee Deadlines
To receive your absentee ballot:

1. By mail: Unless you are a member of the U.S. armed forces, you must mail your properly completed absentee ballot application bearing your original signature to the board of elections of the county in which your voting residence is located. The board must receive your request by noon on the Saturday before the election. However, you should submit your request as far in advance of the election as possible.
2. By fax: If you are a member of the U.S. armed forces or an organized state militia, you may fax your absentee ballot request to the board of elections of the county in which your voting residence is located. The board must receive your request by noon on the Saturday before the election. You may request that the board fax your ballot to you, but you must return your marked ballot by mail.
3. In person: You may go to the board of elections office of the county in which your voting residence is located during regular business hours after absentee ballots are available for voting, but no later than the day before the election, and request, receive and vote your ballot at the board office.
4. If you or your minor child is in the hospital on Election Day: Regardless of where you or your minor child are hospitalized, you must submit a properly completed and signed request to the board of elections of the county in which your voting residence is located by 3 p.m. on Election Day. To be eligible under this provision, you or your minor child must be confined in a hospital because of an unforeseeable medical emergency. Your application must specify where, why and when you or your minor child came to be hospitalized. If you or your minor child are hospitalized in the same county where you are registered to vote, two representatives of the board of elections can deliver the ballot to you, wait while you mark the ballot, and return your voted ballot to the board office. Additionally, you may include in your absentee ballot application a request that your county board of elections give your unmarked ballot to a designated relative - your spouse, father, mother, father-in-law, mother-in-law, grandfather, grandmother, brother, sister, son, daughter, adopted parent, adopted child, stepparent, stepchild, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece - who shall deliver the ballot to you in the hospital and return your voted ballot to the board office.

For your absentee ballot to be counted, it must be received as follows:

1. If cast from anywhere in the U.S., whether returned in person or by mail, your ballot must be received by your county board of elections by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day.
2. If properly returned from outside of the U.S., your ballot must be received by your county board of elections not later than the 20th day after the presidential primary election or by the 10th day after a special or general election.

FOR THOSE VOTING AT POLLS
You cast your ballot at your precinct's designated polling place, unless you vote a provisional ballot. If you do not know where your precinct polling place is located, contact your county board of elections. If you have access to the Internet, you may visit the Secretary of State's Web site, www.sos.state.oh.us, for the location of your polling place.
see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ohhome

Every voter will be required to provide proof of identity before voting. The form of identification that you may use includes your current and valid photo identification card, military identification, copy of utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, government check, or government document showing your name and current address. (Note: You cannot use as proof of identification a notice that the board of elections mailed to you.) If you do not have, or fail or refuse to provide, the required proof of identity, you may cast a provisional ballot.

You may vote the primary ballot of the political party with which you currently wish to be affiliated. If you voted the primary ballot of a different political party in 2005 or 2006, you will complete a statement at your polling place confirming the change in your political party affiliation.

Polls open 6:30 am to 7:30 pm

"Where's the Beef?"

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:33:31 EST

[a somewhat abridged version of an earlier post]

One of the spin-meisters' most effective ploys is claiming that Barack is all rhetoric and no record, all inspiration and no substance. This is of course ridiculous to anyone who is paying attention, yet too many people aren't paying close enough attention.

So here are a few ways to reply when folks say "Where's the Beef."

The first is to talk about his impressive 25 years of public service, as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, working to rebuild a struggling inner-city, standing with the members of the community, learning of the problems facing our society from their perspective and effectively addressing them. That gives him deep understanding of the multi-faceted challenges facing our inner-cities, which have suffered for too long and desperately need to be rejuvenated. Barack is the best hope our country has to do so; he truly understands that we are one another's keeper, that when any of us suffer injustice we all are diminished, and he can inspire us as a nation to act to redress the great injustices of our society. His experience as a community organizer led him to law school, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, and then to become a civil rights attorney, a constitutional law professor, and a voting rights activist, before becoming a state senator in IL. All of these are incomparable assets in a President, and speak to his ability to address a wide range of challenges facing our nation.

But, impressive as this experience most certainly is, folks sometimes fail to appreciate its magnitude. Instead, they want to hear about his legislative record. So here are a few links to help them gain a better sense of the substantial legislation Barack passed in the IL senate.

One of my favorites is the NYT graph of his legislative record in IL: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/29/us/politics/20070730_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html . This offers a representation of the more than 800 bills he sponsored in IL, including over 230 concerning health care, 125 on poverty and public assistance, nearly 100 concerning business and the economy, over 60 on education, and 60 on civil rights.

But the graph fails to give a sense of just how spectacular some of this legislation is. One that stands out is his capital case reform. IL's capital case system was an utter mess; you may have heard of it when Gov. Ryan, a man not widely recognized for his ethical rigor, declared a moratorium on capital punishment in 2000, after more than a dozen men were exonerated for crimes they did not commit. Still, the system remained a mess, and in 2003 Barack was able to bring disparate groups together like the ACLU and the police, as well as Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, to pass legislation that greatly reformed the system, including requiring interrogations to be videotaped to ensure that confessions weren't coerced (see http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/12/obama.death.penalty.ap/ ). As Adam B points out on this issue, "Talk is cheap. What counts is getting substantive progressive reform passed into law, and time and time again, Obama has done it on behalf of groups for whom no one else was fighting." (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/12/124344/53 )

Another article that discusses Barack's IL legislative accomplishments is http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020802262_pf.html ; see also http://www.barackobama.com/2007/07/30/in_illinois_obama_proved_pragm.php, http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/30/obama_hits_chicago_during_coun.php . and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303.html.

Now, I think it is yet another tremendous asset that Barack has such extensive experience as a state senator. He knows how state legislatures work, and he can better grasp the implications of federal policies on a state level. This will be extremely helpful when he is President. But still some people discount his years in the IL Senate. They want to know what he's done in the US Senate. So here are a few examples of that:

See http://obama.senate.gov/issues/good_government_responsible_spending/ to learn about the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, developed by Senator Obama and Senator Coburn, and signed into law in September of 2006. This bill is an excellent example of Barack's commitment to making the government accountable to the people and empowering the people to hold their government accountable. Via USAspending.gov, the search engine resulting from the FFA&T Act ( http://www.usaspending.gov/ ), an individual can search all government contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans--WE THE PEOPLE get to see how OUR tax monies are being spent by the government. When someone is trying to cram in some pork, we will know about it; when somebody is trying to give their favorite companies no-bid contracts, we'll know about it--thanks to Senators Obama and Coburn.
Similarly, Barack sponsored the Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act (see again http://obama.senate.gov/issues/good_government_responsible_spending/ ): "The bill would shed light on the almost 16,000 earmarks that were included in spending bills in 2005. Under the bill, all earmarks, including the name of the requestor and a justification for the earmark, would have to be disclosed 72 hours before they could be considered by the full Senate. Senators would be prohibited from advocating for an earmark if they have a financial interest in the project or earmark recipient. And, earmark recipients would have to disclose to an Office of Public Integrity the amount that they have spent on registered lobbyists and the names of those lobbyists." Barack is the one presidential candidate who has made his earmarks public (see http://www.barackobama.com/2007/06/21/obama_releases_earmarks_other.php ).

Then there's the Lugar-Obama proliferation and threat reduction initiative, signed into law 1/11/07. From http://obama.senate.gov/press/070111-lugar-obama_non/ : "Authored by U.S. Sens. Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Barack Obama (D-IL), the Lugar-Obama initiative expands U.S. cooperation to destroy conventional weapons. It also expands the State Department's ability to detect and interdict weapons and materials of mass destruction. 'The Lugar-Obama initiative will help other nations find and eliminate conventional weapons that have been used against our own soldiers in Iraq and sought by terrorists all over the world,' said Obama."

Barack has also done impressive work on ethics and lobbying reform. From http://obama.senate.gov/issues/ethics_and_lobbying_reform/ : "In the first two weeks of the 110th Congress, Senator Obama helped lead the Senate to pass the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act, a comprehensive ethics and lobbying reform bill, by a 96-2 vote. This landmark bill was signed into law by the President in September 2007. Most importantly, the final reform bill contained a provision pushed by Senator Obama to require the disclosure of contributions that registered lobbyists "bundle" - that is, collect or arrange - for candidates, leadership PACs, and party committees. The New York Times called this provision "the most sweeping" in the bill, and the Washington Post said: "No single change would add more to public understanding of how money really operates in Washington.
"In January 2006, Senator Obama laid the groundwork for the reform package that the Senate eventually adopted a year later. He started building a coalition for reform by helping to author the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act introduced with 41 Democratic sponsors. The bill proposed lengthening the cooling off period to two years for lawmakers who seek to become lobbyists and requiring immediate disclosure as soon as public servants initiate any job negotiations to become lobbyists."

OK, OK, people might say, but all I hear about is hope and change. What exactly does he mean by change? Well, he gives an excellent answer in his Blueprint for Change. It outlines where Barack stands on the challenges facing our nation and how he will meet those challenges as President. It was critical in winning over many undecideds and those who had been leaning towards other candidates here in Iowa. It shows just how laughable the claim is that he has no substance. Folks here were amazed by how comprehensive it is--and it's just an outline! The Blueprint for Change, as well as thorough discussion of other issues, can be found here: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/ .

After considering all these facets of Barack's experience and substance, some people may still not be won over. But that should be because they disagree with him. And that's fair enough. I myself don't agree with him 100% of the time; I don't agree with anyone 100% of the time. But I feel that Barack is listening 100% of the time and he especially considers the perspective of those who hold differing views, and again that's critical in a President.

But those who claim Barack lacks experience are either ignorant or they have a rather narrow and artificial understanding of experience. And as Barack has pointed out, there are few folks in government who are more "experienced" than Cheney or Rumsfeld. And look where that's gotten us.

Barack has the RIGHT experience, the better judgment, and the expansive vision that we so desperately need in a President. He truly is change we can believe in; his lifetime of honoring his words with action testifies to that.

Barack's Legislative Record

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:40:04 EST

So often folks say of Barack, "Where's the Beef?" There are different ways of responding to this ignorance.

The first is to talk about his impressive 25-years of public service, as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, working to rebuild a struggling inner-city, standing with the members of the community, learning of the problems facing our society from their perspective and effectively addressing them. That gives him deep understanding of the multi-faceted challenges facing our inner-cities, which have suffered for too long and desperately need to be rejuvenated. Barack is the best hope our country has to do so. His experience as a community organizer led him to law school, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, and then to become a civil rights attorney, a constitutional law professor, and a voting rights activist. All of these are incomparable assets in a President, and speak to his ability to address a wide range of challenges facing our nation.

But, impressive as this experience most certainly is, folks sometimes fail to appreciate its magnitude. Instead, they want to hear about his legislative record. So here are a few links to help them gain a better sense of the substantial legislation Barack has passed.

One of my favorites is the NYT graph of his legislative record in IL: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/29/us/politics/20070730_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html . This offers a representation of the more than 800 bills he sponsored in IL, including over 230 concerning heath care, 125 on poverty and public assistance, nearly 100 concerning business and the economy, over 60 on education, and 60 on civil rights.

But the graph fails to give a sense of just how spectacular some of this legislation is. One that stands out is his capital case reform. IL's capital case system was an utter mess; you may have heard of it when Gov. Ryan, a man not widely recognized for his ethical rigor, declared a moratorium on death sentences in 2000, as so many innocent people had been executed. Still, the system remained a mess, and in 2003 Barack was able to bring disparate groups together like the ACLU and the police, as well as Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, to pass legislation that required interrogations to be videotaped, among other things (see http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/12/obama.death.penalty.ap/ ). As Adam B points out on this issue, "Talk is cheap. What counts is getting substantive progressive reform passed into law, and time and time again, Obama has done it on behalf of groups for whom no one else was fighting." (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/12/124344/53 )

Another article that discusses Barack's IL legislative accomplishments is http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020802262_pf.html .

Now, I think it is yet another tremendous asset that Barack has such extensive experience as a state senator. He knows how state legislatures work, and he can better grasp the implications of federal policies on a state level. This will be extremely helpful when he is President. But still some people discount his years in the IL Senate. They want to know what he's done in the US Senate. So here are a few examples of that:

From http://obama.senate.gov/issues/good_government_responsible_spending/ :

Senator Obama worked closely with Senator Coburn, to draft and ultimately pass the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. President Bush signed this measure into law in September of 2006.

This important bill will bring badly needed transparency to Federal spending by creating a user-friendly website to search all government contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans, thereby opening up Federal financial transactions to public scrutiny. This measure was cosponsored by more than 40 Senators and received the support of more than 100 outside groups from all parts of the political spectrum. It was also endorsed by dozens of editorial boards across the country from the Wall Street Journal, to the Chicago Sun-Times and The Oklahoman.

The Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act

Hidden, last-minute earmarks hide pork and add to wasteful federal spending. Senator Obama sponsored the Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act. The bill would shed light on the almost 16,000 earmarks that were included in spending bills in 2005. Under the bill, all earmarks, including the name of the requestor and a justification for the earmark, would have to be disclosed 72 hours before they could be considered by the full Senate. Senators would be prohibited from advocating for an earmark if they have a financial interest in the project or earmark recipient. And, earmark recipients would have to disclose to an Office of Public Integrity the amount that they have spent on registered lobbyists and the names of those lobbyists. Several of these provisions were included in the ethics and lobbying reform bill that passed the Senate in January 2007.

USAspending.gov is the result of the FFA&T Act. From http://www.usaspending.gov/

Have you ever wanted to find more information on government spending? Have you ever wondered where federal contracting dollars and grant awards go? Or perhaps you would just like to know, as a citizen, what the government is really doing with your money. The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Transparency Act) requires a single searchable website, accessible by the public for free that includes for each Federal award:

1. The name of the entity receiving the award;
2. The amount of the award;
3. Information on the award including transaction type, funding agency, etc;
4. The location of the entity receiving the award;
5. A unique identifier of the entity receiving the award.

Welcome to www.USAspending.gov, a relaunch of www.FederalSpending.gov, that provides citizens with easy access to government contract, grant and other award data. To begin searching, select either the Assistance or Contracts tab at the top left side of this page. You can easily switch back and forth as you search.

Then there's the Lugar-Obama proliferation and threat reduction initiative, signed into law 1/11/07.

From http://obama.senate.gov/press/070111-lugar-obama_non/ :

Authored by U.S. Sens. Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Barack Obama (D-IL), the Lugar-Obama initiative expands U.S. cooperation to destroy conventional weapons. It also expands the State Department's ability to detect and interdict weapons and materials of mass destruction.

"The Lugar-Obama initiative will help other nations find and eliminate conventional weapons that have been used against our own soldiers in Iraq and sought by terrorists all over the world," said Obama. "The Nunn-Lugar program has effectively disposed of thousands of weapons of mass destruction, but we must do far more to keep deadly conventional weapons like anti-aircraft missiles out of the hands of terrorists."

Barack has also done impressive work on ethics and lobbying reform. From http://obama.senate.gov/issues/ethics_and_lobbying_reform/ :

In the first two weeks of the 110th Congress, Senator Obama helped lead the Senate to pass the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act, a comprehensive ethics and lobbying reform bill, by a 96-2 vote. This landmark bill was signed into law by the President in September 2007.

The final bill that the Congress passed closely mirrored and drew key provisions in a bill (S. 230) that Senators Obama and Feingold introduced in January 2007 to establish a “gold standard” for reform. Among the provisions in the Obama-Feingold bill that were adopted by the Senate and the House were: strict bans on receiving gifts and meals from lobbyists; new rules to slow the revolving door between public and private sector service; and an end to the subsidized use of corporate jets.

Most importantly, the final reform bill contained a provision pushed by Senator Obama to require the disclosure of contributions that registered lobbyists “bundle” – that is, collect or arrange – for candidates, leadership PACs, and party committees. The New York Times called this provision “the most sweeping” in the bill, and the Washington Post said: “No single change would add more to public understanding of how money really operates in Washington.”

In January 2006, Senator Obama laid the groundwork for the reform package that the Senate eventually adopted a year later. He started building a coalition for reform by helping to author the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act introduced with 41 Democratic sponsors. The bill proposed lengthening the cooling off period to two years for lawmakers who seek to become lobbyists and requiring immediate disclosure as soon as public servants initiate any job negotiations to become lobbyists. The bill would have opened conference committee meetings to the public and required that all bills be posted on the Internet for 24 hours before they can be voted on by the Senate. Finally, the bill would have ended all lobbyist-funded gifts, meals, and travel and strengthened the Senate office that monitors lobbyist disclosure forms. All of these provisions were incorporated in either identical or similar form into the final bill passed in 2007.

In addition, Senator Obama sponsored three other ethics-related bills in the 109th Congress that went even further on ethics, earmarks, and legislative transparency. By the time of the 110th Congress, his ideas for reform had gained support, and many of his proposals were passed by the Senate.

OK, OK, people might say, but all I hear about is hope and change. What exactly does he mean by change? Well, he gives an excellent answer in his Blueprint for Change. It outlines where Barack stands on the challenges facing our nation and how he will meet those challenges as President. It was critical in winning over many undecideds and those who had been leaning towards other candidates here in Iowa. It shows just how laughable the claim is that he has no substance. Folks here were amazed by how comprehensive it is--and it's just an outline! The Blueprint for Change, as well as thorough discussion of other issues can be found here: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/ .

After considering all these facets of Barack's experience and substance, some people may still not be won over. But that's because they disagree with him. And that's fair enough. I myself don't agree with him 100% of the time; I don't agree with anyone 100% of the time. But I feel that Barack is listening 100% of the time and he especially considers the perspective of those who hold differing views, and again that's critical in a President.

But those who claim Barack lacks experience are either ignorant or they have a rather narrow and artificial understanding of experience. And as Barack has pointed out, there are few folks in government who are more "experienced" than Cheney or Rumsfeld. And look where that's gotten us.

Barack has the RIGHT experience, the better judgment, and the expansive vision that we so desperately need in a President. He truly is change we can believe in; his lifetime of honoring his words with action testifies to that.

Texas info

IA for Obama ☮ — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:56:17 EST

Texas' election process is a little confusing. But here are things for Texans to know and phone-bankers to bear in mind while calling TX:

There's a primary, and a caucus. Another form of the Texas two-step! In order to vote in the caucus, you must also vote in the primary. Delegates are awarded by both the caucus and the primary, so it's important to do both.

To vote in the primary, you have two options. You can either Early Vote from February 19th to 29th or vote at the polls on March 4th. We are asking Obama supporters to early vote.

Texas also holds precinct conventions or caucuses on March 4th at 7:00. In order to participate in the precinct convention you have to vote in the primary.

How to participate in the Texas Two-Step:

For the Early Vote and Election Day Primary:

Any voter can early vote.
You must bring:
- Your voter registration card OR
- Picture ID OR
- Two pieces of documentation that have your name and address – i.e. utility bill or IRS statement).

For the Caucus:

You have to have voted in early vote or on election day in the Primary.
You must bring:
- Your voter registration card OR
- Picture ID OR
- Two pieces of documentation that have your name and address – i.e. utility bill or IRS statement).
Be sure to arrive by 7:00pm (same location as your polling place).
Sign your name on the list for Barack Obama.
You cannot caucus for Barack Obama if you have not voted in the Primary.

Calling all precinct captains!

IA for Obama ☮ — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 11:02:37 EST

The campaign in TX needs precinct captains and other volunteer leaders! They're doing something that I also did for MN after the IA caucus, where precinct captains of states that have already voted act as sort of remote precinct captains for a given area in another state. This is vital; even though I was calling from Des Moines, I was able to raise awareness, both among voters about Barack and among staffers about the voters, to greatly increase the support in that district, and identify volunteers in that area, including those who took over the role of precinct captain.

In IA, we were lucky; many of us were precinct captains for months before the caucus. Other states don't have the luxury that we did. If you're in IA, or other states that have gone, and you served a leadership role in the campaign, PLEASE email Lindsay (ldubin@texobama.com) and adopt a precinct in TX. It makes a huge difference.

Starfish story

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:52:51 EST

Here's a little story I've always liked:

"A man was walking along the beach one evening and saw a little boy throwing starfish that had been washed ashore by the tide into the sea. He thought the boy was silly in trying to save the starfish, as he knew it was impossible to throw every single one of the starfish back into the sea, with the tides washing them up.

"The man walked right up to the boy and asked him why he was trying to save the starfish.

"'You see, sir, the starfish would die if they are left on the shore. They need to be in the sea in order to live,' answered the boy.

"'But son, how are you going to save all of them? Every time you put one back, another would be washed up. It doesn't matter to them, son.'

"The boy picked up a starfish, looked at the man and said, 'But sir, it matters to this one.' Then he threw the starfish back into the sea. "

It might be a little hoky, but it's a good reminder that we are the change we've been waiting for, that in the face of impossible odds we can stand up for what is right and make a world of difference, even if it seems to others that it's just on a small scale. As Jane Goodall has said, "What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."

Making calls is a great way of making a difference. You get to be the voice of this campaign. You get to tell folks why you so deeply believe in the importance of this election. I know that it can be psychologically daunting to pick up the phone and make the calls, but you are just calling your fellow Americans, one by one. Pretty much the worse they can do is hang up. It's a bit jarring when that happens, but it's just further evidence of the empathy deficit in our country, and why we need Barack. Just shake it off, watch the YES WE CAN video, and try a few more calls. There are wonderful people out there who are grateful for your call, and who may vote/volunteer for Barack because of it.

Even if you just make one call, it could make a world of difference.

Issues: Immigration

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:10:31 EST

For Contrast with Barack (see http://www.barackobama.com/issues/ )

From: http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/issues/index.html#/context=index/issue=immigration

Hillary Clinton
Democrat
Senator from New York

Supports a path to legalization for illegal immigrants that includes learning English and paying fines; toughen penalties for hiring illegal immigrants; voted for fence along Mexican border.
On the Border Fence and Border Security

"It is unconscionable to think that in a post-9/11 world we do not know precisely who is entering and exiting our country. Our homeland security requires that we know the identities of all people who cross our borders. In reforming our broken system, our efforts must be multifaceted and comprehensive."
-- Statement, March 8, 2006

"A comprehensive solution to our immigration crisis must include strengthening our borders."
-- Statement, May 1, 2007
On Illegal Aliens Already in the Country
SUPPORTS A PATH TO LEGALIZATION FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS THAT INCLUDES LEARNING ENGLISH AND PAYING FINES; TOUGHEN PENALTIES FOR EMPLOYERS WHO HIRE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Make it easier for immigrants to bring families. Supports agricultural jobs program; opposes guest worker program that can lower wages of American workers or exploit immigrants. Create new system to verify employment eligibility. Opposes driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

"I'm in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, which includes tightening our border security, sanctioning employers to employ undocumented immigrants, helping our communities deal with the costs that come from illegal immigration, getting the 12 million or so immigrants out of the shadows. That's very important to me.

After 9/11, we've got to know who's in this country. And then giving them a chance to pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English and stand in line to be eligible for a legal status in this country."
-- Democratic debate, April 26, 2007
Actions on the Issue

Co-sponsored the Legal Immigrant Children's Health Improvement Act of 2007, which would lift the current waitng period of five years for federal health care benefits for legal immigrants.
-- More information

Voted yes on the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006," which would have created a guest worker program and addressed border security issues.
-- More information

Voted yes on the "Secure Fence Act of 2006," which created 700 miles of new fence along the US/Mexico border.
-- More information

Mike Huckabee
Republican
Former governor of Arkansas

Give illegal immigrants 120 to register and leave, after which they could apply to return; toughen penalties for hiring illegal immigrants; finish border fence by 2010.
On the Border Fence and Border Security

Finish border fence by 2010; deploy 23,000 more patrol agents.

"I think this can't be brought to a rational discussion until we first bring security to the borders. I think that this has to be the very first step that the president takes, is secure the borders, physically or electronically so that you stop this porous situation where people come across at will. Until that happens, all of the discussion of what we need to be doing on this side with the existing immigrants becomes moot."
-- The Des Moines Register, April 13, 2007
On Illegal Aliens Already in the Country
GIVE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS 120 DAYS TO REGISTER AND LEAVE, AFTER WHICH THEY COULD APPLY TO RETURN; TOUGHEN PENALTIES FOR EMPLOYERS WHO HIRE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Increase skilled worker visas. Create system to verify legal status.

"We shouldn't have amnesty where we just say, 'Fine, everybody's good, we're going to let it go.' We should have a process where people can pay the penalties, step up and accept responsibility for not being here legally.

But here's the point. The objective is not to be punitive. The objective is to make things right. Right for us. Right for them."
-- "This Week," February 7, 2007
Actions on the Issue

Sponsored a resolution, adopted by the Southern Governors Association, which, among other things, recommended implementing a farm labor system to import farm workers from Canada and Mexico.

Proposed a bill that would have allowed children of undocumented immigrants who graduated high school to qualify to receive a state scholarship to attend an Arkansas college. That bill didn't pass the state legislature.

As governor of Arkansas, opposed a proposal banning state-funded services to illegal immigrants.

John McCain
Republican
Senator from Arizona

Supports a path to legalization for illegal immigrants that includes learning English and paying fines; voted for fence along Mexican border.
On the Border Fence and Border Security

Says border security is the "first and foremost priority."

"One thing we would all agree on, the status quo is not acceptable. We have to secure our borders. But we also need a temporary worker program, and we have to dispose of the issue of 12 million people who are in this country illegally. This issue is an important and compelling one, and it begins with national security. But we also need to address it comprehensively."
-- Republican debate, May 3, 2007
On Illegal Aliens Already in the Country
SUPPORTS A PATH TO LEGALIZATION THAT INCLUDES LEARNING ENGLISH AND PAYING FINES

"We need to have a guest worker program. ... Our proposal is basically you can get a tamper-proof visa after your job has been proven that it cannot be filled by an American citizen. ... What do you do with the 11 million people that are already here? ... Make them earn citizenship because they have broken our laws. My friends, thats not amnesty. Amnesty is forgiveness. We're not forgiving anything."
-- In New Hampshire, April 7, 2007
Actions on the Issue

Co-Sponsored the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act of 2007, which would allow states to give illegal immigrants in-state tuition for higher education and let the homeland security secretary confer legal resident status on some illegal immigrant students.
-- More information

Co-Sponsored and voted yes on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which would have created a guest worker program and addressed border security issues.
-- More information

Voted yes on the "Secure Fence Act of 2006," which created 700 miles of new fence along the US/Mexico border.
-- More information

Wisconsin info

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:24:26 EST

Some things to bear in mind while calling WI:

WISCONSIN
http://www.wisdems.org/ht/d/sp/i/1131187/pid/1131187

Wisconsin's primary is on Tuesday, February 19. Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Any registered voter can vote on either side of the presidential primary. Wisconsin has same day registration. To register at the polls, bring a piece of official mail sent to you at your current voting address.

Eligible voters are persons who are United States citizens age 18 or older who have resided in a municipality (city, village or town) or ward within a municipality for 10 days before any election.

Folks can find their polling location here (you will be able to do so through calling script as well): http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/wilookup

You can register to vote or find voter registration information from

* State Government Accountability Board Elections Division [formerly known as the State Elections Board] website at http://elections.state.wi.us
* Dane County website at www.co.dane.wi.us/coclerk/
* your municipal clerk (see below)

For Further Voting Information:

* Edgerton — Please call the Edgerton City Clerk at 608.884.3341 or visit www.cityofedgerton.com.
* Fitchburg — Please call the Fitchburg City Clerk at 608.270.4200 or visit www.city.fitchburg.wi.us.
* Madison — Please call the Madison City Clerk at 608.266.4601 or visit www.cityofmadison.com/clerk/.
* Middleton — Please call the Middleton City Clerk at 608.827.1050 information or visit www.ci.middleton.wi.us.
* Monona — Please call the Monona City Clerk at 608.222.2525 or visit www.monona.wi.us.
* Stoughton — Please call the Stoughton City Clerk at 608.873.6692 or visit www.ci.stoughton.wi.us.
* Sun Prairie — Please call the Sun Prairie City Clerk at 608.837.2511 or visit www.cityofsunprairie.com.
* Verona — Please call the Verona City Clerk at 608.848.9947 or visit www.ci.verona.wi.us.

Upcoming primary & caucus registration deadlines

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:39:22 EST

A lot of voters who wanted to vote in previous primaries found that they could not, as they had missed the deadline to register. While each individual voter has the responsibility of ensuring that they will in fact be able to cast their vote come election day, the fault also lies with the inconsistent system which varies greatly from state to state and with the poor job many state parties and secretaries of state do in publicizing deadlines. Furthermore, several websites have outdated and inaccurate information about registration deadlines. So I culled through state democratic party and secretaries of state websites, among others, and called when the information on the sites was unclear or misleading. I have gathered this information on my blog, which I have already corrected twice (as I said, there's a lot of misinformation out there). If you see any mistakes, please reply with the correct information and cite your source. Thank you.

**FAST APPROACHING DEADLINES:**
MISSISSIPPI: FEB 10
WYOMING: FEBRUARY 22
VERMONT: February 27, 2008

STATES WHOSE REGISTRATION DEADLINE HAS PASSED:
Louisiana, DC (not a state, but still), MD, VA, OH, RI, TX

STATES WHOSE REGISTRATION DEADLINE HAS ***NOT*** PASSED
Nebraska, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Vermont, Wyoming, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, South Dakota

FEBRUARY 9th (LA, NE, WA, VI)
Louisiana Primary 67 delegates
DEADLINE: 30 DAYS PRIOR (PASSED)

Nebraska Caucus 31 delegates
**DEADLINE:ON-SITE REGISTRATION AT START OF CAUCUS ALLOWED**

Washington Caucus 97 delegates
**DEADLINE:ON-SITE REGISTRATION AT START OF CAUCUS ALLOWED**

Virgin Islands Other 9 delegates
haven't been able to find out much about this one

Sunday, February 10 (ME)
Maine Caucus 34 delegates
**DEADLINE:ON-SITE REGISTRATION AT START OF CAUCUS ALLOWED**

Tuesday, February 12 (DC, MD, VA)
District of Columbia Primary 37 delegates
DEADLINE: APPEARS TO BE 30 DAYS PRIOR TO ELECTION, SO IT HAS PASSED

Maryland Primary 99 delegates
DEADLINE: JANUARY 22 (PASSED)

Virginia Primary 101 delegates
DEADLINE: 29 DAYS PRIOR TO ELECTION (PASSED)

Tuesday, February 19 (HI, WI)
Hawaii Caucus 29 delegates
**DEADLINE:ON-SITE REGISTRATION AT START OF CAUCUS ALLOWED**

Wisconsin Primary 92 delegates
**DEADLINE:ON-SITE REGISTRATION AT POLLS ALLOWED**

Tuesday, March 4 (OH, RI, TX, VT)
Ohio Primary 161 delegates
DEADLINE: 30 DAYS PRIOR TO ELECTION (PASSED)

Rhode Island Primary 32 delegates
DEADLINE: FEB 2ND (PASSED)

Texas Primary 228 delegates
DEADLINE: FEB 4TH (PASSED)

Vermont Primary 23 delegates
**DEADLINE: February 27, 2008**

Saturday, March 8
Wyoming Caucus 18 delegates
**DEADLINE: FEB 22nd**

Tuesday, March 11
Mississippi Primary 40 delegates
*******DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 10TH******

Tuesday, April 22
Pennsylvania Primary 188 delegates
**DEADLINE: MARCH 24**

Saturday, May 3
Guam Other 9 delegates
NOT SURE, SORRY

Tuesday, May 6 (IN, NC)
Indiana Primary 84 delegates
**DEADLINE: APRIL 7**
North Carolina Primary 134 delegates
**DEADLINE: APRIL 11**

Tuesday, May 13
West Virginia Primary 39 delegates
**DEADLINE: APRIL 22**

Tuesday, May 20 (KY, OR)
*Kentucky Primary 60 delegates
DEADLINE: APRIL 21

Oregon Primary 65 delegates
**DEADLINE: APRIL 30**

Tuesday, June 3 (MT, SD)
Montana Primary 24 delegates
**DEADLINE: 30 DAYS PRIOR (MAY 4TH?)**

South Dakota Primary 23 delegates
**DEADLINE: 15 DAYS PRIOR (MAY 19TH)**

Saturday, June 7

Puerto Rico Caucus 63 delegates
NOT SURE, SORRY

see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/CGMG9

March 8 through April 22: WY, MS, and PA

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:20:39 EST

The following information is gathered from the respective states' democratic party sites, secretary of state sites, and other sources, with links provided. Please check with your own state and county officials to verify this information.

Saturday, March 8
Wyoming Caucus 18 delegates

Tuesday, March 11
Mississippi Primary 40 delegates

Tuesday, April 22
Pennsylvania Primary 188 delegates

NONE OF THE DEADLINES HAVE YET PASSED, BUT MISSISSIPPI'S IS ALMOST HERE, SO REGISTER NOW!

WYOMING Saturday, March 8 Caucus
http://soswy.state.wy.us/election/vote.htm
Wyoming Dems 800-729-3367 REGISTRATION DEADLINE IS FEB 22nd; 15 days prior to caucus
Bring an acceptable form of ID to the polls (for example: driver license, passport). not sure if this applies to caucuses too
Caucuses held throughout the day on March 8; complete list of time and location here: http://www.wyomingdemocrats.com/ht/display/EventDetails/i/1128771/pid/273337
see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/wyhome

MISSISSIPPI Tuesday, March 11 Primary
http://www.sos.state.ms.us/elections/voterinfoguide.asp
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: 30 DAYS BEFORE ELECTION (FEBRUARY 10TH)
You may register to vote either by mail or by visiting your county Circuit Clerk (usually in the county courthouse) or Municipal Clerk (usually in City Hall). You also may register to vote when applying for or renewing your driver's license, or when applying for services at numerous state and federal government agencies. Any Mississippian qualified to register to vote may do so by mail. For an application, call your county Circuit Clerk, or pick one up at the courthouse, public library or other participating government office. Mail-in voter registration forms are also available from the Secretary of State's Office. If you register by mail: Your application must be postmarked at least 30 days prior to the election in which you want to vote. If you register in the clerk’s office: You must register at least 30 days prior to the election in which you want to vote. In most cases, Circuit Clerks and Municipal Clerks are required to register voters at any time during usual business hours of 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.
see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/mshome

PENNSYLVANIA Tuesday, April 22 Primary http://www.dos.state.pa.us/voting/site/default.asp?votingNav=|&bcelNav=|
Pennsylvania law provides that the deadline to apply to register to vote is 30 days prior to each election. (MARCH 24th)
SEE ALSO http://padems.com/action/registertovote

and http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/pahome

MARCH 4: OHIO, RHODE ISLAND, TEXAS, AND VERMONT

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:52:45 EST

The following information is gathered from the respective states' democratic party sites, secretary of state sites, and other sources, with links provided. It does not claim to be a definitive source, however, and in no way replaces the responsibility each voter has for ensuring that they will be able to vote in an election. Please check with your own state and county officials to verify this information.

Tuesday, March 4

Ohio    Primary    161 delegates
Rhode Island    Primary    32 delegates
Texas    Primary    228 delegates
Vermont    Primary    23 delegates

REGISTRATION FOR ALL BUT VERMONT HAS PASSED; VT'S DEADLINE IS 2/27

OHIO
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/PublicAffairs/voterInfoGuide.aspx

Ohio has a 30-day voter registration requirement.

You cast your ballot at your precinct’s designated polling place, unless you vote a provisional ballot. If you do not know where your precinct polling place is located, contact your county board of elections. If you have access to the Internet, you may visit the Secretary of State’s Web site, www.sos.state.oh.us, for the location of your polling place.
see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ohhome

Every voter will be required to provide proof of identity before voting. The form of identification that you may use includes your current and valid photo identification card, military identification, copy of utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, government check, or government document showing your name and current address. (Note: You cannot use as proof of identification a notice that the board of elections mailed to you.) If you do not have, or fail or refuse to provide, the required proof of identity, you may cast a provisional ballot.

You may vote the primary ballot of the political party with which you currently wish to be affiliated. If you voted the primary ballot of a different political party in 2005 or 2006, you will complete a statement at your polling place confirming the change in your political party affiliation.

Polls open 6:30 am to 7:30 pm

RHODE ISLAND
REGISTRATION DEADLINE WAS FEB 2ND
RIDEMS website least informative of all—and considering the competition with HI’s sec of state, that’s saying something
RI’S Sec of State's http://www.sec.state.ri.us/vic/
see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/rihome

http://www.elections.state.ri.us/frequent.htm
Rhode Island has a 'closed' or party primary system. This means that you may only vote in one party's primary. If you are registered as "unaffiliated" you may vote in the primary of any party you choose. Once you vote in a primary, however, you are considered a member of that party until and unless you "disaffiliate". You may do this by signing an affidavit of disaffiliation at the polling place after you vote or by filling out a new registration form at any time. The disaffiliation takes effect in 90 days. If you indicated a party preference when you registered to vote, you may only vote in that party's primary. If you wish to vote in another party's primary, you must disaffiliate at least 90 days before the primary date.

CITY/TOWN
Barrington, Bristol, Central Falls, Coventry, Cranston, Cumberland, East Greenwich, East Providence, Exeter, Glocester, Johnston, Narragansett, North Kingstown, North Providence, Pawtucket, Portsmouth, Providence, Scituate, Smithfield, South Kingstown, Warwick, West Greenwich, West Warwick
POLLS OPEN: 7:00 a.m.
POLLS CLOSE: 9:00 p.m.

CITY/TOWN
Foster, Lincoln, Middletown, Newport, North Smithfield, Tiverton, Warren, Woonsocket
POLLS OPEN: 8:00 a.m.
POLLS CLOSE: 9:00 p.m.

CITY/TOWN
Burrillville, Charlestown, Hopkinton, Jamestown, New Shoreham, Little Compton, Richmond, Westerly
POLLS OPEN: 9:00 a.m.

NOTE: For the Presidential Preference Primary only, New Shoreham's polls will open from 9:00 am - 12:00 pm

TEXAS
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/laws/2008prical.shtml
REGISTRATION DEADLINE WAS FEB 4TH
MARCH 4TH 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. - Polls are open
5:00 p.m. - Deadline for receiving applications for late early ballots to be voted by persons who became sick or disabled on or after Monday, February 25, 2008 (8th day before election day).
7:00 p.m. - Deadline for receiving early ballots by mail and late early ballots cast by voters who became sick or disabled on or after Monday, February 25, 2008 (8th day before election day).
The voter registrar may take possession of the ballot box(es) or transfer case(s) containing the provisional ballots (or provisional ballot affidavits when DRE systems are used) on election night (instead of on the next business day) by providing the custodian of records with a notice no later than 24 hours before election day.

see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/txhome

According to http://texaspolitics.laits.utexas.edu/html/vce/0201.html : Officially, Texas has closed primaries. But in practice, any registered voter may vote in the primary of any single party, as long as they have not voted in the primary of another party. Texas's primaries are closed in a less direct way: once a registered voter has in effect declared his or her party affiliation by voting for the nominees in a party's primary, that person cannot participate in the proceedings (for instance, a runoff primary or convention) of another party.

According to Dan from Texas (citing http://blog.texansforobama.com/ , http://www.burntorangereport.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4877 , http://www.burntorangereport.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4881 )

"We need two separate GOTV efforts.

One is to get people to vote in the primary, early voting from Feb 19-29. Regular voting on March 4.
The primary determines 128 delegates to the national convention.

Everyone MUST go back to their own precincts - early voters can vote anywhere but you must be in YOUR precinct to caucus at 7:15 pm, March 4. 15 minutes after the polls close.

67 delegates are up for grabs (indirectly) based on how many Obama vs. Clinton supporters show up at the caucus. 15% viability rule.

In theory, the primary could go 100% to Obama and the caucus could go 100% to Clinton (or vice versa). These are two independent, separate, elections for different sets of delegates.

Everyone, please let people from Texas know about this. Because believe me, almost nobody in Texas knows this yet."

VERMONT
http://vermont-elections.org/elections1/voters.html

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 - Last Day to Register To Vote for the Presidential Primary Election

You can vote in Vermont ONLY if you:
1 are a citizen of the United States;
2. Are a resident of Vermont and a resident of the town in which you apply to be added to the checklist;
3. take, or have previously taken, the Voter's Oath (formerly called the "Freeman's Oath"); and
4. are 18 years of age or older (or will be eighteen on or before the day of election).
How to Register to Vote

Complete the Applications for Addition to the Checklist. You must include your Vermont Driver's License Number on the form. If you do not have a Vermont Driver's License Number or if your license is suspended, include the last 4 digits of your Social Security Number. Be sure to take the Voter’s Oath in front of a notary, and have the notary sign the form if you have not voted in Vermont before. Once it is completed you must submit the form to the Town or City Clerk in the town or city in which you reside. You will also be given an opportunity to register to vote when you register your car, get a driver’s license or renew your registration or license.
see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/vthome

FEBRUARY 19: HAWAII AND WISCONSIN

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:32:23 EST

Tuesday, February 19

Hawaii    Caucus    29 delegates
Wisconsin    Primary    92 delegates

BOTH HAVE ON SITE, SAME DAY REGISTRATION

HAWAII

http://www.hawaiidemocrats.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=246&Itemid=90

What happens at the Caucuses?
In order to accommodate as many members as possible the preference polling will be open for at least 30 minutes, from 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. at each precinct election site. Any candidate with the required minimum popularity percentage will field candidates for the various Delegate positions at the State Convention. At the caucuses members will also select their precinct officers, district officers, and delegates to the State Convention.

Who can participate?
Any member of the Democratic Party of Hawai'i. You MUST be both a registered voter in the State of Hawai'i and a registered member of the Democratic Party of Hawai'i to participate in the February 19th precinct election or the Presidential Preference Poll. No absentee or proxy voting is allowed.

Is there walk-in registration?
Yes, registered voters will be allowed to fill out Party registration cards. Any unregistered voters must fill out Wiki Wiki Voter Registration Forms.

See also http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/konrad/CGGbp

Beth from CA also pointed out, this link www4.honolulu.gov/vote/ , and this info "If your callee needs caucus info that is not available through BO.com, they can go to the above link, or they can call Honolulu Headquarters at (808) 253-8117"

WISCONSIN
http://www.wisdems.org/ht/d/sp/i/1131187/pid/1131187

Wisconsin's primary is on Tuesday, February 19. Any registered voter can vote on either side of the presidential primary. Wisconsin has same day registration. To register at the polls, bring a piece of official mail sent to you at your current voting address.

FEBRUARY 12: The Potomac Primary

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:26:49 EST

Tuesday, February 12

District of Columbia     Primary     37 delegates
Maryland     Primary     99 delegates
Virginia     Primary     101 delegates

ALL THREE'S REGISTRATION DEADLINES FOR THE PRIMARY SEEM TO HAVE PASSED

District of Columbia

From http://www.dcboee.org/voterinfo/
Voter Qualifications
To register and vote in the District of Columbia, you must be:
• a citizen of the United States
• at least 18 years old by election day
• a resident of the District of Columbia
To find out if you are registered and eligible to vote in the November General Election, call the Board’s office at 202-727-2525. (DEADLINE APPEARS TO BE 30 DAYS PRIOR TO ELECTION, SO IT HAS PASSED)

Although DC election law does not require voters to present identification except for certain first-time voters, some polling places require ID to enter the facility. The Board therefore encourages voters to take some form
of identification with them to the polling place.

Find your polling place here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/dchome

As a registered voter in the District of Columbia, you have the right to:
• vote in privacy in the polling place, regardless of physical disability
• receive instructions on how to operate the voting equipment
• take your time when voting
• update your address and vote a Special Ballot if you have moved
• receive a new ballot if you make a mistake before casting a ballot
• vote if you are in line when the polling place closes
• ask for help from a person of your choice, including a poll worker
• bring voter information with you to the voting booth
• vote free from threat or intimidation by election officials or anyone else
• read a sample ballot posted in the polling place
You may also report fraud or other illegal election activity to the Federal Bureau of Investigations at 202-278-2000.

MARYLAND
www.elections.state.md.us/
If you are not yet registered to vote, an application must be postmarked by January 22, 2008, to vote in the Primary Election and October 14, 2008, to vote in the General Election.
February 12    8:00 p.m.
    Deadline to file a Late Absentee Ballot Application, in person, at your Local Board of Elections

February 12    7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
    Presidential Primary Election

Find your polling place here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/mdhome

VIRGINIA
http://www.vademocrats.org/news/items/feb_12_presidential_primary/
The Presidential primary is FEBRUARY 12! Any eligible county resident who will be 18 by or on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 may register and vote in the primary.

Polls will be open FEBRUARY 12 from 6 AM to 7 PM. You vote at your normal polling place.

Registration deadline appears to be 29 days before election, so appears to have passed.

Find your polling place here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/vahome

FEB 9-10 Primary & Caucuses

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:15:18 EST

NEBRASKA, WASHINGTON AND MAINE HAVE SAME DAY ON-SITE REGISTRATION

FEBRUARY 9th

Louisiana     Primary     67 delegates
Nebraska     Caucus     31 delegates
Washington     Caucus     97 delegates
Virgin Islands     Other     9 delegates

February 10th

Maine Caucus 34 delegates

Louisiana ( http://www.sos.louisiana.gov/tabid/68/Default.aspx )
need to be registered 30 days prior to an election, so deadline has passed
When you go to the polls to cast your vote in an election, be sure to take a driver's license or some other generally recognized picture ID. Voters who have no picture ID and bring only a utility bill, payroll check or government document that includes their name and address will have to sign an affidavit furnished by the Elections Division in order to vote.

Find your polling place here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/lahome

Nebraska ( http://www.nebraskademocrats.org/ ): first caucus ever! Caucus participants must be (1) a U.S. citizen; (2) residing in the precinct at which they participate; (3) eligible to vote (18 years old by the next General Election Day); (4) a registered Nebraska Democrat, or anyone who, prior to or at the caucus meeting, registers as a Nebraska Democrat and signs the “New Democrat form” as described below; and (5) one who thereafter does not participate in any other political party’s process during the election year.

There will be voter registration cards at the caucus, but the best (and quickest) way is to print a registration form off (from www.votedouglascounty.com ) ahead of time, and bring it to your caucus location already filled out. With the huge turnout the county party is expecting, the more people who do that the better to make things run smoothly. (Thanks to Trevor F on NE for Obama list for pointing that out)
There may be confusion, as there will also be a primary later in the year, but the primary is meaningless as to the presidential race. In order to vote on the presidential candidates, you must attend Saturday's caucus.
to make things REAL simple (sarcasm), each county sets its own time for its caucus, but all have to be finished with results reported by 7:30 pm. Earliest I've seen is 8 am, with lots at 10, but some as late as 6:30; find your location & time here http://www.nebraskademocrats.org/content/1365/Nebraska-Presidential-Caucus-Locations .
Also, Obama supporters will be rallying on O Street in Lincoln tomorrow (Friday) starting at 6 pm

Virgin Islands: I think it's a caucus but haven't been able to learn much about it. Sorry

Washington: Caucus, though like Nebraska it's also having a primary which is meaningless as to the presidential race. Appears to be A LOT of confusion about this.
from http://the-foghorn.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-info-on-washington-democratic.html
The Democratic caucuses officially start at 1:00 PM. If you are not yet registered to vote, you can still attend the caucus. There will be voter registration forms at the caucus locations and AS LONG AS YOU REGISTER AT THE START OF THE CAUCUS, you can then participate.

Unlike the Iowa caucuses, which do not allow participants to show up after the scheduled start time, you may show up late to the caucus and vote, up until the point that the final results have been announced for your precinct. Once the results are announced, you will not be able to vote for your candidate but you will be able to vote on delegate and alternate selection for your precinct.
When you sign in, you will be asked to indicate a preference for a Democratic candidate, or you can state "undecided". Once the caucus starts, the chair of your precinct will have someone count up the total number of votes for each candidate. The # of votes for each candidate will then be divided by the total number of votes for that precinct to determine a percentage of votes. This percentage is then multiplied by the number of delegates allocated to determine the portion of delegates each candidate receives. Delegates are then allocated first by assigning whole delegates, then second by the highest percentages after the decimal point. Ties are determined by lot (i.e. - coin flip or other random method).
After the initial tally, each group of supporters is allowed to give a 1 minute speech to the rest of the group explaining why they support their candidate and asking for support. After the speeches, a short time will be allowed for people to talk to each other and ask for or offer support. If you decide to change your vote, you would update your sign in for your new preference. Once the discussion is concluded, the chair will again tally the votes and then announce the final results and delegate allocation.
Unlike the 2004 Washington Democratic caucuses and this year's Iowa caucuses, there is no 15% "viability" rule. A candidate who fails to receive enough support to earn a delegate in the first round of voting is still eligible to convince other voters to support them and earn new or additional delegates
and from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004148968_caucusqampa28m.html
Although Washington voters are not required to register by party, in order to participate in the presidential nominating process you will be required to reveal your party affiliation.

Do I have to be a registered voter to attend the precinct caucuses?

A: Yes, with one exception. The Democratic Party will allow people who are 17 but will turn 18 by the Nov. 4 general election to take part in caucuses
How do I find where my precinct caucus will be held?

A: For the Democratic Party go online to www.wa-democrats.org/caucusfinder or call 206-583-4345.

Also see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/nathanwilliams/CGGkc

Find your caucus location here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/wahome

SEE ALSO http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/CGMLg

MAINE

Maine will be caucusing this Sunday, February 10.

New voters, or those not registered in a political party may register to become Democrats at the caucus.
CAUCUSES can be held anywhere between 1 and 8 pm. Children are explicitly welcome according to several of the caucus announcements (but not necessarily at all--please check).

AS CAUCUS TIMES VARY, PLEASE CONFIRM YOUR CAUCUS TIME AND LOCATION
Find caucus location http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/melookupsem

For more information, see http://www.mainedems.org/

see also http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/CGMG9

Letter to Senator Dodd

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:31:55 EST

Dear Senator Dodd,

Thank you for your great service to this country. Your leadership on issues like the FISA bill, the Family Medical Leave Act, and the Help America Vote Act have greatly strengthened our nation. In fact, my five-year-old was so inspired by your work that he organized a caucus in his kindergarten class so that he could serve as your precinct captain. You may remember meeting us at your Holiday Party in Des Moines. Finn will treasure the photos and memories always. And I greatly enjoyed meeting some of your friends and supporters who attended our caucus in Des Moines, especially a gentleman who like my parents had emigrated from Ireland. Though I was the Obama precinct captain, I proudly displayed the photos we took at your party at the caucus.

I find tremendous common ground between your campaign and that of Senator Obama. One of Senator Obama's policy proposals that appeals to me most deeply is his Call to Serve. As a Peace Corps volunteer yourself, I am sure you appreciate the great value this program will have, in which the American government and the American people mutually invest in each other, so that both are strengthened. This is an outstanding example of Senator Obama's approach to government, to inspire Americans from all backgrounds to believe in their country once again and to become actively engaged in politics and government. By the thousands upon thousands, in every state across this nation, Americans who had become alienated from their government are now embracing it as a critical instrument of change.

I know you intend to remain neutral, Senator Dodd, and I respect that. But if there is a chance that you have not fully decided to do so, I would like to ask that you consider endorsing Senator Obama. As your great friend Senator Kennedy has said,

with Barack Obama, there is a new national leader who has given America a different kind of campaign—a campaign not just about himself, but about all of us. A campaign about the country we will become, if we can rise above the old politics that parses us into separate groups and puts us at odds with one another.

I remember another such time, in the 1960s, when I came to the Senate at the age of 30. We had a new president who inspired the nation, especially the young, to seek a new frontier. Those inspired young people marched, sat in at lunch counters, protested the war in Vietnam and served honorably in that war even when they opposed it.

They realized that when they asked what they could do for their country, they could change the world.

It was the young who led the first Earth Day and issued a clarion call to protect the environment; the young who enlisted in the cause of civil rights and equality for women; the young who joined the Peace Corps and showed the world the hopeful face of America.

Senator Dodd, I was born on that first Earth Day, and you were one of the young who answered President Kennedy's call to think not of what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country. You have done great things for our country. I am asking you to do one thing more. Please, endorse Senator Barack Obama.

Words of encouragement

IA for Obama ☮ — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:37:22 EST

Written to another supporter, who was starting to lose hope in the days after NH:

I am daunted. I don't know that I can give you an answer. Not because I am not confident that we can win, we will win, and we should win. Of that I am certain, and working my everything off to do what I can to help bring it about.

No, I am daunted because I often have turned to you for greater inspiration and information; to see you say that you have almost given up all hope; well, I know the depths from which that comes, and that is what I find so daunting.

But I will try to convey why I totally respect and understand where you are coming from, but why I still have so much hope and faith and confidence.

First off, yes, she'll pull any and every trick in the book to try to wheedle what some might call a "win." Yes, the MSM, even now TR, go so easy on her, for fear of playing into her victimization schtick. Yes, some women, perhaps due to legitimate oppression in their own lives, perceive a challenge to HRC as some kind of sexism. Hell, even Working Assets maintained the same in a ridiculous protest email the other day.

But this isn't about her. She's trying to make it all about her, and she's trying to force a fight on her own nasty terms. But she will lose. Because Barack is better than that. And the American people, in significant enough numbers, are better than that, and are thoroughly sick and tired of it.

I can't say what will happen in NV. But I don't think that any one state determines another. Look at IA, then compare it with NH. Not just on the Barack/HRC contest--across the board results were different. NV is NV and SC is SC and there will still be 44 states to go (MI and FL DQed), 22 of them on Feb 5th alone.

You write, "Tell me why/how he can still win this thing." Here's one reason: because this isn't just about him. It's about each one of us, and what we're willing and able to do to help him win. Voters rights groups need to be proactive to ensure that votes are accurately counted, and we all can help to that end. We can hold our government and election boards accountable. We can combat the misperceptions and deliberate distortions of Barack’s record with our own words, across the country, across the world. Don't let the MSM define your reality. Be the change you wish to see in the world. Embrace the power of your own possibility. Yes, I know you’ve heard that all before. But they really do have meaning. And so many of us here are helping us have a greater influence on world perceptions. Think of the things so many of us have done for the first time since coming on board this presidential campaign. How much more aware we all are. How much more informed we all are. How much more engaged we all are. How much more powerful we all are.

Our country is waking up. We’ve been disillusioned and cynical for so long. We’ve felt alienated from each other and from our deepest sense of self. We let them slice and dice our country for far too long. We gave them that power. And we’re taking it back.

Now, of course I can’t say what’s going to happen in the future. But one thing I do know is this: when people wake up to themselves, they can’t go back to that false sense, that half-life anymore.

I’m reminded of the wisdom of Audre Lorde: “having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” There’s no going back. This movement cannot be stopped. I don’t know where exactly it will lead, but I do know it won’t circle on back for the status quo.

And there’s another reason we’ll win. Because we’ve got Barack. I know it’s easy to second-guess what he’s doing ot nor doing, especially when all the nastiness of the system he’s fighting is unloading on him. But I’ve seen him in action before and I am impressed. He knows how to rise above it and also refute the slime. People begged for him to go negative in his Senate primary race and he refused. Look how that turned out for him.

Remember Barack’s words, "When you signed up for this you didn't think it was going to be an easy ride. Listen, it's going to be bumpy, there's going to be turbulence. If you need me to sit next to you on the plane and hold your hand, I will. But I hope you won't need that, because we have a lot of work to do and we can win this."

YES WE CAN! But it’s up to all of us to make sure we do.

Liberation Theology, Feminism, and Barack Obama

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:46:26 EST

    As a professor of Religion and Women’s Studies, one of the subjects I most enjoy introducing to students is Liberation Theology. This is a branch of Christian theology that can be said to have begun in the 1960s, although its roots go much deeper than that. Indeed, some would say that Jesus himself was the first liberation theologian in Christian history, as liberation was the cornerstone of his ministry: liberation from sin, from death, from ignorance, from oppression in all its forms. But in a more precise historical sense, Liberation Theology emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, a response to the staggering poverty and suffering rife there. In the face of starvation, sickness, exploitation, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness and powerlessness, Liberation Theology boldly declared that God had a “preferential option for the poor,” which affirms "both the universality of God’s love and God’s predilection for" the weakest and most oppressed. The poor deserve preference not because they are inherently superior, “but because God is God, in whose eyes ‘the last are first’” (Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, xxvi, xxviii; see also Lk 9:48). The poor are not to be idealized nor romanticized, Liberation Theology insists, but to be identified with as human beings, treated with equality and respect; moreover, the poor should have the greatest voice in the battle against poverty, because they can best articulate their experience and create solutions to the unjust systems that help perpetuate their oppression.
    Liberation Theology intertwined with the civil rights movement in America heavily influenced other forms of theology emerging at this time, including Feminist Theology and Black Theology. Each group maintained that God, who stood with slaves against Pharaoh and came as a lowly peasant to stand against the dominant powers of the world, radically identified with the oppressed, and each pointed to one form of oppression as the primary impediment to justice. For Latin American Liberation Theology, it was poverty. For Black Theology, it was racism. And for Feminist Theology, it was sexism. Each group might recognize that the other branches of Liberation Theology also had cause for complaint, but their own experience of a particular form of oppression initially caused them to diminish the realities articulated by others, and even to perpetuate those injustices to an extent. Some theologians, frustrated by the racism in Feminist Theology and the sexism in Black Theology, developed Womanist Theology, which approaches theology through the lens of Black female experience. This process has been repeated many times, and today there are countless forms of Liberation Theology, each focusing on a particular group identity and its experiences.
    As women theologians worked to eradicate injustice in the 1970s and 1980s, many of them realized that the various forms of oppression are often inextricably intertwined. Sexism, however, is among the most pervasive, the most insidious, and often the most ignored. For example, in the fifteenth anniversary edition of his Theology of Liberation, widely regarded as the foundational text of the movement, Gutiérrez notes that injustice against women is difficult to detect because of “its hiddenness, for it has become something habitual, part of everyday life and cultural tradition. So true is this that when we point it out we sound a bit like foreigners bent on causing trouble” (xxii). This comment characterizing challenges to sexism as foreign interference hints at how deeply ingrained sexism is in the cultures Gutiérrez is discussing; so does the fact that he writes of “the new presence of women . . . among the poor”(xx). The presence of women among the poor is of course nothing new; the fact that it could seem such to someone working among and in solidarity with the poor for decades, however, speaks volumes about how insidious that oppression is, as does the fact that these two passages constitute the only references to women quae women in his book.
    Female theologians working within the broader context of Liberation Theology challenged such assumptions, and came to realize that in order to abolish sexism, all other forms of oppression must also be eradicated. In general, such theologians have been the most explicitly committed to ending oppression in all its forms, rather than focusing on one or two particular issues. Their work has had great impact on Liberation Theologies across the spectrum, with more and more theologians from differing backgrounds recognizing the complex web of oppression and injustice, and of the great need to challenge all forms of oppression in order to effectively address any. For example, one cannot point to a single cause of the oppression of an indigenous, multiracial, single mother who has been forced into prostitution by poverty and has consequently contracted HIV/AIDS; each aspect of her oppression compounds another. For justice to be achieved, a total transformation of society is required, and it is to this end that many feminist and other liberation theologians are committed, with a mutual commitment between God and humanity providing the inspiration and ability to do so. As Rosemary Radford Ruether writes, "I see God, the divine ground of being, as the ground of our hope in this struggle for transformation, but this is not a God who is “in charge” and will intervene to save us despite ourselves and bring in a reign of God from [on high]. Rather the deep ontological structures that dictate biophilic mutuality as the only way to generate well-being give us the potential for making a new future, but one we could miss through our greed, hatred, and delusions" (Women and Redemption, 224).

    This is a rather lengthy preamble to why I regard Barack Obama as the strongest feminist candidate running for president. To many, this claim may seem ridiculous, if not downright offensive, as we have a strong female candidate, one who has the support of some of the staunchest feminist organizations in America, including NOW and EMILY’s List, which have actively (and often with deliberate distortions) campaigned against Senator Obama. One of the more extreme views has been articulated by Marcia Pappas, President of NY NOW, who yesterday wrote: “Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. . . . He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president” (http://www.nownys.org/pr_2008/pr_012808.html ). The list to which she refers connects with her earlier press release, in which she characterized male politicians’ support of candidates other than Senator Clinton as a “psychological gang bang” (http://www.nownys.org/pr_2008/pr_011108.html ). In this statement, she also declares, “Let us remember what we as women’s rights supporters, are charged to do: SUPPORT WOMEN!” Ms. Pappas’ belittling and cynical appropriation of the very real brutalization of women and girls is deeply disturbing and serves largely to discredit the merits of her argument. But her claim that women must at all costs support women has been echoed by many throughout this campaign, with some so-called feminists maintaining that a woman who supports any candidate other than Senator Clinton is a traitor to her sex.
   I am sensitive to this argument. Indeed, some women whom I respect are voting for Senator Clinton primarily due to her sex. However, such an argument is equally as sexist as arguing that we should not support someone because of their sex (which is, in essence, what such advocates are claiming vis-à-vis John Edwards and Barack Obama), and I find sexism objectionable no matter which sex it disadvantages. Furthermore, solid arguments can be and have been made as to why Senator Clinton is far from a paragon for feminists, whose potential presidency may very well serve to further disempower women (e.g, http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/01/10/kissling_clinton/ , http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/flanagan-hillary , http://visiblevote08.logoonline.com/2008/01/14/gloria-steinem-the-faux-feminism-of-hillary-clinton/ , http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/10/6288/ ). I will not repeat such arguments here, but, building upon my discussion of Liberation Theology, I will consider a few reasons why I firmly believe that Barack Obama is the strongest feminist in the race.
   In making this argument, one could easily point to his outstanding legislative record and progressive policies on matters critical to women (e.g., http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/womenissues , http://factcheck.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/01/22/obamas_strong_record_on_protec.php , http://www.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/01/08/fact_check_obamas_strong_proch.php), or to the fact that he was the sole Senator to help overturn South Dakota’s criminalization of abortion, despite all other pro-choice Senators being asked to do so (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILVLzbBcs8A ), or that women play some of the most critical roles in his campaign, including Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Cassandra Butts, and Judith Gold. But to be fair, a strong argument could be made for other candidates on similar grounds. Barack’s compelling life story, however, clearly sets him apart from the rest. He was raised by a single mother, a biracial boy who was at times ostracized by the dominant white culture in America and could also be considered the “other” among blacks, and an American who spent several years living among the people in Indonesia; these factors helped shape Barack and gave him great perspective and understanding of diverse views. This is reflected in his approach to politics and government, in which he seeks to include rather than exclude, and refuses to demonize his opponents, though our society all too often rewards those who do; rather, he truly listens to diverse viewpoints and reflects upon them. In a country which has long been divided by bitter partisanship and oppression of diverse groups, his approach and personal narrative signify a healing of some of our country’s deepest wounds, in which we have the potential to come together and work together for the betterment of our society.
   His life experiences also shape his understanding of power. In Dreams from My Father, he tells of his mother’s witness of an emaciated woman being scorned by men as she desperately but determinedly begged for a few coins in Indonesia: “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory” (45). As a member of multiple oppressed groups, as well as of multiple privileged ones, Barack has extensive understanding of the different ways in which power both oppresses and empowers. He is fully committed to lessening the former use of power and in expanding the latter.
   His commitment to equality and justice for all, which is the true goal of feminism, is further made manifest in his life choices. After college, he rejected a lucrative corporate career path in order to become a community organizer on the streets of Chicago, earning a paltry $10,000 a year. As liberation theologians had before him, he stood with the poor, studying the structures of oppression from the perspective of those victimized by it and listening to their own insights as to the nature of oppression and how best to address it. It was not his Christianity that inspired him to do this; rather it was his independent commitment to social justice that inspired him to choose this path and ultimately led him to embrace the Christian faith. His struggles to help give jobs to the jobless and hope to the hopeless further impelled him to become a lawyer, a constitutional scholar, and a voting rights activist. This led him to the Illinois Senate, where he consistently remained a champion of the oppressed and the marginalized, including women and girls. It was towards the end of his time there that I first met Barack, and I was genuinely inspired by his commitment to social justice, his recognition that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, that we are all diminished when any of us endure injustice, and that we all can and must be the change we wish to see in the world. I strongly supported his candidacy for the United States Senate and in fact wished that he would run for the presidency. In the years that have followed, my conviction that he would serve as the president we so desperately need has only intensified, and I am committed to doing all that I can to ensure that he becomes that president.
    Barack Obama solidly stands with those who maintain that in order to eradicate any form of oppression, we must address them all, and that the way to do so is by standing with the people and empowering them to fight the oppression themselves, while simultaneously remaking the institutional and societal structures that perpetuate oppression. He shares a similar understanding of the dynamics of oppression developed among feminist and other liberation theologians through decades of grappling with the issue; to me, his is by far the strongest feminist stance. The feminism espoused by Ms. Pappas and others like her represents a narrower, far less effective approach, which is too focused on one form of oppression to adequately address any. Furthermore, Senator Clinton’s approach to change, as exemplified by her claim that “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done” (http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/Clinton_and_Obama_Johnson_and_King.html ) signifies a decidedly un-feminist approach to power and the fight for justice, claiming that it occurs from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. This is the result of her standing primarily in a privileged class, including as the wife of a governor and a president, and suggests that she is more accustomed to looking down upon the oppressed than to standing with them.
    I implore those who want true change, who genuinely seek to transform our society to bring it closer into conformance with its stated goals of liberty and justice for all, which will result in an empowerment of people across the spectrum and thus in women among other disadvantaged groups having greater access to and greater representation in positions of power, to consider the candidacy of Barack Obama. Given “the fierce urgency of now,” in the words of Martin Luther King, with Super Tuesday a mere week away, please, please take some time to get to know Barack, the greatness he has accomplished, and the greatness that together we can achieve. I ask this as a solid feminist who is committed to the advancement of women, but not at the expense of others, who fiercely believes that in order to effectively combat any injustice, most especially including sexism, we need to unite against them all.

Letter to Al Gore

IA for Obama ☮ — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:31:41 EST

Dear Vice President Gore,

Thank you for your lifelong commitment to our country and our planet. As a parent, as an environmentalist, and as an American, I am deeply grateful for all you have done. I write to ask you to do another thing for our country: endorse Barack Obama for President.

I was heartbroken by the election of 2000. My faith in this country and in my own ability to make a difference fractured. It wasn’t until 2003 that I dared to believe again, when I met a man who spoke of our need to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper, how when any of us endure injustice we all are diminished, how we each can be the change we need to see in the world. A man who had been working to be that change for over a decade, on the streets of Chicago and in the halls of Springfield. A man who made me once again feel empowered and inspired politically. A man who was running for the U.S. Senate, but I yearned for him to run for President. That man is Barack Obama.

The election of 2004 was almost as divisive and disturbing as the election of 2000. But in 2008 we have the opportunity to take our country back, by a landslide. By the thousands new voters are being turned on to the Democratic Party and to the political process, largely because Barack Obama has reached out to them, energized them to believe in the power of their own possibility, and inspired them to become involved. We are witnessing a kind of rebirth of America, one in which Americans are daring to dream again, daring to break down the walls of partisanship that have enabled a small group of people to wield a disproportionate amount of power over the rest of us. Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats are flocking to his campaign, desperate to believe not just in our country once again, but in ourselves, and in each other. And together we can do this. Yes we can.

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he will win the presidency, and by a landslide. No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, is likely to do the same. And with the mandate of the vast majority of the American people supporting him and his platform, he will be able to tackle the great challenges that face our nation and our world. Issues that are dear to your heart will finally be addressed in a thoughtful, intelligent, comprehensive and effective way. You will be able to play a central role in addressing these issues, and we will be all the more grateful to you for it.

But in order for him to win the presidency, he must first win the Democratic nomination. Your endorsement of him will be critical to that end. You are one of the most respected leaders in the Democratic Party; indeed, you are one of the most respected Americans in the world. So many of us deeply, deeply regret that you did not become President, and so many great wrongs have been inflicted upon our country and by our country in the eight years that have followed that tremendous injustice. The time for change has never been more critical in my lifetime; Barack Obama is ideally suited to help deliver that change, and to empower us all to be part of that change as well.

I appreciate the great work you have already done, and you certainly deserve a respite from politics. But your country still needs you, Vice President Gore. The American people need you. Please help us take our country back. Please endorse Barack Obama for President.

Letter to Chairman Dean

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:02:17 EST

Dear Chairman Dean:

I write to you with a heavy heart. I am deeply disturbed and saddened by the viciousness coming out of the Clinton campaign, directed towards a fellow Democrat. Since I know you to be a good man who has suffered similarly unfair attacks, I am asking you to use your voice and position to speak against it.

Seeing so many excellent candidates in the Democratic field this past summer and fall, I was greatly heartened by its testament to the strength of the Democratic administration which I was confident would win the presidency next November. Though only one could be President, all would play a vital role in the new administration and I was extremely proud that our Party had so many exceptional public servants to represent it. But then, in mid-November, Senator Clinton’s campaign began engaging in the politics of distortion and division, grossly misrepresenting her opponents’ records and positions. For months she had been my second preference in an outstanding field, but as her tactics spiralled down into the gutter, so did my opinion of her character and of her ability to be an effective President. Her lies on any number of issues, including Senator Obama’s record on the Iraq War, his support for women’s rights, and even his comments about Ronald Reagan, and her determination to destroy him in any way possible, including members of her campaign pushing those posionous emails about Barack’s faith and patriotism, her surrogates (including her own husband) engaging in race-baiting and voter suppression, and her repeated attempts to create scandals where there are none, have alienated me to the extent that she has lost my vote forever. I possibly could have overcome the serious reservations I have about her own voting record, her dishonest political practices such as planting questions in her audience, and other questionable aspects of her character which I will not detail in this letter, to find enough common ground on critical issues, such as civil rights, education and women’s issues, to support her should she be the Democratic nominee. But her and her campaign’s conduct over the past two months have cost her countless votes in the future, including my own.

I write as a new Democrat. Though 99 times out of 100 I have voted for Democrats (including twice for Bill Clinton) and generally speaking Democratic positions deeply resonate with my own, I had been too alienated by partisan politics exemplified by both sides to embrace the Democratic Party. But the unifying and empowering approach to politics exemplified by Barack Obama and other like-minded Democrats inspired me not just to become a Democrat but to accept a position in the Democratic Party at my caucus here in Iowa. I have encouraged dozens of my friends and neighbors to become Democrats as well, and I have witnessed a glorious rejuvenation, not just of the Democratic Party, but of the American people. By the thousands new voters are being turned on to the Democratic Party and to the political process, largely because Barack Obama has reached out to them, energized them to believe in the power of their own possibility, and inspired them to become involved.

We are witnessing a kind of rebirth of America, as citizens throughout the land find inspiration in Barack’s vision, articulated in his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004:

there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

Thousands of Americans have embraced the politics of hope, and strive to help strengthen America and its commitment to liberty and justice for all. They have strengthened the ranks of the Democratic Party and offer the hint of the great landslide a Democratic victory could be this November. But the Clintons’ cynical conduct over the past two months, which seem to grow worse by the hour, are causing that hope to be tempered by outrage and disgust at what Democrats are willing to do to another fellow Democrat. One who has done them no harm, except that he has inspired so many people to such an extent that he has a strong chance of winning the Democratic nomination. And with each dishonest and unfair assault, they are deepening rifts within the Democratic Party and risking alienating these newly inspired voters from the Democratic Party for good.

I know you are no stranger to “the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” Your own extremely promising presidential campaign was cut short due to the media’s invention of the so-called “Dean Scream.” The 2004 election gave birth to another new word in the political lexicon: “swiftboating.” Yet while such attacks came from outsiders and Republicans, now the attacks are coming from Democrats upon other Democrats. And not just from any Democrats, but from our former President and First Lady.

Senator Clinton is fond of proclaiming her readiness to take on the Republicans, but I fear she has become too much like them. Certainly in her conduct of late I detect far more similarities with Karl Rove than with progressive Democrats such as yourself, Representative Barbara Lee, Senator Russ Feingold, and Governor Janet Napolitano. And she is inflicting worse damage upon the Democratic Party than Karl Rove has, as she is dividing it from within. If Senator Clinton and her campaign do not renounce “the politics of anything goes,” Democrats in races throughout the country may well pay the price. This negativity and viciousness may cost us not just the presidency, but the Congress. And the one to pay the biggest price of all will be our country and its future.

Please, Chairman Dean, hold them accountable for their behavior and strive to ensure that we can get back to discussing the issues, not the distortions. The American people deserve better than that. The Democratic Party deserves better than that. Our country deserves better than that.

Join your voice with mine

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:53:21 EST

What follows is an email composed in collaboration with other supporters. It draws heavily from the outstanding speech Senator Obama gave yesterday in Atlanta, and was inspired as a response to the despicable emails making the rounds about Barack, spreading horrible lies about his faith and his patriotism. I encourage you all to send this to your contacts, or to draw from his speech and create your own email in honor of the day. The speech speaks to all of us, and different passages will have particular meaning for different groups and individuals. The email also contains a link to the full text of Barack’s speech, as well as the video of it. I think everyone can benefit from reflecting upon this speech, especially “on this day of all days.”

Some inspiring thoughts in honor of Martin Luther King Day:

Unity is the great need of the hour is what King said. Unity is how we shall overcome. Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education. We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don't think like us or look like us or come from where we do. Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media.

On this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.

If we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country’s ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina. All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone. In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone. In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone. In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all.
--Barack Obama, "The Great Need of the Hour," Ebenezer Baptist Church
Atlanta, GA, January 20,2008 (for the full speech, see http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/01/the-ebenezer-se.html; for the video see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf0x_TpDris )

If you long for unity in our nation and in our communities, please send this to 10 friends. I can't promise you good luck as chain mails might, but you just might help tear down the walls of Washington and reach the promised land of a country restored to its people.

P.S . I don't know if you've received an email saying some pretty shocking things about Barack Obama and his background, but if you have, you're not the only one. Newsweek magazine investigated it and found out that those emails have completely false information and are political tricks designed to help Obama's opponents. If you've gotten any of those emails, you should click http://www.newsweek.com/id/91424 to read about the tricks the political operatives are trying to play on people.

MLK Day email project

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:40:30 EST

This idea began when Morton contacted a few of us about the abhorrent emails claiming Barack is a jihadist Muslim who hates America. She wrote:

It is still the case that the Obama/Muslim/Koran/Pledge of Allegiance smear email is influencing people. Last week when I was volunteering in Nevada and phone banking, I'd run into one out of every 30 or so undecideds ("3"s for those of you who've done phone banking) who told me that they would not be voting for Obama b/c he's a Muslim; he used the Koran when he was sworn into the Senate, or he doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. I read today another Obama supporter on the blog talking about how frequently she is running into this response in Nevada.

But the last straw for me was when I heard the smear email parroted back by my own mother-in-law! Mind you, she is a 90-year old woman, living in a very small town in east Texas. She has never been on the internet (never used a computer), but last summer, my husband and I bought for her (and her husband, i.e., my husband's parents), this nifty device (which I'd otherwise *highly* recommend), which looks just like a Hewlitt Packard printer (it's made by Presto, if you're interested: http://www.presto.com/), and it receives email - prints it out - but ONLY from persons who have been authorized to send email to that account. We all use it to stay in touch w/my in-laws, who otherwise would never receive email. However, my guess is that one of my nephews (mid-30s and now married into a pretty right wing family) sent the Obama/Muslim/Koran/Pledge of Allegiance smear email to my in-laws, and b/c it came from my nephew (their grandson) and b/c my in-laws never get on the internet and don't know how rampant crap email really is, they found it compelling. Mind you, my in-laws are what we call in Texas "yellow-dog Democrats": If the only competition against a Republican is a yellow dog, they'd vote for the yellow dog. But after the smear email made their way into their home, I heard my 90-year old mother-in-law say that if Barack got the nomination, she would vote for a Republican. (First time in her entire life - that's how much the smear email affected her.)

Now, we all know that there are plenty of web sites that one can go to for fact finding - including snopes. But my guess is that many of the people who are believing this smear email are not the type to go fact checking at snopes - or even read Newsweek (where there is a good myth buster) - and definitely they are not going to go seeking info on the BarackObama.com site. I think we need to think of a nifty type of email that will go viral and be circulated to thousands of people and have the correct info in it. But how to get such a message to go viral. How to make it that exciting/interesting that people will want to circulate it? And what should the message say? That's where I was thinking we could all put our heads together and figure this out.

I think it needs to be short and sweet and somehow grab people's attention. In the past, those chain email letters grabbed people's attention, so maybe that's a ploy (e.g., pass this on to 10 people for happiness, or something like that). I don't know. I do know that we need it to be compelling, very accessible (not tons of links or complex language; indeed, very straightforward) and funny, interesting, provocative, whatever, enough to inspire passing around.

Thinking her idea an excellent one, I sent it to a friend with outstanding political sense. He wrote:

My guess is that it's pretty hard to get viral with a rebuttal, and you'd be better off doing things that get viral that get the right facts to the right people, so they are vaccinated against the bogus stuff. Obama must have some speech he gave in a church or about his Christian faith; have people respected in the Christian community circulate inspiring excerpts around prominently flagging Obama's faith. For example, MLK Jr Day is monday. With a little thinking, one could probably figure out how to remind people that MLK was deeply Christian (perhaps obliquely contrasting with the Farrakhans Nation of Islam crowd) and that Obama falls into the same Christian inclusive community organizing model. The campaign couldn't get away with that kind of comparison, but something viral could do it. This speech would seem to be a good start, with the biblical quote and God references: http://usliberals.about.com/od/extraordinaryspeeches/a/ObamaMLK.htm

Maybe you make it viral by asking people to pledge to take one act on Monday showing the the "redeeming power of love", and to forward it to their friends too, asking them to commemorate Dr King in the same way. Or ask people to sign a petition you create on http://www.thepetitionsite.com

I shared his idea with others, and it was generally agreed that we should focus on a positive message that honored King's legacy and called all Americans to reject such tactics of hatred, ignorance, and bigotry, no matter their party or candidate preference. Some possible speeches were:

Barack's remarks at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Groundbreaking Ceremony

http://obama.senate.gov/speech/061113-dr_martin_luthe/

His Call for Renewal Address http://www.barackobama.com/2006/06/28/call_to_renewal_keynote_address.php

The Selma address http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/04/selma_voting_rights_march_comm.php

And of course MLK's own speeches http://www.mlkonline.net/speeches.html

But then today Barack delivered one of his most moving and profound speeches. And it is the perfect answer to those who seek to divide us based on fear, ignorance, and bigotry. Read it for yourself here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/rospars/CGxG9

The only thing is, as others have pointed out in the email exchange we had, people might not take the time to read the whole thing. We need to keep it relatively brief without sacrificing the power of the message. Not an easy task. Though I felt all the while like I was taking a knife to an artistic masterpiece, I have edited it down to less than half. It is still far too long, however. So I ask all of you to weigh in, as to how we can most effectively go forward with this project.

I have decided to create a blog about it, as I know there are many more who would like to be involved than the 15 or so on the email. And we can benefit from all their insights. So please give this some thought. If we want to launch this tomorrow, we have a limited time to do so. The fierce urgency of now!

Thanks for all the great things you are doing. Together we will take our country back.

OThe Scripture tells us that when Joshua and the Israelites arrived at the gates of Jericho, they could not enter. The walls of the city were too steep for any one person to climb; too strong to be taken down with brute force. And so they sat for days, unable to pass on through.

But God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city, and on the seventh day he told them that when they heard the sound of the ram’s horn, they should speak with one voice. And at the chosen hour, when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.
. ..

What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Unity is the great need of the hour – the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

. . .

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we’ve come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap.
. . .

But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes – a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.

It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart – that puts up walls between us.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

. . .

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean.

. . .
So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

. . .

The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country’s ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.

. . .
All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility.

. . .

That is how we will bring about the change we seek. That is how Dr. King led this country through the wilderness. He did it with words – words that he spoke not just to the children of slaves, but the children of slave owners. Words that inspired not just black but also white; not just the Christian but the Jew; not just the Southerner but also the Northerner.

He led with words, but he also led with deeds.
. . .
That is the unity – the hard-earned unity – that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope – the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.

. . .
And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope – but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone

In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
The Great Need of the Hour
Ebenezer Baptist Church
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
Atlanta, Georgia
Much Abridged

Then do we end with something about the email attacks? I haven't actually read them. Maybe one of you who has had more experience with them can come up with something that addresses them effectively?

Letter to Bette Lasky

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:40:53 EST

Bette Lasky is the Asst House Major Leader of NH, who signed her name to those cheapshot fliers which deliberately twisted Barack's record and also used her influence to keep Obama poll watchers from being at polling stations, which seriously hindered their ability to get out the vote. See http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/01/12/taken_for_granite.html for a summary.

Dear Representative Lasky:

I ardently support a woman’s right to choose. Though I recognize that it is a very complex matter and I deeply believe in the sanctity of life, I feel that a woman’s rights over her own body trump all other concerns. In fact, when I voted for Bill Clinton for the first time in 1992, I did so almost entirely because of his pro-choice stance. I was gratified to see him stand by his campaign promises on this even from his very first day in office, reversing dangerous trends that had emerged during the Bush-Reagan years.

Fortunately, since 1992 we have continued making considerable progress in protecting women’s reproductive freedoms, though it remains a freedom constantly under threat. Legislators across this country, including all the Democratic Presidential candidates, have repeatedly stood by a woman’s right to choose, and we should be grateful to all of them for it. To combat the fierce opposition to this right, its staunchest defenders have sometimes advocated sophisticated tactics, like encouraging Illinois state senators to vote “present” on a “barrage of hot-button abortion bills that [Republican Senate President Pate Philip] was continually trying to ram through the [Illinois] Senate in 2001 and 2002” (see http://thecapitolfaxblog.com/2007/12/04/about-those-present-votes/). This was a tactic that Barack Obama initially opposed, because he wanted to vote against measures that restricted women’s reproductive rights. He agreed only after being convinced by pro-choice groups such as Planned Parenthood that “present” votes would do far more to protect women’s reproductive rights, as they “would be difficult for Republicans to use in campaign literature against Democrats from moderate and conservative districts who favored abortion rights” (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20obama.html?pagewanted=2 ). Other leaders in the Illinois Senate, such as Lisa Madigan, Emil Jones, and Ricky Hendon, also agreed to the tactic, which proved quite successful.

How sad, then, that the time these votes were used against Senator Obama to greatest effect, the attack came not from Republicans, but from his fellow Democrats. Worse still, it was a deliberate distortion by women who claim to be concerned about protecting women’s rights. It came from people who knew better, but decided to swiftboat a fellow fighter for women’s rights simply because they preferred another candidate. It came from people who might have done a great deal of harm to that cause by employing such tactics.

This behavior deeply disturbs me. As a feminist, I find it even more problematic than the tactic of removing non-Clinton poll observers from polling stations, a tactic in which you also engaged. But perhaps most upsetting is your remark that people should just get over any problems they have with your conduct, because “It’s politics, and it happens” (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/01/12/taken_for_granite.html ). I’m sorry, Ms. Lasky, but that kind of conduct combined with that kind of attitude is precisely why so many Americans have felt alienated from and cynical about politics for so long; that behavior and attitude represent what is so terribly wrong with our government today.

You did a tremendous disservice to the women’s rights movement, the Democratic party, and the state of New Hampshire through your words and deeds, Ms. Lasky. As an American, as a Democrat, and as a woman, I ask that you honestly reflect upon the harm you have done to causes you claim to care about, and I hope you never employ such tactics again.

Sincerely,

Protecting our votes

IA for Obama ☮ — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:29:43 EST

Only two states have held primaries thus far and there are serious concerns about the accuracy of the vote count in both. We cannot afford to have our votes stolen from us by inaccurate or hacked machines. We must do all that we can to prevent that. Otherwise it will not be the voice of the people that is heard; it will be the will of those counting the votes and controlling the machines.

To that end, I encourage everyone to post useful information about how we can ensure election integrity as we go forward. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

primaries being held in the next 3 weeks alone:

January 26, 2008 South Carolina Proportional primary (Open) 54 delegates at stake

January 29, 2008 Florida Proportional primary (Closed) 0 delegates at stake (Like MI a confusing case, but every election matters)

FEBRUARY 5—over 2000 delegates at stake
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, CA, CT, DE, GA, IL, MA, MO, NJ, NY, OK, TN, UT, “DEMS ABROAD” all having primaries (7 other states having caucuses)

Testimony that machines can be and have been "hacked"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybCaT52Fa6w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBI33kOiKc

Useful links to help ensure voting integrity

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/71356.html

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html

http://www.openvotingfoundation.org

http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/

http://www.nvri.org/resources/index.shtml

http://www.uncountedthemovie.com/take-action.html (offers a guide to citizen action and has links to several other useful sites as well)

Useful numbers

202 863 8000 DNC

Relevant laws currently under consideration in Congress

H.R. 811: Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-811

S. 559: Vote Integrity and Verification Act of 2007

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-559

Also, some important insights into NH which are relevant elsewhere

"The recount will not change the system, it will validate it. To change the system work to eliminate secret vote counting. Right now, that means hand counted paper ballots.

I don't know where you live, but you need to find out the laws in your state and then work to get rid of corporate controlled e-voting. Good luck!

The ballot chain of custody does not include citizen oversight. The ballots, all of which will be handcounted in our State recount, will have been outside of any citizen oversight for over a week. The recount will be conducted in public using those ballots. People are free to come and monitor the count, but I am willing to bet it will not produce any discrepancies of note from the machine results. I just figure, either the election wasn't rigged or it was. And if it was, whoever did it knows about our liberal recount laws in NH and would have Plan B all ready with swapped out ballots."

see also http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/71356.html?1200521043

http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/new_hampshire_2008_primary_analysis

Clinton: statewide optical scan tally
95,843
52.73%

Obama: statewide optical scan tally
85,910
47.27%

Clinton: statewide hand-count tally
16,767
46.75%

Obama: hand count
19,097
53.25%

While the actual difference between Obama and Clinton hand count and optical scan margins are not a mirror image of each other to four decimal places as we had initially believed*, the undeniable fact that Obama appears to have carried the hand-counted tally statewide, while Clinton carried the optical scan statewide tally -- by almost exactly opposite margins -- remains a remarkable result.

Register to handcount ballots

http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/register_i_count_corps_hand_count_ballots_true_elections

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_080110_sign_up_to_take_...

January 10, 2008

Sign Up to Take Back Our Elections – Register for the "I COUNT" Corps

By Andi Novick and Sally Castleman

At best there is “uncertainty” about the reported outcomes of the NH primary. Undoubtedly many other articles in this issue of OpEd News will be discussing them.

What we do know is that once again some doubt is being cast on the viability of machine counting of our votes. We believe it is time for us, the citizens of our nation, to take the actions that our ‘leaders’ have been refusing to take.

We are entitled to honest, transparent elections with appropriate checks and balances that the oblique processes of a computer prevent.

It is time for us to build our own corps of citizen counters. WE will count the ballots on election night. We propose that we, the people, sign up to count ballots on election night after the polls close. Much like jury duty, only one needs to commit for only 4 hours.

Our proposal is to hand count the federal races, which is never more than 3 races – President, Senator (some years), Representative. Calculation shows that only 1 in 4 citizens will ever be needed just once in their lifetime for a 4-hour stint to fulfill this highest order civic duty. Some, of course, may choose to do it more often.

Every team of counters would have a representative of at least two different parties. Citizens would be vetted, just as they are before being chosen to sit on a jury.

We urge anyone interested in learning more or anyone ready to sign up for the “I COUNT” corps, to sign up at Info@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org. We will send you more details.

Andi Novick & Sally Castleman
Election Defense Alliance
______________________

Had Enough of "Faith-Based" Elections Entrusted to a Corporate Machine? Tell Congress and the Media You Want Paper Ballots Counted By Hand in The Precincts

Click Here for a quick, one-click way to write
your U.S. Senators, your Representative, and your regional newspaper all at once.

We provide a sample letter you can adapt to make your own. Copy, paste, alter, and add what you want to say.

Click here to Act

When you're done, click to see the messages other citizens are sending too.

‹ Quick Overview of Hand-count/Machine-count Discrepancies up 2006 Election Investigations [NEW!] › »

Other useful links

Voting Machine Failures During the 2008 Presidential Primary Race
Submitted by davidswanson on Sat, 2008-01-12 22:16. Elections
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/30050
(see also http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5553 )

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/voting/20071219/17/2384
New Voting Machines May Not Meet State Standards
by Andrea Senteno
19 Dec 2007

http://baltimorechronicle.com/2008/011108Lindorff.shtml

http://commonwonders.com/archives/col429.htm

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5540

Open letter to NV Precinct Captains and Volunteers

IA for Obama ☮ — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:52:45 EST

Dear NV Precinct Captain or volunteer,

You don’t know me, but I know the incredible work you are doing to help us take our country back.

I know, because I did it in Iowa. I know how much time and energy you’ve dedicated, how much more informed and engaged you’re becoming, and how much more hopeful you are about the future our country could have. A future our country will have, thanks to people like you.

I know how hard the work is. But I also know how great the rewards will be. I know how burdensome canvassing can be, how time-consuming following up on all the issues, reading yet another article, watching yet another interview or debate, can be. But because you are becoming more informed and involved, you realize all the more how high the stakes are and how much greater and rarer the opportunity before us is. And you are exceptionally effective in listening to your neighbors, learning their concerns, responding to them, and helping them become more informed. And the more informed they are about the issues and the candidates, the more they realize that Barack Obama is the one we need for the fierce urgency of now.

Some days it might feel like you are fighting an uphill battle. But never lose faith in the importance of what you are doing and your ability to do it. You are the key to the success of this campaign. And your hard work will pay off. It sure did in my precinct, where we nearly doubled the record for caucus attendance and we more than doubled the closest competition in votes. Obama received 5 of our precinct’s 9 delegates, again more than double the competition (see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/msmaeven/CC3m for my account of my caucus). While Barack himself as well as the Obama campaign in general deserve most of the credit, my work was critical to that success. Just as your work is critical to the success Barack will have in Nevada on January 19.

Barack has so many inspirational words to draw upon, but I will leave you with these: “One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world, your voice can change America.”

Your voice will change the world. And know that there are millions more who stand with you, when you stand with Barack on January 19.

Thank you for being the change we need to see in the world.

An open letter to Americans

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:07:13 EST

Below is my canvassing letter. Obama supporters are free to use any part of it that they feel might be helpful in raising awareness about Barack Obama, the great good he has done, and the great good he will do for our country. Also, each letter should be "personalized" for each state, whether it's caucusing or a primary, etc; this is just a generic, all-American version.

My fellow Americans,

Normally, I would be one of the last people to write letters to total strangers, reaching out to them about one of the most sensitive and divisive issues of our day, politics. But I believe so deeply in the candidacy of Barack Obama and in the pivotal position Democratic voters across the country will play in it, that here I am! I don’t know how well you know Barack Obama, but I wanted to share with you some of my own reasons for supporting Barack and for serving as his precinct captain in Iowa.

    I first met Barack in a colleague’s living room in the fall of 2003, when he was running for U.S. Senator. I had met other politicians before and heard more speeches than I care to recount, but that night was different. It might sound somewhat trite, but Barack was truly inspirational. He spoke with an authenticity and integrity that few people possess, least of all our politicians. His wisdom was simple without being simplistic, and he offered a concrete course of action to translate high ideals into a better reality. He spoke of the profound connections between members of a community, how each one suffers when another cannot get adequate education or health care, how all are diminished when any endure injustice. He could point to a long list of his accomplishments putting his ideals into action as a state senator, a civil rights attorney and a community organizer, but he was the first to recognize that those accomplishments were nowhere near enough. Critical decisions were being made in Washington that needed to be rectified, decisions like choosing to bring our country to war.
    The previous October (and almost six months before the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq began), Barack gave a comprehensive condemnation of the Bush administration’s saber-rattling against Iraq. While he recognized that war is sometimes a necessary evil out of which great goods can come, and that “the world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without [Saddam Hussein],” he laid out a case against the war that is all the more compelling for its clarity and foresight. He decried it as “A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” It distracted us from our mission in Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda. He argued that this invasion would “fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.” Over five years later, we see all too clearly how right he has been.
    My support for Barack Obama does not depend on this wise judgment, however. My numerous reasons include: the Coburn-Obama Federal Funding and Transparency Act, which enables us to hold our government accountable in tax spending through a searchable website at usaspending.gov; the Lugar-Obama bill to combat proliferation of nuclear weapons; his impressive campaign finance reform legislation in Illinois and in the US Senate; his reform of Illinois capital-punishment cases, bringing together diverse groups like law enforcement and the ACLU; the over 800 bills he sponsored in the Illinois Senate to advance health care, including guaranteed coverage for children, to reduce and combat poverty, to reform the criminal system, to energize the economy, to promote education, to combat discrimination, to drastically reduce the influence of lobbyists in government, and to protect the environment (an excellent chart outlining his legislative record in Illinois is available at http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/29/us/politics/20070730_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html), among other things—to name just a few reasons from his legislative record!
    Barack Obama has a unique set of skills and experiences which make him an exceptional candidate for what Martin Luther King Jr called “the fierce urgency of now.” The above paragraph demonstrates his outstanding legislative experience in his decade-plus of elected office. But other elements of his biography are even more impressive. He has spent his entire adult life commited to public service. After college, he became a community organizer in inner-city Chicago. A president should have a strong sense of the situations facing our inner-city communities, and to have a proven track record in effectively addressing their needs; perhaps if more of our politicians did, the inner-cities wouldn’t be in the dire straits they are. His experience on the streets of Chicago led him to law school and to becoming a civil rights attorney; how greatly our country can benefit from such skills and experience, especially as the current administration has threatened so many of our basic civil liberties.   He’s a constitutional law professor; after the last seven years, it’s painfully apparent how desperately we need someone who understands the constitution and is commited to protecting it, rather than manipulating or disregarding it. His experience as a state senator gives him great insight into the implications of federal policies on a state level, another invaluable asset to help government work effectively for the greater good. And that he has family and friends from so many different places and positions in America and abroad gives him a unique perspective on what it means to be an American and on the multifaceted ramifications of our military, social, economic, and legal policies, at home and abroad.
    Throughout his career, he has been a unifying force, someone who builds coalitions across the spectrum. He truly listens to others who hold differing viewpoints. He is not committed to a narrow ideology, but strives to find solutions that will benefit the greatest number of Americans. In Iowa and New Hampshire, he cultivated a broad base of support that included not just Democrats, but Independents and Republicans. Our country has been paralyzed for far too long by divisive partisanship in which other Americans are seen as enemies upon whom we should “turn up the heat.” As Barack has said, “There’s no shortage of anger and bluster and bitter partisanship out there. We don’t need more heat. We need more light. I’ve learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still reaching out to those who might not always agree with you.”
    Unfortunately, other candidates have continued to engage in the politics of distortion and division. You may have heard some serious misrepresentations of Barack’s legislative record. The attached sheet refutes some of them (canvassers: print out compilations from fact check; see http://factcheck.barackobama.com/ ). Sadly, these intentional distortions and even outright lies have come from people who know better. Significant differences do exist between Barack and other candidates; for example, Barack will work to provide affordable and accessible health care to all Americans, but aims to do so without mandates, which do little to ensure affordability and quality. The American people should have an open and honest discussion about these differences, so we can make up our own minds as to what we think is best for our county and who we think is the best leader to get it done.
    Perhaps my most compelling reason for supporting Barack Obama is that his campaign is not just about him; it’s primarily about the American people. His approach to government is to empower citizens to take our country back from the lobbyists, from the special interests, from politics as usual. He strives to enable us to become more fully engaged with our government and in decision-making throughout our society; see his call to serve as one excellent example (http://www.barackobama.com/issues/service/ ). In his words, “in the face of impossible odds people who love their country can change it. . . . I am asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours” You can make a difference. You can be the change you wish to see in the world. It starts by standing up for Barack at your caucus or primary.

What was it like in IL?

IA for Obama ☮ — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:30:30 EST

Tonight Marti in Oregon wrote, "I was wondering if anyone on here personally exerienced Senator Obama's campaigns in Illinois...the state one, and the Washington senate one.

Do you remember anything special about it? Maybe some of those memories would remind us that this guy knows what he is doing."

Here is my reply:

I had the good fortune to do so.

My canvassing letter talks a bit about it:

"I first met Barack in a colleague’s living room in the fall of 2003, when he was running for U.S. Senator. I had met other politicians before and heard more speeches than I care to recount, but that night was different. It might sound somewhat trite, but Barack was truly inspirational. He spoke with an authenticity and integrity that few people possess, least of all our politicians. His wisdom was simple without being simplistic, and he offered a concrete course of action to translate high ideals into a better reality. He spoke of the profound connections between members of a community, how each one suffers when another cannot get adequate education or health care, how all are diminished when any endure injustice. He could point to a long list of his accomplishments putting his ideals into action as a state senator, a civil rights attorney and a community organizer, but he was the first to recognize that those accomplishments were nowhere near enough. Critical decisions were being made in Washington that needed to be rectified, decisions like choosing to bring our country to war. "

When I heard him speak that night, within five minutes my inner voice shouted out: I WANT HIM TO BE MY PRESIDENT! I am not usually so quickly impressed, but I was not just impressed, I was inspired. And I had never had that thought about anyone before, though I have voted in every presidential election I could and thought several of the candidates were good, if not great.

My husband was already quite familiar with Barack's work, as he works in the legal field as well, and knew him to be the outstanding leader he is. He volunteered for the campaign and helped him win his astounding victory in the primary, and then of course in the general (though that wasn't really balanced, given that Alan Keyes is Alan Keyes and doesn't even live in IL).

There are several similarities between Barack's primary run and this campaign. It too was a multi-candidate field, with a party favorite (though Dan played nicely, unlike this party favorite) and an obscenely wealthy businessman. Audacity of Hope chronicles this campaign quite well.

From the start, Barack's victory seemed improbable to cynics, but those who felt his inspiration knew better. People repeatedly said he should go negative, but he refused. He was criticized for not being black enough. He was criticized for being too black. People tried to use his "present" votes on matters concerning a woman's right to choose against him. He has seen this play before.

You want to know how it ended? He took over 50% of the vote in that multi-candidate field; he more than doubled his nearest competition. And in the general, he took over 70% (although frankly I've never understood how AK got as many votes as he did).

Barack is a masterful politician. Funny that that can be a good thing too. His sense of timing is impeccable. His ability to connect with voters is amazing. His speeches are sublime. His only weak point has been debates, simply because he is so thoughtful and genuinely sees the complexities, which don't always lend themselves to simplistic sound-bites. But as the campaign progressed, he became more and more effective.

I lived in IL the whole time he was a state senator, but I wasn't aware of any of his campaigns. Up until I was invited to the small gathering in 2003, I don't know that I'd ever heard of him (though, as I said, my husband had). But I knew of the good he'd done, even if I didn't know his name. I knew of his capital reform work, I knew of his work passing health care for children, I knew of Project Vote! and the good it had done, etc. I may even have marched with him against the war (don't know if he was there at marches and rallies I participated in or not). And that is the mark of an extraordinary leader: someone you know by the good he does, even when you do not know his name.

I have every confidence that Barack is going all the way. It's just a matter of helping as many voters as possible get to know him. He might not win by the same margin as he did in IL, but then again he might--he sure did in my caucus!

Precinct 74 caucus

IA for Obama ☮ — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:33:38 EST

I cannot begin to describe how awesome it was. But I will try. Starting at the beginning.

The chair said the space would be open at 4:30 and it was first come first serve. Wanting to stake a good claim, we aimed to get there when it opened (most other places opened at 5), but, with two kids in tow, the earliest we could manage was 4:45. The Hillary camp was already there in full force, with Edwards a close second. Dodd also had signs up, though no people. Most of the people were very friendly and helpful, even offering help putting up the signs if we needed it (we didn’t). I have to admit it was a little daunting, being greeted by all that support from the opposition. But we quickly set about making our presence felt just as forcefully, decorating the room and the outside just as abundantly. Note to future caucus-site decorators: remember to get ample yard signs! We had to pilfer them from nearby supporters.

After getting everything set up, I started calling through my supporters. Only got through the Bs; most people were way fired up already, but a few were getting kinda annoyed with all the calls, so I figured I could better expend my energies elsewhere.

I met so many wonderful people that night. One of my favorites was a man in from New York to support Chris Dodd. The Richardson volunteer was also great. But the best were my neighbors, all 532 of them! A new record! And nearly half with Barack Obama as their first choice!

When it came time to count, I was a bit at a loss. How were we going to count this gynormous mass of hope, in 30 minutes or less? But one of our supporters had a great idea. All the supporters went out into the hallway, then walked in counting our their number, being verified by two other counters. It was very powerful. It was one person one vote even though it was a caucus, each one standing up for Barack. And at the first count we had 229! HRC was the only other viable candidate, with 98 (needed 80 to be viable). JE had 72, which surprised me; I expected him to be viable. Biden and Richardson were in the 40s and 50s (can’t remember exactly); Dodd and Kucinich each had 14, which got a big cheer from the Kucinich folks.

Realignment was crazy. Sent my persuaders out to the various camps to do their work. A few Obama folks did defect to try to make Biden viable, though. Most of the Richardson and Dodd people did too, though some went to make JE viable. And the final count: Biden 72 (not viable), JE 97, HRC 108, BHO 241!

Things got tense for a few minutes. The Biden precinct captain was still trying to cut deals trying to make his group viable, but that of course is against the rules (time had elapsed for realignment). I understand his desire, because Biden was so close to viable, but he should have been trying to make those deals 10 minutes earlier. As it initially came down, JE got 1.67 delegates, HRC 1.82, and BHO 4.11. So JE and HRC had theirs rounded up to 2 each, and BHO got 4. We have 9 delegates so that left one unassigned. Now, if I had been using this handy dandy program that the campaign gave me, I could have avoided a couple of angst-filled moments, but my computer was at the back of the room, so I was relying on the chair up front. The HRC guy started clamoring for another round of realignment. I was adamantly opposed. It was already 8:20. We had elderly people, people with kids, school-age babysitters, et al. More importantly, it was against the rules. You only have one realignment, for a set amount of time. Then the caucus chair read the rules, that the one with the highest number under .5 got the remaining delegate. The HRC camp in particular was prepared to fight this tooth and nail, but I looked at the numbers and said, “yeah! Because you guys already got your numbers rounded up!” (1.67 became 2, 1.82 became 2, but 4.11 had been rounded down to 4) The HRC guy looked and nodded and said, “yeah, she’s right. Obama gets it.” And that was one of the best moments for me. The HRC guy fought hard, and his admission spoke volumes for me. Tigger didn’t have nothin on me at that moment. I bounced a mile high with joy, at least 10 times.

Of course, if I had just plugged the numbers into that nifty little program I would have had the answer in a split-second. But the way it turned out was good too!

Afterwards, I agreed to stick around to help out a young woman who had a plank to propose. She had helped us by counting those who couldn’t move and making sure they were comfortable and happy, so I was happy to help her out. First I had to clean up and get interviewed by BBC radio (I’m a selective media whore, I guess!), and bring stuff out to my car, all the while the caucus is continuing its business (only about 30 people remained). When I came back they were discussing nominations for some Democratic Party position and all of sudden the chair pointed at me and said, what about Maeve? I tried to beg off, saying I wasn’t political, which they scoffed at, saying that I had just delivered the largest political victory our caucus had ever seen; I said that was Obama, not me, but they weren’t having it. I tried coming up with a million different reasons, without coming out and shouting I AM NOT A DEMOCRAT! I AM A PROUD INDEPENDENT! I registered as a Dem only to caucus for Barack! I thought that might be a little rude, and by this time they were really giving me the hard sell, so I thought, well, if Barack can be a Democrat, I can be a Democrat; if Dennis Kucinich can be a Democrat, I can be a Democrat. So I’ve signed up to be a Democrat for the next 2 years. I’m not sure exactly in what capacity, but maybe I can help get rid of some of the aspects I have found so annoying in the Dem Party (tI’m sure not saying the GOP is any better!).

I stayed just long enough to support the woman’s plank and a few others, then I hightailed it outta there. I had a victory party to get to!

I arrived outside the hall just as City of Blinding Lights was playing, so I ran as fast as I could and got there just as Barack took the stage. The speech just may have been his best yet, and we are about to see the fulfillment of its promise. My whole body got goose bumps; my smile nearly split my skull, and I’m not really sure my feet touched the ground in the hall. I was struck how each speech of his still contains an element of what he said when I first heard him in 2003. Not because he can’t think of new material, but because he is so consistent. His values have remained unchanged, and having watched his career since 2003 and studied his career before that, I know he will honor his words with action. I shared the speech with my staffer and other volunteers, then came home for more celebrating with neighbors.

All in all, an astounding, amazing journey. I never believed this was improbable; I had faith in my neighbors and the other good people of Iowa who have taken the time to get to know all the candidates, but most of all I have faith in Barack. And you will see this happen again and again and again. I am overjoyed also that my precinct’s results matched that of the IL primary in March of 2004: he more than doubled his nearest competitor in both votes and delegates; he took over 50% of the delegates.

I’m glad I got to experience a caucus, but I think the system has some serious flaws. I don’t like that you can only participate if you are able to attend during a narrow time frame. I saw so many heroes in my precinct last night. Elderly people for whom the slightest movement was excruciating. Yet they came, in the cold, over icy paths, to a room so packed we must have been in violation of fire codes, getting jostled and moved about, for over 2 hours. That’s how seriously they take their vote, and why it should be a source of shame for anyone who refuses to participate. I don’t like that people who hold certain jobs are not supposed to participate (like the press, judges, et al); I don’t like that people who provide services our city needs can’t participate (like police officers, firefighters, et al who are working that shift). I think it’s too big of a deal to automatically exclude such a significant number of the population. Maybe I’ll bring that up at whatever meeting I agreed to be a part of last night!

Thanks again to all of you for helping us win Iowa and for reminding us of the strength of this movement. And we ain’t seen nothin yet!

I’ve put up a bunch of photos up of the last month or so in chronological order, ending with a few shots of the caucus. Also, Meri, somebody loved your haiku so much they made off with them! And the treats were a huge hit. Certainly won over the children of Edwards supporters (their stuff wasn’t as good, I guess). So if you want to check out the photos, go to http://picasaweb.google.com/Maeve47/HopeAndHappinessOnTheCampaignTrail2008

Some of the shots are grainy and certainly not professional quality. They include shots from our home, from the Dodd event, from the Urbandale event 12/22, DM 12/27, and a caucus eve party with caucus tree, before ending with the caucus itself. I call it Hope and Happiness on the Campaign Trail 2008.

New Hampshire, take it away! Then NV, SC, etc and so forth! Let’s go change the world!

Will Bake for Change

IA for Obama ☮ — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 10:30:32 EST

I just had an idea of another way out-of-Iowans can help us Jan 3. Skimming through the blog as quickly as I could after a night that was supposed to be spent at the India.Arie rock for change concert but was much fun nonetheless I came across a reference to Aunt Becky's drinks and cookies. And I wanted some. And I thought, well, why don't I ask her for a recipe. In fact, why don't I ask you all for your favorite recipes. See, one of the nice things about a caucus is you get to eat while you're doing it. So we're planning on bringing all sorts of tasty treats that make people want to come into your corner and stay there all night. Like I have an excellent brownie recipe that would be perfect. But I bet the collective resources of the blog could come up with some truly amazing delectable delights. Just make it somewhat easy--we've got lots of other things to bake here in IA!

Anyway, if you think it's a good idea and would like to send us precinct captains a recipe, I would do my best to share with others!