Hello:My name is Allie Feldman, and I'm helping Ben Baruch with Organizing for America here in New York. We just wanted to make sure everyone sees the email and video below discussing OFA's next nationwide initiative -- the Pledge Project. Please feel free to contact me or Ben if you have any questions or concerns.Stay tuned for more updates coming by the end of the week!Thanks,Allie--Allie FeldmanVolunteer Organizing for America | New Yorkallie.feldman@gmail.com 908-370-2689
Ben BaruchVolunteer LiaisonOrganizing for America | New York
bennett.baruch@obamaalumni.com
Just over a week ago, President Obama submitted his first budget and made it clear he was ready for the fight to come.The President isn't alone. We're ready for that fight too -- it's what you built this movement for.Watch a video I recorded announcing our new initiative, the Organizing for America Pledge Project:Americans are ready for the bold new direction this plan offers. It's what they voted for in November, and it's needed now more than ever as we continue to face an unprecedented economic crisis.But the special interests and old ways of Washington won't go away easily. In fact, they'll only fight back harder.It's up to you to organize support for President Obama's plan throughout the country. It's the only way we'll get the change this country needs.Take the next step now in our fight to bring change:http://my.barackobama.com/pledgeprojectThanks,MitchMitch StewartDirectorOrganizing for America
Come celebrate at a party to thank the hundreds of volunteers in the Western NY region for all your hard work, which ensured President-elect Obama's historic victory on November 4th.
This party is free and open to all the volunteers who worked on the Obama campaign. There will be food and drink, as well as music and other goodies.
We will also be discussing plans for how we move forward with the work of realizing the CHANGE we all fought so hard for the chance to achieve. As our President-elect has told us many times, he can't do this alone. True change will only come through the collective efforts of millions of individuals working within their own communities to fundamentally change the way things are done.
Come and learn more about how you can continue the fight, and to celebrate our success in bringing victory on November 4th.
Date: Friday, December 5thTime: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Location: Lobby of the Ellicott Square Building295 Main StreetBuffalo, NY 14203
Sign-up at: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gsxd9x
Today is the eve of what will be for many of us one of the greatest moments of our lives. We have made a positive change in our lives which holds the great promise for the betterment of all. Our motivations for this change are as varried as we are - yet our ultimate goal has been the same - to make the world a better place for all of humanity us to live in.
We have done what we did for reasions both selfish and selfless, and given our support in both time, money, sweat, and even blood - but it will have been worth it all if just one child lives because he now recieves health care instead of none - or one less grandmother freezes to death in the winter because she can afford to heat her house, recieve needed medication and eat at the same time.
Small victories indeed, but small victories like these are what life is all about, fulfilling these hopes and dreams are the winning of the small battles in the war on ignorance and poverty and intollerance. They are what is importaint, not the man or the movement - but the results of electing the man with the movement.
We will prevail, our victory over ignorance and fear is all but assured, but this victory we brought about isn't for his glory but ours - this will be a victory for humanity as a whole, and not a vain glory for a few or the one.
Today is Monday, today we rejoin the battle with renewed vigor and determination, we will do everything we can to combat the forces of ignorance and hypocracy - and tomorrow we will vote and then we will judge the results of our efforts.
As for Wednesday? Wednesday we will no doubt be tired and "hung over", but the hardest part of the "war" we have been waging will upon us. We must "win the peace" with our former adversaries, we must console them and re-educate them so when January 20th 2009 arives, they too will be cheering for Obama/Biden as loudly as we do.
We have a much larger a harder struggle ahead of us in the weeks and months to come - but for now you may be proud of what we have done - take a breif moment to savor what your efforts have brought to fruit.
This is it!
We're coming down to the final stretch and Barack Obama needs your help now, more than ever before!
Please bring your cell phone, a charger and a few fun friends who care about change and join with thousands of your neighbors in the largest ever-attempted phone bank effort in New York state history. The Obama campaign is hosting several of these "mega call centers" all over New York, so invite your friends and family to make calls to voters in key battleground states and change America for years to come.
Visit http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/nylastcall to find a location near you.
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”
The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
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Well, I've just finished tallying up all the contributions and pledges from our "We Are The Change" fundraiser to support Buffalo's local efforts to help ensure Barack is our next president, and we had a very good night!
We received the following:$870 in donations for merchandise$100 in In-Kind gift cards$1,255 in pledges towards future expenses$1,775 in contributions towards our future Obama Store purchases--------------------------------------------------------------------------For a Grand Total benefit to our local efforts of $4,000!
In addition, we took in $525 in donations directly to the national campaign, which we will be forwarding on to Chicago.
Thank you so much to everyone who attended & contributed. Thank you to all the volunteers who helped make the event run so smoothly! I could not have done it without all of you. Thank you to the Erie Country Democratic Committee for helping out with the food and beverage. Thank you to Tom McCarr for providing the entertainment.
Everyone's efforts really paid off and I hope everyone had a good time!
To those of you who were unable to attend the event, but would still like to make a contribution, or for those who would like to contribute additional in the future, please contact me at FaiB65@aim.com to make your pledge. We have a hard battle ahead of us, and all that you do really helps!
YES WE CAN!
At the Grand Opening of the Obama campaign office in Buffalo NY, a volunteer planted the seed for a biker run. (Motorcycle, not bicycle) It's still in the making, and more announcements of the plan will come as we make them, but you should start to announce to friends with Bikes that something is brewin' and they need to put their ear to the ground.
The run will likely be Buffalo to Pittsburgh and back, so anybody on the way can get in on the run. Their is some plan to help the PA campaign with their efforts. Might be an overnight stay in PA. Everything is still tentative. Got good ideas, or experience in making a bikers run successful? Let's hear them.
You might be a LIVID (Low Information Voter In Denial) if:
You might be a LIVID if:
You believe McCain is a Maverick because he describes himself as such.
You think that the people who put us in a financial meltdown can fix the problem.
You still believe that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 (Gov. Palin still uses that tired lie.)
You believe McCain and the Republicans support our troops. Voting no on giving the military more funds to improve armor for our soldiers being mangled by IEDs is not supporting the troops. Voting no on increased funds to improve the VA hospitals is not supporting our troops. Voting no on giving the soldiers time between deployments to keep their sanity and families afloat is not supporting the troops. Talking against a new GI Bill and parroting Bush's words and then failing to vote on the new GI Bill is not supporting the troops. Lip service is not support!
You believe the Republicans are pro-life. They are NOT, I repeat, NOT pro-life. They are anti-abortion (or at least say they are), but they don't care a whit about taking lives. Ask the 100,00 or so Iraqis who were killed because they lived in Iraq - oh wait. You can't, they're dead. Their crime? They lived in the country the Bush/Cheney regime decided to invade.
You believe we can win the Iraq "war". Newsflash - you can't win an occupation! We are not at war with Iraq, our troops defeated the Iraqi regime years ago. We are fighting the people who want their country back from the occupying force - sad to say, that is what we have become under bush/cheney, occupiers - like the old Soviet Union.
You still believe we have a free press. Never mind that most of the media is owned by corporations and refuse to give Americans the truth. We are spoonfed outright propaganda by FOX, Limbaugh, the right wing radio talk show hosts and the other tools of the corporate rich whose aim is to keep the American people ignorant and fearful. Limbaugh gets paid $39,000,000 a year to spread hate, lies and fear and yet wants you to believe he speaks for the typical American. Do you really think he's speaking the truth to the little people? The biased lies we are fed everyday are a continuing effort to make sure the working class remain mushrooms - in the dark and covered with manure.
You believe McCain will do anything to stop jobs from leaving America. He lobbied for Airbus of Germany to make military planes, instead of American companies. Yes airbus got the contracts. He changed legislation to allow foreign countries to ship cargo into the states. Hey Ohio, remember DHL? Yeah, you're the ones immediately hurt by that one. McCain is a strong supporter of NAFTA, and any other "trade" agreement that makes it cheaper for corporations to take our jobs to third world countries so they can make more profit and oh, by the way, screw the working man. And for all of that, those of you who still have jobs and pay taxes, the corporations get your tax money to take your jobs off American soil.
You believe there is any similarity between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. They're both women and married with children. End of similarity. Palin would set women's rights back fifty years and seal the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that Hillary caused.
You call yourself a good Christian and yet, cheer when those with few prospects are treated like scum and ridiculed. What did Jesus say about how you treat the least of us?
A good Christian would not embrace the Republican party's blatant disregard for the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. The hypocrisy of the "values" party is enough to make most thinking people violently ill.
Thou shalt not put false gods before Me. Money means more to the powerful than God does and it shows in the way they conduct their business.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. The Constitution is just a G..D..... piece of paper. bush
Thou shalt not commit adultery - I don't guess that means it's ok to cheat on the ex-beauty queen wife who got in an accident, got paralyzed and then - horrors! put on weight! But, hey, that was a long time ago, right? And the new wife was rich, too, so it's all good.
Thou shalt not kill. Well, except when we want their oil, or something. Self defense is one thing, invading a country for oil is something else altogether.
Thou shalt not lie. That doesn't mean it's ok to lie if you're losing an argument, or a political race.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Somebody want to rein in the liars on talk radio and the political ads? We used to have laws - slander, libel...now anything goes.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife and or goods. This is especially dangerous when those in charge of a country decide they want the natural resources of another country - see Iraq "War".
Thou shalt not steal. Again, if they want it they're going to take it. Eminent domain for commercial projects anyone? Goes with the false god above - money is all!
You still believe the Republicans are the moral party, especially after reading the above.
You think McCain/Palin will help women in any way. McCain voted against the equal pay for equal work bill and basically said that women don't need equal pay. It'd be bad for business - all those law suits. Women just need to get more education and training. OMG!!
I am not a LIVID. I AM livid because I pay attention and dig into stories to try and find the truth. I AM livid because most people don't have the time or the inclination to find out the truth. I AM livid that the press has been compromised and no longer serves the American people. And finally I AM livid that even when the LIVID citizen is shown the lies and deceptions they've been fed, they DO NOTHING and simply accept the deterioration of their lives and the future of this country. Low Information Voters In Denial, please wake up and help save America!
Please sign up here to take a short trip that makes a big difference.
Our leaders from Buffalo are so important to Barack Obama winning Ohio. I'm looking to connect with you and talk about partnering with volunteers in Cleveland, Akron, Dayton or Northeast Ohio. We need you to come join our field team--from now until election day, for a few weeks or even a long weekend.
Thanks so much. Please feel free to email me, rgoldensohn@ohioforchange.com.
A fun side effect is that it draws fire from both people that disagree with you and people that like to “bust your onions.” The onion-busters are quick to move on when they see they can’t get you mad. They are a waste of time to argue with anyway because they are probably on your side but they like to start trouble. The other ones are worth your time. They will pull out every thing in their head trying to win an argument against you, and all you have to do is take your time and mindfully answer all their fears with facts.
Last night I had a doosey! Funny that he got put on me by an onion-buster. This fellow was a Conservative, pious Republican, who has qualms about Democrats voting the party line. His first statement to me was, “what is wrong with voting against a person because of his color? I wouldn’t do it, but I know a lot of people that would.” I smiled and looked at the ground for a second or two and said, “I don’t have anything against that, voting is a personal decision.” I paused momentarily as I watched some of the red leave his face then went on to say, “but I believe that bigotry is morally reprehensible, and it disgusts me personally.” Wow that felt good! Out of the corners of my eyes I could see stealthy eavesdroppers gathering around trying to get close enough to hear the debate but staying far enough away to not get involved. I thought I should speak louder for the rest of the conversation. I then went on to say that I had never paid attention to politics before this year, and that I literally went to Obama’s site to find reasons to make fun of him, but couldn’t and was so impressed by his policies that I joined his team.
He brought “Hussein” into a sentence and tried to make a Muslim connection and I headed back to it later. I said, “you know people named Jeff right?, but you don’t treat them any different because Jeffery Dahlmer was a mass murderer do you? So why do you want to bag on a guy with a funny name?” He thought for a moment then tried his Muslim connection argument. I said, “I’m a Catholic, but you wouldn’t try to connect me to the Ku Klux Klan would you? So why would you try to connect his fathers religion which was the normal religion of that area to him, and to terrorists?” I had him a bit speechless there and I could see his face wanting to change the argument to something he could win.
The next thing he went on to say was, “none of that matters to me anyway, I only vote on one issue, right to life.” Again I allowed him to speak his mind fully. Although it was dark outside I could see that his red face color was coming down to an ordinary complexion white skin. I don’t think he felt too comfortable after he aired his view because he took a new position near me where his back was now up against a giant hedge. He went on to call the appointing of specific Supreme Court Judges that enact his extreme views as the greatest accomplishment of the Republican Party. I told him that I don’t think it’s so easy to define laws because these issues about life are no simple standardizeable matter. Then he started to talk really crazy about nuclear bombs going off killing everybody in some specific city in our state. I said, “now how can you be pro life and talk like that?!” He became immediately embarrassed and began to swerve it back away from crazy passion to his crazy belief that the end times are near. (if I die and go to heaven, I’m going to kick the shit out of the guy that wrote Revelations) As a changeup I pulled one from the Bible; I don’t know the chapter and verse, but I know I read it in the Bible. I said to him, “scriptures have a story that says if you are lost and starving and you come upon a bird and her eggs, to take the eggs and leave the bird alone. I think the reason that is in the Bible is because God can work with a mother to make new eggs, but God can’t work with the eggs without the mother.” Then I went to women’s health issues and how my grandmother nearly died from giving birth to her last daughter that was an obvious health risk because of how the pregnancy developed low in the womb. If God is all powerful, then the soul of my Aunt would have been put in the next conception. I told him that I think both sides are wrong and it is never a simple matter and writing laws that force everybody to live under one groups opinion is not right or doable.
He talked about how Hitler could have possibly fooled all those people into following him, and I said I used to be a Republican and after meeting so many Democrats I believe these people are the least likely to have that happen, but Republicans grab slogans, don’t investigate and fall in line with their leaders. We left that topic quickly.
I began to steer the conversation to economics, and after things calmed down, he thanked me for taking the time to talk to him. I wouldn’t be so bold to think I have converted him to our side, but I may have at least put out the “angry mob torch” he was carrying. He may be more open minded. He may doubt some of the political things that he accepted as a matter of faith. All in all I believe it was time well spent.
Go and get one of these for yourself. I’ll be glad to read your post.
The Republican Party just purchased Sarah Palin a new jet for her traveling to Washington where she will be headquartered if John McCain wins the November Presidential election.However the Republican Party purchased this jet from a foreign country thereby not promoting American made jets, and helping the economy in a time of a recession.
Is this the Republican idea of job creation and fixing the economy?
http://politicolnews.blogspot.com/2008/09/palins-new-republican-jet-snubs.html
I was born and raised as a Republican, though I was not registered to vote till after Reagan got in office, and after my contract in the Marines was completed. I listened to talk radio and Rush Limbaugh from about 1987 to about 1997. So what changed and made me a Democrat and nearly a Delegate at this year’s convention?
Towards the end of the 1980's my wife and I had a produce store, a hobby farm and 2 full time jobs. As an adult with so many responsibilities I was learning fast, and I was developing great reasoning skills. I started to find things wrong in what was being said on talk radio. I found that if you want to get on a talk radio show, you have to fit one of two requirements; agree with them with out seeming psychotic, or disagree with them in a lame way that makes their opposition look bad. They will not air a solid argument against themselves because truth has nothing to do with their message. I found that level of deceit deplorable, but never detected it before I grew an open mind and listened to both sides. I was capable of good thinking, but was never in a position to try it.
In the late 1990's I went back to school and studied many things but loaded heavily in Economics coursework. During the first campaign of Lil' Bush, I was phoned by a GOTV Republican party volunteer. I said I wasn't voting for them because it was too much Texas Oil power in one area and that if they won something would happen that would raise the prices of fuel such that Texan's would be able to profit again on their local oil production. I may be a little off, but it was kind of prophetic if not just openly cynical. That volunteer treated me so badly on the phone that I wondered what I was doing in the same party.
I felt like the Democrats had little to offer me at that time. This is because of the persistence of propaganda in the human mind. Old thoughts in the human mind that were learned well remain intact until overwhelming new evidence proves them wrong. Thus I had only heard all of what's wrong with Democrats. That is not an easy hurdle for an ordinary person to get over, and mental assaults don't work; if you meet a person like I was, try calm discussion with the proper rules of debate. If the discussion becomes heated, our brains get into defensive positions and loose the ability to think rationally.
I went to the Denver convention and found that everything I ever heard about Democrats was a lie. I watched the Republican convention and now I am embarrassed that I was ever associated with them; I know good Republicans, but those people are not in any position of power. I'd really like an opportunity to punch a lot of those jack-asses in the face that control the Republican Party.
As a mathematician of sorts, I advise you to whenever you get to discuss anything with potential opponents or undecided voters, get their definitions of what they say they are. As I said in the beginning, I was raised a Republican, but hearing Senator Wexler of Florida go on about fire breathing Liberals, I heard the definition of a Liberal for the first time and realized I have always thought like a Liberal, and I was only against them because I held a mistaken definition of Liberal in my head. Find out what the person you are talking to really wants to happen and you may find out they are on your side, but they don't know it yet.
Good luck to you all, and remember change a mind = change a vote, and that one changed vote = a gain of 2 votes at the booth. The worst you can hope for is an opponent looses their enthusiasm when you shed the light of truth and they stay home on voting day.
You keep hearing that Barack is not ready to lead. My question is, how do these naysayers define that?
Isn't a leader someone who mobilizes people to get things done?
Doesn't a leader get people to move beyond their comfort zone?
Aren't great leaders often described as able to inspire large groups of people?
Aren't the best leaders those willing to NOT be bought (big biz, oil) therefore compromising their values?
In what definition is leadership described as the person with the most experience? I can't say I remember experience being an important part of any description of great leaders.
It isn't about their technical abilities, but how they LEAD and inspire people to be a part of what they are trying to accomplish - to find the right people for the technical aspects of an endeavor (Biden anyone?) - to get differing people to work together to accomplish a common goal.
Now, who fits these points best - McCain or Obama? Hmmmm - tough one here. Seems like what the Republicans define as leadership as keeping all the little people home and oblivious and just letting the rich and powerful continue getting richer and more powerful. Not the kind of leaders I want. They're scared that they are up against a TRUE leader, all the little people are getting involved and making a BIG difference and they might actually have to answer to their constituents - oh no!
Please - I challenge you to sell me a definition of leader that puts McCain ahead of Obama.
Hello to all potential Obama Event attenders, I have been thinking about this idea of enhanced security for some time and talking about it on rare occasions. Now seems like a great time to SPAM the thoughts to lots of people. Professional agents like the Secret Service can prevent nearly any possibility of harm to those they protect. The media and the blog world has been talking about the one possibility that they can't stop; the "Lone Wolf." This type of threat is hard for a professional to detect because their thoughts and plans are likely to be completely personal, thus undetectable. The pro's can do amazing things with geometry and physics to detect any potential long range attack, or stealthy approach. Mapping communication links allows them to guess who is connected to organized threats, and track the movement of the known players of insurgency. I don't believe they can effectively play the "Where is Waldo" game by scanning our massive crowds to find a potential Lone Wolf who looks just like the rest of us. That's where we the normal people come in. Early in the primaries when we began to discuss this idea, I suggested attendees of events perform acts of confrontation and heroism should a perpetrator brandish a weapon. Recently I thought security against the potential Lone Wolf doesn't need to be so dramatic. Any potential Lone Wolf would be playing the part of a hunter and their camouflage would be pretending to be at the event like we are, but unlike us they would be in total focus on one goal just like a hunter. It would be a terrible problem for them if they were constantly distracted. Since all the attendees that show up for honorable reasons will be friends in spirit or otherwise, their should be nothing wrong with talking to everybody near you even though you never met before. Who could possibly be against a friendly & light conversation at an event? A Lone Wolf would be against light conversation; it would be totally distracting and ruin their hunt. So if you attend a event where the Pros are already on duty, you should be looking around for people that look disconnected, alone, or just out of place and engaging them with a smile and a friendly comment. The upside of this security through noise and connectivity is you have the potential to prevent a wrongdoing without even knowing it. The downside to this is you may meet somebody that you really don't agree with and isn't fun to talk to. Think of how happy the Pros would be to have between 20,000 and 75,000 motivated and unpaid volunteers helping with security. I think this would also inadvertently fit with the Obama plan for strengthening communities; talking to strangers improves a community (don't tell children I said that). If you think this is a good idea, feel free to send it to those you think should read it but haven't gotten it yet.
Sincerely,Michael Ruppaka:WNYmathGuy
