I am so happy to write my first blog post! I really appreciate the awesome Obama Biden leadership, the campaign team and this fabulous website! Congratulations and thank you so much! This is a wonderful way to share and connect!
By way of a little background, my heritage is Asian American from Hawaii. I graduated from Columbia University in New York, majored in economics. I love Washington D.C. I have been in D.C. since I came to complete my Masters and Ph.D. majoring in economics and international relations from GWU. My passion is achieving human potential and promoting community service and social entrepreneurship. I love making new contacts and developing new win-win-win relationships.
I look forward to meeting you at the free monthly networking community events that I help to organize as president of Allies Building Community Inc. (A.B.C.) so people of diverse backgrounds can regularly come together to network, bond, know and appreciate each other as fellow members of the human family! This is a good way to introduce friends and allies to each other to start conversations for possibilities. I look forward to meeting you at one of these meetings. The next one is on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009.
On the third Sundays of every month in 2009, from 12:30PM to 2:30PM, our Meetup Alliance for Networking comes together to explore opportunities for community service, to make new contacts, exchange ideas, develop new friendships and build community spirit! We have networking conversations over lunch (self-pay) at the Burma Restaurant, 740 6th St. NW 2nd Floor, Wash. DC 20001. This is about one block from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station (red, green, yellow lines). (We chose the Burma Restaurant because they have good food, are near the Chinatown Metro stop, and they give us the entire restaurant for our regular monthly event.)
A little more background: A.B.C. (Allies Building Community), its friends and associates, were instrumental in the creation The Friendship Archway bringing together Wash. D.C. and Beijing as "Sister Cities". Located next to the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station at 7th and H Streets NW, DC., it is the widest single span Chinese archway in the world. Unlike most monuments in Wash. DC that look to the past, the Friendship Archway looks to the future, a strong visual symbol for bridging the joint East-West, Chinese and American aspirations for peace, friendship and cooperation. China and America will be the two leading economic superpowers in the 21st century. The Friendship Archway commemorates their necessary interdependence.
The Friendship Archway physically symbolizes how to bridge over superficial differences by focusing on shared ideals and by working together to develop many effective solutions for generating more joy, friendship and prosperity for all. For more information, see http://www.archway2.org/ or http://www.meetup.com/networking/ or http://www.meetupalliance.com/conversationsNET/ My friends and I look forward to meet you on the 3rd Sundays of each month in Downtown Wash. DC! Please feel free to invite your friends and allies to meet us at the Burma Restaurant. Meetup.com/networking/ will send you monthly reminders if you sign up free of charge.
Our free monthly get-togethers are about appreciation, joy, fun, good humor, nonjudgment, nonattachment, unconditional Love and acceptance, sharing perspectives and developing community around your passion or cause. We believe all of us can make A Bigger Contribution by giving our positive energy to the world! You and I can change and be more powerful generators of Loving energy. You and I can give more gifts of hope, appreciation and friendship. We can all make a difference by choosing to focus on we want for ourselves, for others and for the community. Let's BE the change by becoming more aware of our subjective perceptions and attitudes. Let's help to spread happiness, locally and globally, on land and online!
My friends and I want more than just the absence of war or violence. We want to build an infrastructure of communications, mutual trust, good will and friendship among people of diverse backgrounds. Let's choose to reflect a change or improvement in our attitude, behavior and choices. We look forward to meeting you at our next Meetup Alliance community get-together in Wash. D.C.! Aloha!
Obama Election Night Rally. Flickr Album
What a great night! Got to the gates around 730. They let people in around 830. Three security checkpoints. We sat on a hill about 150 yards from the podium. From 830 to 1000 they had CNN on the big screen. When they declared Virginia and then the election for Barack, the crowd of 65K+ erupted. Reports of 125K-200K include the overflow area where people without tickets were placed.
At no time in recent history has it been more important for our leaders to speak to the American people than now.On Friday, Senator McCain and Senator Obama are going to face-off and give Americans the first real look at how the two of them plan to guide America in the next four years. With so much going on with financial and energy sectors, Americans need to see for themselves what our choices are and have a basis to make a decision in the voting booth.Now Senator McCain wants to back-out of the debate, saying his presence in Washington is required. (Personally Mr. McCain, I think you should have been at the wheel of this problem several months ago.) McCain wants to suspend his campaign! This, along with selecting the unknown Sarah Palin, really shakes my previous judgment of this man's character. Is this really the appropriate decision for America? Now is not the time to duck-out on this election. Now is time to face the American public and make the case why you are better suited. We're only five weeks from Election Day!If I were Senator Obama, I would show-up at the debate site regardless of McCain's antics and demonstrate his willingness to go on the record about his plan for America. Enough of this foolishness.
Haven't posted in quite a while, but seriously...what a crazy and wonderful time!!!
We have a long road ahead but things are looking good!!!
YES WE CAN!!!!!!!!!!!
Mrs. Clinton has vowed to "Push On" after the overwhelming endorsement of her failed campaign by the voters of West Virginia. Up until polls closed, everyone knew the West Virginia demographic were going to back Mrs. Clinton by a substantial margin. After the polls closed, and the reality matched the prediction, the main stream media stumbled over itself as it tried to reframe the news as some cataclysmic victory.
And then you have this woman pronounce her victory as a turning point (a description she used after winning in Ohio) and that she will carry on until the convention.
But who does this damage? Certainly not Senator Obama. Not John McCain either. The only people really damaged by this Quixotic behavior are Bill & Hillary. They are not only mortgaging their reputations, but their financial well-being. She is pumping Chelsea's inheritance into this campaign like dot.com CEO before the bust.
So the upside? The Clintons will have to focus on rebuilding their reputation and wealth and allow President Obama to govern in relative peace.
Even Dennis Kucinich knew when to get out while the getting was good.
The editorial in today's New York Times . . .
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.
If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”
By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience.
No matter what the high-priced political operatives (from both camps) may think, it is not a disadvantage that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share many of the same essential values and sensible policy prescriptions. It is their strength, and they are doing their best to make voters forget it. And if they think that only Democrats are paying attention to this spectacle, they’re wrong.
After seven years of George W. Bush’s failed with-us-or-against-us presidency, all American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate — right now and through the general campaign — about how each candidate will combat terrorism, protect civil liberties, address the housing crisis and end the war in Iraq.
It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.
...dodging sniper fire...j/k
Seriously buys with a sick baby...
BUT things are looking up...weathered the storm and now most numbers are better than ever!
On to the general!!!
I am getting scared listening to the rhetoric coming from the Clinton campaign. CNN is again reporting that the Clinton campaign will begin trying to sway committed Obama convention delegates to vote for her at the Denver Convention.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/26/clinton.delegates/index.html
"Every delegate with very few exceptions is free to make up his or her mind however they choose," Clinton told Time's Mark Halperin in an interview published Wednesday.
"We talk a lot about so-called pledged delegates, but every delegate is expected to exercise independent judgment," she said.
Clinton's remarks echoed her Monday comments to the editorial board of the Philadelphia Daily News.
"And also remember that pledged delegates in most states are not pledged," she said Monday. "You know there is no requirement that anybody vote for anybody. They're just like superdelegates."
This is wrong for several reasons -
1) What's the point of the Primary/Caucus process if you're going to ignore the will of your own political party who have already voiced their preference? Are you going to subvert the will of the electorate?
2) Is it blind ambition, stifling pride or just insane self-anointment that motivates her to believe that coming in second is winning?
3) Are notions of grace, bridge-building, humility and coalition so foreign to Mrs Clinton that they are not part of her game plan?
Dr. King once said, "If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream."
For weeks we have heard about the strength of the Clinton campaign in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, but it seems as the wind has been lost for our sails.
C'mon! We still lead in delegates, we won more states and we're about to add two more to our win column in the coming days.
Of course the media, in search of any new story in this endless election coverage, will pick-up on the Clinton campaign generated message of change in tide, new momentum, but we know that is simply spin. The Clintonistas must do that to salvage whatever they can in terms of publicity, relevancy and campaign donations.
It is still our victory to loose. Let's simply keep on stoking those coals because we are FIRED UP!
...now the Clinton Campaign is considering a legal challenge to the Texas Primary System.
UGGGHHH...they really don't care if they tear the party apart, do they!?!
Last night was again a clear picture of why Jews such as myself who support Barack must stand up and be vocal about why we support Barack and that any claims that Barack is against Israel or in league with anti-semites are absolutely false. In fact his statements last night about the Jewish role in Civil Rights and the importance of repairing the once strong bond between the African American and Jewish communities in this nation were the most compelling arguments I have EVER heard any candidate make for Jewish Americans to vote for them.
Barack denounces AND rejects Anti-Semitism and yet we all know people are out there who will STILL question.
For all of my fellow Jewish supporters of Barack Obama, let's all do our duty as Jews AND Americans and clearly stand against these smear tactics!
At this time when the smear-tactics have increased... and we've all seen/ heard the absurd claims from both anonymous email hate-mongers and far-right talk-show hosts - Barack is a muslim (look we have the photo to prove it), Barack isn't Patriotic...my God...he doesn't wear a flag pin!!!! Don't you know what his middle name is!?! Don't you know what his last name sounds like!?! He has ties to Farrakhan!?!!
We've seen and heard all of this...and we know every bit of it to me part of a lie-filled smear campaign.
As Jews, our speaking out against these lies carries an extra weight. Why? Because we are known to be amongst the most hyper-sensitive demographic to claims of ties to the Muslim religion...who amongst us has not been told to boycott this store or that due to "Muslim ties". Just recently, someone I know...well educated mind you...said to me, "If we elect Obama, what's to saw he doesn't turn on Israel? He went to a Muslim school after all!"
It is up to us to stand up to these lies and tell both fellow Jews and other voters:
"I am Jewish, and I support Barack Obama for President"
And the facts that we can present are strong:
1) Barack is and always has been a strong supporter of Israel
2) Barack is not nor has he ever been a practicing Muslim, he is a Christian and a churchgoer
3) Barack has no ties to Farrakhan...he did not seek that endorsement and has spoken out against Farrakhan's views
4) Barack is as patriotic as any candidate who has ever run for office and has clearly stated his belief that he owes everything he has to this nation.
Please, as Jews, let's all stand together and make it clear to all we talk to about politics that we support Barack, why we support Barack, and how clearly we know him to be a friend of the Jewish people.
...for the Clinton campaign.
This is now 100% absurd.
I've just crossed over into the: "Won't vote for her should she get the nomination" camp.
Sad, really...
