The first poem written below comes from Obama's high school in Hawai'i. The other two are from the Occidental Weekly, a publication of Occidental College in Los Angeles, which he attended before transferring to Columbia.OLD MANI saw an old forgotten manOn an old, forgotten roadstaggering and numbpulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,And walks a straight line along the crooked world.POP
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and brokenIn, sprinkled with ashes,Pop switches channels, takes anotherShot of Seagrams, neat, and asksWhat to do with me, a green young manWho fails to consider theFlim and flam of the world, sinceThings have been easy for me;I stare hard at his face, a stareThat deflects off his brow;I'm sure he's unaware of hisDark, watery eyes, thatGlance in different directions,And his slow, unwelcome twitches,Fail to pass.I listen, nod,Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,Beige T-shirt, yelling,Yelling in his ears, that hangWith heavy lobes, but he's still tellingHis joke, so I ask whyHe's so unhappy, to which he replies...But I don't care anymore, causeHe took too damn long, and fromUnder my seat, I pull out theMirror I've been saving; I'm laughing,Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his faceTo mine, as he grows small,A spot in my brain, somethingThat may be squeezed out, like aWatermelon seed betweenTwo fingers.Pop takes another shot, neat,Points out the same amberStain on his shorts that I've got on mine, andMakes me smell his smell, comingFrom me; he switches channels, recites an old poemHe wrote before his mother died,Stands, shouts, and asksFor a hug, as I shink, myArms barely reaching aroundHis thick, oily neck, and his broad back; 'causeI see my face, framed withinPop's black-framed glassesAnd know he's laughing too.
UNDERGROUND
Under water grottos, cavernsFilled with apesThat eat figs.Stepping on the figsThat the apesEat, they crunch.The apes howl, bareTheir fangs, dance,Tumble in theRushing water,Musty, wet peltsGlistening in the blue.
Click here for animated demonstration of SMS text voter registration.
Although the txtvoter site is not operational right new, you can still do the same thing using govote.org's tool.
Click on the button below and notice at the upper right-hand corner you can send emails or txt messages that will allow the same easy voter registration process.
Read my blog to see how political "handicappers" see the race.
These markets are based on "traders" who analyze everything: polls, trends, money, grassroots, etc.:
Obama Blog
Link
Online Advocacy Tools: SMS Text Messaging
Source: Link
Cell phone text messages are the final political tool we’ll consider. If you’ve spent the last year or two building up your thumb strength and agility while keeping up with which bars have good drink specials (as I write this, I’m looking at a friend’s message from last night that said, and I kid you not, “CcCome to bedinbl” — Jen had maybe been at a barstool a little too long…), you already know that text messages are an efficient way to get a brief burst of text in front of a lot of people at once.
Their limitation lies in the brief part — text messages are too short to include much persuasion, so they’re best used in triggering an action that you’ve preplanned. Particularly outside the U.S. (creative cell phone uses have lagged in the States), organizers have used mass text messages to alert people to the location for a rally or demonstration and give authorities little time to counter them.
You might use them for similar purposes or to spark an immediate cell call to a campaign target, for instance a congressmember or corporate CEO. You’ll need to have educated your activists beforehand through other means, probably via email, but the text message can generate an immediate action when you need it. The trick will be getting the right target phone number to the right activist, but that’s why you hired a top-notch vendor (hint).
Probably the most immediate use of text messaging in the U.S. will be for election-day Get-Out-The-Vote efforts, though you can also use them as a two-way tool by soliciting information from supporters through polls and such. But the really interesting uses of mobile technologies are probably still a couple of years away, and savvy campaigns are gathering supporters’ cell numbers now for applications that haven’t yet been dreamed up.
On a billboard alongside a busy San Francisco boulevard, above a restaurant called "My Tofu House," a message aimed at young Asian-American voters is helping break new ground in political activism.
"Register to vote," reads the advertisement, which looks more like an ad for a hip new Nokia phone than a public service message. "Text 'IVOTE' to 80837."
The campaign, jointly produced by a new nonprofit called Mobile Voter and the city's Chinese-American Voter Education Committee, is one of the first in the United States to take the surge of political activity that has emerged around e-mail and the Web and move it wholly to the cell phones that are appearing in more and more pockets.
Bottom line: None of these high-tech methods of political activism will replace good ol' fashioned doorbell ringing and mass media ads, but backers say these tools are soon likely to complement traditional means of reaching out to voters.
More stories about political activism
A handful of grassroots campaigns have already used cell-phone text messages to help organize protests and other events, such as actions staged during the national party conventions in 2004. But Washington-based politicos are watching this early San Francisco experiment for lessons that might be applied more directly to their future campaigns.
"The thing that's interesting about this, particularly to political types in D.C., is that this could actually affect the bottom line of an election, which is voter turnout," said Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.
The San Francisco project is the work of the leading edge--at least in America--of a new generation of activists hoping to turn the immediacy and near-ubiquity of cell phones into a powerful tool of political organization and mobilization.
Activists and technologists have long forecast that the Internet would become a campaigning tool. Those predictions matured only in the 2004 election cycle, when Democrat Howard Dean successfully used the Net to raise money and galvanize supporters.
The campaigns of John Kerry and George W. Bush each drew heavily on the Net afterward, for fundraising and to support volunteer activities.
However, mobile politics has moved faster in many countries overseas, where people more commonly send text messages and surf the Net on their phones.
Cell-phone text messages are widely given credit for tipping the scales in Spain's 2004 election, where 40 percent more messages were sent on Election Day than on an ordinary day, and young voters turned out in large numbers to help unseat the government.
In the Philippines earlier this year, activists opposed to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took a controversial recording of the president talking to election officials and turned the recording into a ring tone. The file--which Arroyo critics said showed she tampered with the vote in 2004--topped ring-tone download charts in the country, despite threats of prosecution from the government.
A first step The ambitions of Mobile Voter, the project of San Francisco-based Web designer Ben Rigby, are less sweeping. While cell phone use is growing exponentially in the United States, use of text messaging is considerably lower than in many other countries, partly because the feature is more expensive--usually about 10 cents per message--than in other markets.
The Mobile Voter nonprofit is aimed at helping improve voter participation, particularly among younger people who can be difficult to reach with traditional political tools. The current campaign is aimed
specifically at registering voters before a November special election called by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The registration is a several-step process. Sending a text message reading "IVOTE" to the number on the sign triggers an immediate reply asking the potential voter to send back their name and address, still using the phone's messaging function. The Chinese-American voter group will then mail voter registration forms to that address, with much of the information already filled in.
The billboards will be followed by a more personal approach, such as fliers handed out in Chinese restaurants and "bubble tea" shops popular among teens and twentysomethings, Rigby said.
"The advantage of mobile technology is that you can reach people in environments where you can't reach them by other means, in a way that's convenient and instantaneous," Rigby said.
Last year's MTV-backed Rock the Vote campaign similarly used mobile phones to solicit voter registration, but ultimately sent potential voters online to a Web site. The San Francisco project is among the first to keep interactions entirely on the cell phone, aiming to reach potential voters that may not own a computer.
Open source, open-minded networks Interest in this kind of campaigning is growing worldwide. A conference held late last month in Toronto brought together for the first time activists from around the world who are using mobile technology. They brainstormed new ways the medium could be used in their projects.
Attendees provided several powerful illustrations of how mobile technology can adapt to environments where Internet penetration remains low, or where traditional online communications can be difficult or dangerous. Groups told of projects using phones to monitor human rights violations against children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or to mobilize indigenous people in Argentina to block bulldozers tearing up forest land.
Developers from the United States showed off a virtual phone bank system, which uses open-source Internet voice technology to transfer calls to volunteers on cell phones. The system is presently being used to help connect recent immigrants with everyday questions to volunteers who speak their languages, but it's likely to be used for political phone-banking in the future.
"There are infrastructure barriers, but I think in the next election you will see massive use of cell phones," said Katrin Verclas, co-director of Aspiration, a nonprofit dedicated to helping activists use new technological tools, and one of the organizers of the Toronto event.
None of this will replace politics' traditional doorbell ringing and mass media TV ads, but backers say these tools are soon likely to complement more common means of reaching out to voters.
"This is not the end-all and be-all," said Mobile Voter's Rigby, "but as one of several supporting tactics in a campaign, it can be very effective."
All eyes to be on Obama in Oakland's melting pot
Candidate's race won't guarantee votes, locals say; downtown rally on Saturday
By Mary Anne Ostrom and Josh Richman, MEDIANEWS STAFF
Updated: 03/16/2007 08:44:57 AM PDTLink
When schoolteacher Mari Houssni-Adler went to Oakland's Jack London Square last weekend wearing a homemade "Obama 08" T-shirt, she turned heads.
"People were curious. They stopped me and seemed surprised that a middle-age white woman was supporting Barack Obama," the San Jose woman said.
Obama's run is challenging at least some racial stereotypes in politics, and his candidacy has reignited the discussion about whether an African American can be elected president.
On Saturday the Democratic senator from Illinois will make his first public Bay Area appearance as a presidential candidate in Oakland, where his candidacy is evoking a strong sense of pride alongside caution that his race alone will not guarantee him votes. After extensive outreach by the campaign, an afternoon rally in downtown Oakland is expected to draw as many as 10,000 people.
While Obama's race clearly matters for people and is part of the reason for the surge of interest, even in multiracial Oakland he's far from sealing the deal.
"It's a great opportunity for African Americans to re-enter vigorously the political arena," said Black Wall Street Merchants Association President Ed Dillard of Oakland. While calling Obama's ethnicity "extremely important," Dillard added, "Gone are the days when black people vote for people just because they're black."
Obama, the son of a white mother from Kansas and black father from Kenya, is walking a delicate race-in-politics tightrope, balancing
The Saturday rally falls on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq and Obama will reiterate his call for winding down the war, says his campaign. Several high-profile African-American politicians will be at his side, including Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris.
The campaign says Oakland was chosen not necessarily because of its racial mix, but instead for the grassroots enthusiasm for Obama. The city's population is about one-third white, one-third black, one-quarter Latino and 15 percent Asian.
So far the combination of his race, background and his politics has translated into a surge of interest, even if he still trails Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in polls.
When bids for rally volunteers went out to help with Oakland's event, about 900 people showed up in San Francisco and Oakland for planning meetings last weekend.
"There are great Democratic candidates in this race, but people are looking for something different than the status quo," said Steve Westly, the former eBay executive and ex-state controller who is co-chairing Obama's campaign.
At the same time, attitudes toward race are liberalizing.
A Gallup Poll taken before the Civil Rights Movement flowered in the 1960s found 53 percent of Americans would not vote for a "generally well-qualified person" for president if the candidate was black. A USA Today/Gallup Poll taken March 2-4 showed one in 20 surveyed said they wouldn't vote for a black for president.
"A lot of the racial polarization is breaking down" at the ballot box, said Jaime Regalado, director of the Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Institute of Public Affairs. As more minority candidates and women reach high elected and appointed office, "voters have a larger and larger comfort zone in voting for candidates that don't look like themselves."
While such sentiments give Obama an opening, he still faces a struggle to unify his various constituencies, including African Americans.
Many people think he has a fine line to walk, particularly for a relative political newcomer and must appear above the racial fray to be successful. At the same time, Regalado said, some African-American voters want him to "go through a legitimacy muster, a litmus test of sorts" because he doesn't come from an easily categorized background.
Former presidential candidate Al Sharpton, without naming Obama, said earlier this week, "Just because you're our color doesn't make you our kind."
In his own words, Obama on the eve of declaring his candidacy last month told CBS "60 Minutes" that he is "rooted in the African-American community, but I'm not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that's not all I am."
His background is nontraditional in some respects for African-American politicians, since he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and didn't launch his career in the Civil Rights Movement.
Some African-American backers say they find the debate of whether he will represent African-American interests offensive. They point out that Obama is married to a black woman, attends a black church and worked as a community organizer among African Americans on the South Side of Chicago, where he still lives.
Tony West, an Oakland African-American attorney and Obama supporter, said Obama's race is important "if only because of the dynamic that has been created." It's been decades since "the African-American vote has been as heavily courted as it is now within the party." Obama, Clinton and former vice presidential nominee John Edwards are reaching out, and Obama can't take that vote for granted, West said.
In Oakland, his biracial makeup and global experience are part of his attraction.
Javier Fuentes, a deacon in East Oakland's St. Bernard's parish and a community organizer, said many Latinos are intrigued by Obama's candidacy but want to hear more.
"I think it's about time we have a president of a different race," he said. "But it would be nice to hear a little more about where he stands."
Oakland Unified School District board President David Kakishiba said Obama's upbringing in a largely Asian environment intrigues Asian voters. "People sense that he is far more equipped, far more understanding, far wiser in the ways that people live around the world."
But plenty of possible pitfalls lie ahead in his quest to win over voters, say observers.
The fact that he is not basing his candidacy on his race is helping him with white voters, said Ward Connerly, an African American who has led campaigns in California and other states against affirmative action.
But, in the heat of presidential campaigning, the Republican Connerly predicted, "it may be a difficult tightrope to stay above the racial fray and stay linked to all of us. The moment that he is identified as white or black, he will fall off that bigger-than-life platform we've put him on."
And, in the end, while many African Americans are personally rooting for him, some think the presidency still may be out of reach given the complex political formulas it takes to win the job.
"There is no precedent for it. I'd love to be wrong," said Charles Henry, professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. "I'm certainly backing Barack Obama because I do think he takes us down the road but if you look at recent politics, it's white male Southern governors who've won.
By Frank D. Russo
At the 1965 World's Fair, I was given a button at a General Electric exhibit that reads "I have seen the future, and it works." Yesterday, on a Sunday, I got a glimpse of the future of the Democratic party in California, and I can report to you that the change in our state's primary date, even before it is signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger, is already working.
On just two days notice, close to 500 volunteers showed up in the Bay Area--not for a rally by Barack Obama--but to plan his upcoming appearance on March 17 in Oakland. Two separate meetings were held by organizers of the Obama campaign. The picture above is from the Oakland meeting.
There was enthusiasm in the room as veterans of past Democratic campaigns met many who were new to electoral politics.
As the meeting was about to begin, I spoke with Marie Houssni, who lives in the San Jose area and is a high school language teacher. She described herself as "a United Methodist married to a Moroccan Muslim." She is active with the San Jose Barack Obama Meetup Group and gushed about the start of its work. "The people who came to our meetup the other night were a couple of evangelicals, which was interesting, a couple of young college students, a couple of teachers, and someone from my neighborhood who is a Vietnamese immigrant," she said.
I asked about the purpose of the group and she said it was "to start to publicize for Barack Obama, to post flyers and go to flea markets and farmer's markets, and to get people registered and to get his name out there."
When asked if it wasn't early, she said "No. We need to start early. Last time, when it was the John Edwards campaign, I didn't get started until 3 months before the primary and that was too late. There's a large group of people that are very uninformed, because they are plugged into their I-pods and MTV. You know, we're busy. I'm a working mother. People have two and three jobs. They're leery of politics. They've been misled in the past, so the more you can get people on board that they are the citizenry. Its up to them to change things."
She described Edwards as "a valuable person, he's done a lot for people," but is supporting Obama because of what she saw as his stronger opposition to the War in Iraq.
When I told her that many pundits and others were predicting a heavy media campaign and asked her what she thought of that, she said: "I can tell you what I am going to be doing. I'll be working at the De Anza Flea market once a week, to regisater voters, sell bumper strips, and badges. We'll also be going to West Valley College once every two weeks to register new voters. Our big campaign is to get the younger kids, the younger people on board."
With that the meeting began, and with it part of the future as well.
Northern California Unites for Barack Obama
Please RSVP at : my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/wrjf Link
Northern California Unite! (Meeting)
The Sacramento for Obama group invites all Northern California Obama supportors to come party with us and celebrate Senator Obama's Presidential candidacy! We want to meet everyone, we will have sign ups so that we can set up a support network for Northern California. We are also going to invite the media and we NEED a HUGE show of support at our first media event. Let's pull 100's of us together for an evening of networking, organization and fun. Bring yourselves, your family, your neighbors! The excitement for Senator Obama is high - let's celebrate it together!!! Feel free to message me with questions, suggestions and ideas. ***NOTE: Children are welcome to attend. However, the Blue Cue prefers that there be no minors after about 7:30PM. I also indicated to them that I didn't get the impression that there would be too many minors there. Please make sure that if you have a minor with you that they do not approach the bar area.
Time: Saturday, March 10 at 5:00 PM
Duration: 4 hours Host: Kim Mack
Location: The Blue Cue (Sacramento, CA)
1004 28th Street Sacramento, CA 95816
View Map:
Starting to put together a fundraising event and would like to get your input on the type of event we should have to make this a successful and fun event. My friend suggested we should have a "Casino Night". Any thoughts and suggestions would be great.
