November 2004 Archives

FLASH: The official Green Party site reports that "...attorneys representing the Kerry-Edwards campaign filed papers in Delaware County, Ohio to intervene in legal proceedings in defense of Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian Michael Bednarik and their legal counsel, the National Voting Rights Institute, who are seeking a recount of all votes cast for president in the Ohio 2004 general election." More info from the Washington Post.

A conference in one of the Senate office buildings next week will significantly heighten the visibility of the grassroots movement that has been documenting the numerous flaws in the election on November 2. Sponsored by Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and The Century Foundation, the all-day event will be free, open to the public, with box lunches if you send in an RSVP.

Last week I wrote asking you to share your recent experiences of calling your Congressperson's office.  Now I will share mine.

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall prodded his readers to call their members of Congress to see how they had voted on the DeLay rule.  That sounded like too interesting an opportunity in participatory democracy to pass up, so I called.  And called, and called, and called.  After being given the run around for five days, I finally got an answer to the "yes or no?" question of how my representative voted.  Not surprisingly, he was a DeLay man.

The most interesting part of this was how some members of Congress think that constituents can and should be treated.  Here is the entertaining account that Josh printed in TPM of how I and others were responded to by our Congressman, John Sweeney.

After you read it, please come back and tell us what you think.  Is this how a  Congressperson's staff should respond to its constituents?

I haven't watched a lot of "current events" television since November 2nd, but I did tune into Bill Moyer's NOW on Sunday, November 12th because the discussion was focused on religion and politics. I was truly inspired by the conversation with Sister Joan Chittister, who spoke with crystal clarity about true Christian values.

Reading through Andrew's post below about the investigations into the possibility of fraud in this year's election, I came to see the investigations in a new context, which I am calling "open source history." As citizens on the net, we are now all empowered to be open source historians, dramatically changing the way that current history is researched and written by making the process of creating history much more transparent than it has ever been. One of the older cliches in the  books is "History is written by the victors," a cliche that depended on restricted access to raw data and to methods of distributing alternative explanations. As open source historians, we can research and write history together, outside the control of the supposed victors.

Was there fraud in this fall's election? I do not know, but I do know that the mass media has been reluctant to even begin examining the evidence. But as Andrew describes, intrepid internet investigators have been on the case since Election Day, turning up problem after problem, and collecting testimony from voters.

While the recent uproar in the Ukraine has made "voter fraud" an issue in the news, there is a stunning silence in the U.S. television media regarding voting irregularities in America's 2004 election.  I'm not surprised that the media has been ignoring the major story about all the anomalies in recent voting that have been coming to light. These are the very same media, after all, whose poor reporting allowed many Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the September 11th attacks. These are the same media who failed to take on the many other outright lies of the Bush Administration.

How many of you had the joyful experience of sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table with one or more (or all!) of your relatives expounding on the glories of the Republicans' successes at the polls on November 2? I don't know about you, but there's nothing to make a good meal go sour faster than not being able to eat because you're busy fending off attacks from your more conservative relations.

A little late for Thanksgiving, but still in plenty of time for Christmas, I came across this excerpt from George Lakoff's latest book, Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Lakoff is the distinguished linguist who argues that progressives need to learn how to "reframe" their arguments. (If you're watching the NFL right now, you might think of this approach in terms of whose field you're playing on, yours or your opponents.)

Click here to read Lakoff's condensed version of how to handle conservatives at the dinner table or the water cooler; there's even a short 4-item list that you could ink on the inside of your wrist as a reminder when your Uncle Bob starts going on about why people without health care deserved their fate.

For more information on Lakoff's work on how to frame progressive political arguments, visit the Rockridge Institute's web site.

Want to see how the media constructs the right-wing version of "reality" right before your very eyes?  In the days following the election, conservatives seized on the term "moral values" in their explanantions of why Democrats lost.   But who defines what "moral values" are?  In another of its piercing exposes, Media Matters for America shows us exactly how the trick is done:

In five days following election, conservative religious figures made 15 media appearances to progressive religious leaders' five.

To read the entire report, click here.  Media Matters is doing a great job every day knocking the right wing media back on their heels.

I hope that everyone had a good Thanksgiving Day. Visiting my wife's hometown, the great city by the lake, Buffalo, we stopped by several of her high school friends' homes to say hello---and inevitably ended up in passionate discussions about the ins and outs of the campaign, as people struggled to understand how our fellow citizens could have voted in such numbers for a man with the miserable record George  Bush has accumulated.

Dear Bloggers,

We're taking a little time off to be with our friends and family, but we'll be thinking of you too as part of a special kind of extended family, that reaches from coast to coast (and across the oceans) to all of those who hoped for a better outcome on November 2.  We learned during the campaign that the friendships that we made in working together were real and enduring.

We are looking forward, in the coming years, to working with you to realize the vision that we share of an America and a world that puts the needs of people first, and where we celebrate the power of openness and transparency to generate an ever-more democratic world. 

See you on Friday,

Dick Bell and the crew

One of the easiest and most powerful things you can do as a taxpayer is call your Congressperson's office to ask questions or express an opinion about what they are doing.  Whatever they are doing, they are doing it with your money.

When a constituent calls, the staffers keep a log of the call.  They make reports to the Congressperson on what the callers are saying about issues.  They are also there to answer questions you may have about a bill or how your member voted on legislation.  When you call, they pay attention.

Have you called your Congressperson lately?  If so, please tell us about your experience.

If not, here's an easy link that will hook you up to the contact information for your member of Congress.

Give them a ring and check on how they spent your money today!

Courtesy of the sharp eyes of Media Matters, which is doing an outstanding job making sure that the rest of us do not miss any of the distorted, mean-spirited utterances of the right-wing, comes this astonishing quote from Tucker Carlson. Many of the quotes on Media Matters reflect the grotesque sensibilities of these right-wing flaks, but this one of Carlson's is in a league of its own. Was this really a person PBS should have rewarded with his own show?

From the November 22 edition of CNN's Crossfire:

TUCKER CARLSON (co-host): And that's about the era [the 1970s] that still defines the Democratic Party, the era of Our Bodies Ourselves [women's health book collective], of solar [power], not nukes. ... You know what I mean? ... A time when grouchy feminists with mustaches controlled the party, and they still do.

Since many of you were involved with John Kerry’s blog, I thought you might get a small bit of satisfaction out of some statistics from Intelliseeks’s Campaign Radar 2004 survey of political blogs since August.

According to Intelliseek, the Kerry blog ranked 21st out among the top 100 political blogs, while the so-called Bush  blog, which did not allow public comments, came in 50th. These numbers show that all the work that the moderators and Kerry supporters did to make the Kerry blog a welcoming and productive place kept people coming back and built a solid following in a highly competitive environment. Congratulations to all!  We’re aiming to build a site with that same spirit of openness and persuasive conversation here on the Democracy Cell Project, so we welcome all the Kerry veterans who have been saying hello.

You can get more details on this survey at Intelliseek. (Plus some great-looking graphs of political trends on blogs since August.)

Election got you down? Ready to give up hope and just ignore what’s going on? Move to Canada? New Zealand? What do you say to people who think that all that work was in vain?

I want to share with you an article on hope by Howard Zinn, who was my teacher at Boston University during the tumult of the early 1970s. (An aside on the Kerry campaign: The first time I ever met John Kerry was through Howard Zinn. The time was 1972, and I was helping to organize a teach-in about the Vietnam War. Howard said to me, “Why don’t you get in touch with this fellow John Kerry."  I contacted Kerry, and he spoke at our event, huddled over the microphone, his hair falling in front of his face, as he compelled us to listen and understand the truth about that war.)

One of the immediate tasks we face is to keep the groups that formed during the campaign together, or at the very least to preserve the email and phone lists that we spent so much time putting together.  A commenter from Connecticut who went to Meetups wants to know about what kinds of changes you're seeing in groups that you worked with during the campaign.

"Resolute" writes:

In Connecticut, our Meetup group is morphing into an activist cell with about 20 to 30 people. In fact, they spent Saturday morning in Westport protesting voter suppression across the country - and supporting the recount in Ohio.

Is anyone else out there seeing the same thing happen to their MeetUp groups or ?

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the opening of the Democracy Cell Project, a new blog and website intended to encourage people across this country to use all the tools at our disposal, online and off, to build the institutions from the grassroots up that we must have to take our country back from the radical forces that have seized power in Washington. The image of “democracy cells” is an image for us of any group of people who come together to work for a better country, whether they’re members of an existing organization or are just taking the first steps in founding something entirely new.

The people who have come together to share this site with you have been through a unique experience in American politics: they were moderators and volunteers of John Kerry’s blog, the first presidential general election campaign blog that was open for comment from the public (the Bush campaign blog was closed to the public). I was the blogmaster for the Kerry blog, and together the moderators and I plunged headfirst into a sea of comments, complaints, and suggestions, seeing over and over again how blog-mediated interactions transformed people from a state of being simply curious to a state of deepening activism,  from working in their local communities, to donating funds, and to traveling thousands of miles to volunteer for days or weeks in other states.

But the visitors to the blog were not the only ones who were transformed by their experiences. The moderators and I also learned from the thousands of hours that we spent online. We learned about the hopes and fears of visitors, and formed a tight, energetic community through the Instant Messaging area where the moderators met to manage the blog together.

We did spend a lot of time talking with people about the intricacies of issues.  But as the campaign progressed, our own interests converged more and more on the question of HOW could we use these powerful online tools to help people do a  better job  of fighting for what they wanted, whatever it was, and wherever they were. We had hoped to be working on these problems under a Kerry presidency.  But within days of the election, we agreed that we wanted to keep fighting, and to take what we had learned to others on the net.