Archive - 2007

Date

June 12th

New Hampshire U.S. Senate Race

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/12/2007 - 10:23

At DemocracyFest on Saturday, I got into a brief discussion with Karen Liot Hill about the U.S Senate race in New Hampshire. I’ve known Karen from DFA days and I have a lot of respect for her. She told me she was running Jay Buckey’s campaign. Well, this will be difficult. I’m also a good friend of JP Boyle, whom I met on the DeStefano campaign, and who is now working for Steve Marchand’s campaign.

Katrina Swett had a table up at DemocracyFest and I’ve been speaking with JP about making sure that Steve makes an appearance. I first spoke with JP about Steve when he was trying to get Steve and Ned Lamont to speak. Opponents of Swett are quick to point out that she was national co-chairwoman of Lieberman's 2004 presidential bid. Her supporters say that it is not fair to paint her with a broad brush as a Liebercrat.

In digging around, I found an article by Eric Moskowitz in the Concord Sunday Monitor on August 13, 2006, after Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman in the primary. The article said she “supports Lieberman's decision to stay in the race”. It went on to say,

Swett believes Lieberman lost because of three perceived Democratic "sins": the sin of supporting the Iraq war and being tough on defense, the sin of being bipartisan and the sin of displaying religious faith. Swett said those traits might make Lieberman undesirable to many Democrats but they could be key for Democrats in winning future national elections.

Swett may be trying to present herself as being other than a Liebercrat, but as a strong Democrat, I feel that I must work hard to oppose anyone that supported Lieberman after the primary. The question for me is should I work for Steve? Should I work for Jay? Can I work for both?

So far, I’ve offered what I hope were helpful suggestions to both campaigns and I hope that the fact that I’m currently willing to help both of them doesn’t alienate either of them.

With that, let me run through some of my thoughts and views about the candidates. Both of them come across as charismatic good people. Both of them have hired some good people. Steve gets points in my book for reaching out to Ned. He gets points for having a nice palm card that he handed out at DemocracyFest. He loses a couple points for not having the URL to his website on his palm card.

As a fiscally conservative social liberal, Steve hit some of the right notes on his palm card, ending the war in Iraq as his top priority, defending a woman’s right to choose, working to make health care more affordable and accessible, protecting the environment, improving the quality of education. It notes that he is the former Northeast Regional Director for the Concord Coalition.

In 1992, I was a Paul Tsongas supporter. I liked the Concord Coalition as a fiscally conservative group that welcomed social liberals. Swett might laud bipartisanship, but I find Lieberman’s version of bipartisanship abhorrent. The Concord Coalition is a much better model for bipartisanship.

Steve’s website looks nice. They are using NGP for their donation processing, but they are also taking donations via ActBlue. So far it is just a few donations, but they are ahead of Swett.

Jay’s website isn’t quite as attractive yet. He isn’t up on ActBlue yet. Some of that is because he just moved from having an exploratory committee to having a full campaign. The website still claims to be an exploratory committee. The issues section is a little anemic. He does get major points for providing a link to an image of an email that Jay sent to Sen. Gregg opposing the Iraq resolution back in October, 2002. Yet it talks about there being no easy solution and could go further in calling for bringing the troops home.

What I find surprising is that there isn’t a reference to health care on the issues page. Jay is a professor of medicine at Dartmouth, and I would love to hear his thoughts on addressing the health care crisis in America.

All three candidates ended up at DemocracyFest Sunday evening. Buckey and Marchand stuck around to hear Gov. Dean, who spoke about the importance of getting rid of Sen. Sununu. on first glance, it looks like there are two interesting and exciting candidates running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. It will be great to see this race develop.

(Cross-posted at BlueHampshire)

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June 11th

Political Social Media

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 12:13

Over on Cat On My Head, Jaya writes about a ViralTags Blog Rank Boosting Experiment. She worries about whether or not this will boost her ranking, or if there are algorithms around that will cause it to have a negative effect. I suspect there is a little bit of both.

In particular, she encourages people to copy and past a large block of text. However, copying text as is, is one of those things that algorithms search for. If everyone writes their own version, it is more effective.

Also, the question becomes, how do you want to be ‘tagged’. ‘Cat on my head’ might not be the most useful tag. In my case, Orient Lodge is already the top listing for my blog. I don’t need more people coming to my blog searching for Orient Lodge. Drupal Themes and Smoking Jackets are also already key searches on my blog. What do I want?

Well, since it is limited to three words, I would like to see if I can get more people finding me if they search for something like Political Social Media. If I were really serious about search engine optimization, I would go and find the phrases that people search on most frequently that are close to that. However, for the time being, I’ll simply use Political Social Media.

One other concern: This has a certain about of MLM feel to it. People who get on board early are likely to get lots of links, others, down the road are likely to get much fewer links.

So, on to the idea. Add a matrix of links to a blog post of other people that are doing this. Copy the matrix from an existing site. The original idea and matrix can be found here. Copy the matrix, change the Host Tag to the three words that you want to use, and add their tag into the matrix, if it isn’t there already.

Most importantly, when someone adds a matrix, be sure to add them to your list. Then, spread the word.

Here is the current matrix:

Host Tag: Political Social Media

Important: Once I get a ping back from you (I promise to do the best I can), I will add your anchor text and the associated link you designate as “Host Tag” here, replacing one of the “ViralTags” from the matrix above. As more and more bloggers copy and paste this matrix, the more backlinks you will have with your anchor text. If everybody who copy and paste from your blog does the same, pretty soon this will spread and go viral. So, the sooner you participate, the more links with anchor text you will receive.

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Cultural Preservation as a means of neutralizing extremist terrorists

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 10:03

Late last night, as I was driving home from DemocracyFest, I tuned in the local public radio station to hear a program from the World Affairs Forum about the results of the Iraq Study Group. I was very tired and concentrated on driving, so I didn’t follow the show as closely as I would have liked, especially since it was getting into some very interesting ideas.

A starting point of the session was whether or not the idea of a ‘Global War on Terror’ was a useful framework for thinking about our response to 9/11. If not, what would be a better framework and if so, what strategies would be best for waging such a war.

The first speaker did a very good job of explaining why thinking about our response to terrorism as a ‘global war on terror’ is detrimental. First, it places the issue into the context of militarization. It causes us to think of the solutions as military solutions while missing other solutions that might be more productive. In addition, it confuses the issue by leading many to think of ‘the enemy’ in terms of Arabs or Muslims as opposed to the extremists that make up a very small percentage of these populations.

It feeds into the narratives of the extremists by promoting a framework of a holy war. The speaker asked how our approach to extremists and terrorists could be framed in a more productive manner.

The second speaker brought up even more interesting ideas. He contrasted the idea of nations and states. He suggested that a nation is a group of people with a common identity, traditions or language. He spoke of states as locations having internationally recognized boundaries and governments. He then went on to speak about the problem of when nations and states do not coincide. As an example, he spoke about the situation with the Kurds, which he referred to as the largest stateless nation in the Middle East.

Yet the idea that really grabbed my attention was that of identity markers. The term was not defined, so I’m not sure if I fully grasp the concept. The speaker spoke about how identity markers are regularly destroyed in times of conflict.

From my brief reading on identity markers, it seems as if some of them are physical; monuments, places of historical importance, or even symbols of the marketplace. Others are linguistic, indications of a shared identity through languages, accents, and other linguistic identifiers. Some may be rituals.

How much of the conflict that we see in the world is a result of people fighting to hold on to their identity markers? In a world of globalization, American cultural markers are showing up everywhere. U.S. pop songs, golden arches show up everywhere. Is it any wonder people seeking to maintain their own cultural identity would feel threatened? Even in our own country, we find different groups finding their cultures threatened and fighting ‘culture wars’. In so many other conflicts around the world, one side actively seeks to destroy the cultural artifacts of their opposition.

So, how can we reframe the ‘Global War on Terror’ to something more productive? Well, perhaps a starting point is instead of trying to export American style democracy, business, and media, we would be better off trying to export an idea that has truly made our country great, America as a melting pot.

Perhaps, instead of vilifying Arabs and Muslims, we should honor their cultures. We could lead by example in seeking and promoting the beauty of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish cultures. By recognizing and promoting the great contributions that moderate Muslims have contributed to our world, we will help neutralize extremists, making it harder for them to organize, recruit and carry out terrorist actions.

As individuals, it may be harder for us to do this, but we can still lead by example. We should all seek out chances to experience, appreciate and honor cultures different from our own in our daily lives. Is there a culture center near you that you haven’t visited yet? Go, visit, and learn about other cultures. Even driving past the local golden arches and having lunch at a local ethnic restaurant is a start.

So, let’s change the global war on terror to a quest to appreciate global cultures.

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June 10th

DemocracyFest Other Presidential candidates

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/10/2007 - 16:27

Yesterday evening, Granny D delivered an incredible talk linking the immigration issue to NAFTA. She spoke about the amount of corn being imported into Mexico and effect it had on their economy. She then introduced Mike Gravel.

Mike started talking about the war. He said congress should pass a law requiring the President and Vice President to certify that all troops are out of Iraq by December 31st. Failure to do so would be a felony punishable by a minimum of five years in prison. He said that congress should keep voting on it everyday until it passes and then after it is vetoed, until the veto is overridden.

He also spoke about the need to provide for national initiatives. At this point he opened things up to questions. The questions and the answers were all over the place. There was a discussion about ending the prohibition on marihuana. He tied this to a discussion about his sister who is a nun in Manchester who spends time visiting people in jail.

He was asked about what he would do about AIDS which led his thoughts on health care reform, which led to him talking about tax reform. He is arguing for a sales tax instead of corporate taxes. “We need to become a nation of savers”.

He said a lot of good things, but he said a lot of weird things as well, and generally, his comments were all over the place.

After this, William McNary, President of U. S. Action spoke on Sen. Obama’s behalf. It had a good Baptist revival feeling, but was a bit light on content. He spend a bit of time reading from Sen. Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention. It seemed to be good red meat for the Obama supporters, but didn’t really do much for me.

Today, Steve Gerencser spoke on behalf of Sen. Dodd and Karen Hicks spoke on behalf of Sen. Clinton. Unfortunately, it conflicted with Matt Dunn’s discussion about Service Politics which I really wanted to hear.

After this, Rep. Kucinich called in via cellphone from California. A Kucinich supporter held the cellphone up to the microphone for the room’s speaker system. He spoke about the war, health care, voting issues and impeachment. He presented the issues very well. We need to not only get out of Iraq, but we need to change our way of living to be more about peace. He spoke about impeachment in terms of the importance of accountability.

On the other hand, there was a lot of dog whistle, or at least shorthand politics. Bills before Congress were spoken of in terms of their bill number, and unless you were already well informed, you wouldn’t know what was being talked about. The same applied to court decisions.

Edwards, Obama, Clinton and Kucinich all had material at DemocracyFest. I have not seen any sign of Biden or Richardson.

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DemocracyFest: John Edwards

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/10/2007 - 13:19

DemocracyFest has brought together a large gathering of progressive activists in New Hampshire, and as such, draws the attention of many of the Presidential campaigns. The first to speak was Sen. Edwards. He arrived around half an hour late and delivered what I thought was a very good speech. I must admit, that I’m an Edwards supporter and am biased. Jim Dean introduced Sen. Edwards and spoke about Edwards visiting Vermont in 2005 to talk with political leaders about addressing issues of poverty. He spoke about Sen. Edwards recognizing that Washington DC is no longer the center of the universe.

Sen. Edwards picked up this theme and said, “We will never bring about the bold change we need in this country, unless we do it from the ground up.” He went on to acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do.

He started off by talking about the war. We spoke about the Democrats taking back congress as a mandate to end the war and echoed the frustration that many have about Democrats in Congress caving to President Bush. He said congress should not submit any funding bill to the president that doesn’t have a withdrawal schedule. He acknowledged voting for the war and admitted he was wrong for that.

He went on to talk about poverty and health care. He gave some details of his healthcare plan, claiming it is the only truly universal plan that any of the candidates have presented. Anyone will be able to get ‘Medicare Plus’, but people will still be able to get traditional plans if they so chose. If the Medicare Plus plan is as good as Sen. Edwards believes it will be, then most Americans will opt for it and will move us towards a true single payer plan.

He spoke about treating mental health equally with physical health, making sure that people are not denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions and mandating electronic record keeping. The medical plan would cost between $90 and $120 billion and would be paid for by getting rid of President Bush’s tax breaks for the extremely wealthy.

He went talk briefly about energy prices. He spoke about the need America to get off our addition to oil. He spoke about the need for big changes, including that we should stop subsidizing large oil companies to the tune of $3 billion a year.

His final point was about the need for ‘College for Everyone’, and described how it is working in North Carolina.

During the questions and answers, he kept returning to the issues of poverty, “I want to say a word about this issue of poverty….It says something about the character of America…America is better than this…And we have a responsibility to do something about this… I think what has happened in New Orleans is a national embarssment…
”

He spoke about the New York Times Magazine which should have a front page article about fighting poverty today. He spoke about the importance of a livable wage and the role of unions in fighting poverty in America

When asked about the push back that insurance and pharmaceutical companies are bound to give if he gets a chance to push for his healthcare reform, he said,
“Every time you see an ad on television, I want you to ask, who’s paying for this?”

That’s a good idea for whatever ads we see.

As to addressing voting issues, he said, “If you love this country, if you love democracy, don’t you want to make sure that your votes are counted?”

I was already an Edwards supporter and it didn’t change my mind. I don’t know what others where thinking, but his speech was well received.

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