Politics
Entries related to things political.
Farmers’ Market Redux
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/15/2007 - 20:16A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about our trip to a farmers’ market. Because we have signed up with a Community Supported Agriculture farm, we go back every week to get our basket. This week, Kim wasn’t feeling well, so Fiona and I went alone to the farmers’ market to pick up our box of produce.
Last time I was there, we picked up some fresh picked peas, which we ate on the grass surrounding the farmers market. The peas are gone now and string beans are in season. We got a nice bag of string beans in our box of produce and Fiona and I ate many of the string beans fresh, as we walked around the market. Later, we snacked on them at home. There were also four very fresh ears of corn, some nice tomatoes, more basil, and plenty of other great vegetables.
We signed up not only for the vegetable box, but also for fruit, and there was a basket of blueberries and several lodi apples. Lodi apples are one of the earliest apples to be available. King Orchards describes the lodi apple this way:
The earliest apple of the season, Lodi is an old-fashioned transparent-type apple. It is cross between Montgomery and Yellow Transparent, introduced by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva in 1924. Green to light yellow in color.
Like our previous visits, we stopped and bought some locally raised meat. This time, I picked up a kielbasa which would be part of our dinner. There was a man selling lemon aide and brownies to raise money for Discovery to Cure, a program at Yale to help fight ovarian cancer. I picked up a magnet for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, as well as brownies and lemon aide for Fiona and I to have for our picnic on the grass.
Raspberries are starting to come in, but they were pretty expensive, so I skipped the raspberries. However, on the way home, we passed some wineberry bushes that were loaded with berries. I pulled over to the side of the road, and Fiona and I hopped out of the care and picked a bunch of berries. As we continued home, we passed a few other wineberry bushes and hopped out to pick those berries as well.
We didn’t get enough wineberries for a wineberry pie, but we did get enough to be used with the lodi apples to make an apple and berry pie.
So, for dinner, we had fresh corn on the cob, locally raised kielbasa, some pasta with the tomatoes and basil, and a little cheese thrown in, and ended off the meal with the apple and berry pie.
Like the previous trip to the farmers market, this ended off a close to idyllic day. After Fiona had gone to bed, I sat down and tried to get a little closer to catching up on all my unread emails. Over on a mailing list of folks interested in media education, there is a discussion of how U.S. media covers Food, Fashion, Fitness and Finance. One person wrote:
Food is intensely political... By political I mean it directly affects our lives, human decisions in centralized bureaucracies of corporations and government shape this effect, and above all: we can together take action that influences these decisions or even moves the decision-making power into our hands... Food, fitness, and finance, meanwhile, are important parts of health, sustainability, opportunity, independence, freedom, and justice.
In a different part of the email, the person wrote, “It's not that these four Fs are covered, it's how they're covered.” He’s right. We need more discussions about how our food relates to our health; how we can live more sustainable lifestyles be eating more locally. It would be good to see more people talking about this. Until then, I’ll probably keep putting up blog posts here and there about the importance of eating locally, not only in terms of health and sustainability, but also in terms of how wonderful it can be.
A Birthday Wish
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/09/2007 - 16:07Let me start off by thanking everyone who has sent me birthday greetings. It is greatly appreciated. Birthdays can be a great time of reflection, especially if there are other big events going on, such as moving and trying to find a new job. It can be amplified if the birthday is a milestone or rapidly approaching one. For me, fifty is coming soon. That is well past halfway through the three score years and ten that poets of yesteryear wrote about, so please indulge a little mid life crisis reflections.
After dinner, I will blow out the candles on my birthday cake and make a birthday wish. What shall I wish for? Most practically, I’m wishing for a good job, but I’ve been wishing for that for a while. I’ve had various leads that looked promising, but never panned out.
How would I define a good job? Well, I realize that potential employers may come by and read my blog. I hope my description of my dream job doesn’t put off any of them if their opportunity isn’t precisely what I’m dreaming for. I sometimes feel as if that has happened in the past, and that perhaps I’m too much of a dreamer.
People who know me, and particularly my thoughts about writing know that I like to focus on the larger narrative. Yet I usually don’t think a lot about that narrative when I write my blog posts here. Instead, I’m finding a bit of it in retrospect.
Let me start off going way back. When I was young, I had a speech defect. I’m not sure how much I was ostracized for my funny way of speaking and how much I just felt that way, but I remember kids making fun of the way I spoke, even through high school. In college, I took some courses in speech pathology. I’ve always been searching for my own voice and been interested in helping others find their voices.
I had some poems published when I was in high school and college. I moved to New York City to become a writer. In the meantime, I supported myself working with computers. Now, nearly thirty years later, I still write and support myself by working with computers. Blogs have been a wonderful joining of the two.
When I was working as BlogMaster for John DeStefano’s campaign, I read a lot of local blogs and hyperlocal journalism sites. At the http://www.newhavenindependent.org/ >New Haven Independent, I came across posts by http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/gina_coggio/ >Gina Coggio. Gina was teaching English in a school in New Haven. She wrote wonderful accounts of her interaction with students in the school. I visited her class and encouraged them to take up blogging. Many of them had important stories to tell.
Back in September, 2005, I wrote in The New Orleans Metaphor,
It is my dream that just as Freedom Riders hopped on buses over forty years ago to help bring equality to blacks in the south we will see a new generation of people head to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild and help fight poverty.
In my mind, I thought of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, redone for a new generation and a new media. I thought of bloggers and videobloggers writing about the Gulf Coast of today. I thought of people helping people along the Gulf Coast find their voice to describe their post-Katrina struggles, sort of like http://www.bloggercorps.org/ >BloggerCorps which never really got off the ground.
A month later, Sen. Edwards came to Yale as part of his Opportunity Rocks tour. I spoke about this idea with friends there. In Freedom Riders of the New WPA, I described the event:
If Senator Edwards does the standard leftover politics, I will be disappointed, but not surprised. I sure hope, however, that he will really talk about a new generation of Freedom Riders…
So, when Senator Edwards invoked the image of Robert Kennedy in Appalachia, my friend excitedly said, “That is exactly what you were talking about.” I wondered if this is what I’ve been hoping for.
Later, I was approached by the Edwards campaign about possibly working for them. I had dreams of being able to bring about a little bit of this vision. Perhaps my dreams were too big, perhaps they were looking for something else. Whatever it was, it never worked out for me to work with the Edwards campaign.
This year, on New Years, I wrote some similar thoughts in to help people find their voice. I spoke about it in terms of media reform. I’ve followed various leads for jobs with different non-profit organizations where I hoped I could bring about some of this vision. I spoke with Jay Rosen about trying to find ways to get this vision incorporated into some of his work with NewAssignment.Net.
Now, Sen. Edwards has announced his “Road to One America” Tour. It will start in New Orleans and end up in Prestonsburg, KY, where Robert Kennedy ended his trip in 1968. I hope the campaign has great local people blogging about the trip. More importantly, I hope that they spend some time helping people in New Orleans, and Prestonsburg and the towns and cities in between find their voices online. I hope these voices find their way into hyperlocal journalism, into Off the Bus, and find a persistence in our national dialog that enables politicians and non-profits to address the problem of poverty in our country.
And I do hope that I can find a job where I can help people find their voice.
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/05/2007 - 10:02Shortly, we will be heading off to Cape Cod for a few days. I don’t expect to be online during that time, so the blog won’t be updated, and most emails will probably go unanswered.
I dealing with the inspection for selling our house, I ended up climbing through some poison ivy, and I’m pretty miserable right now. Itching everywhere, unable to sleep. This, of course, means that Kim could sleep well either. It will be a difficult trip, but hopefully a little salt water will help out.
With the NOI campaigns, only the Burns campaign responded to my inquiries. Most, but not all of the campaigns list an email address somewhere to contact the campaign, and it appears as if most of those don’t bother to check their email. It seems to be a standard problem of many campaigns. The flood of emails can be overwhelming and many of them are spam or people wearing tin foil hats, but over the years, I’ve found some great volunteers and made some good friends as a result of responding to campaign emails. It gets to the idea of campaigns and emails really being a two-way conversation, and not just another broadcast medium.
On the graphing front, I have another graph of MyBlogLog interactions up on Flickr. It was during Wordless Wednesday and you can see the clear community grouping of Wordless Wednesday. It was also done early in the day and ends up showing a grouping of Malaysian bloggers.
Enough for now. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
Way Off The Bus
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/04/2007 - 11:07Recently, Zack Exley wrote an entry at Huffington Post entitled Time to Get Off the Bus. It is about the joint venture between NewAssignment.net and Huffington Post to get more citizen journalists covering the 2008 Presidential election.
Zack was also a cofounder of the New Organizing Institute which is doing a training in Washington DC right now. As part of the training, teams were formed to promote different fictional characters running for President. So, in the spirit of Off the Bus, I’m going to go way off the bus and present my fictional coverage of the campaigns.
The first candidate that I heard from was Lisa Simpson. Lisa’s supporters have a Facebook group up and can be reached at info@lisa2008.com. I’ve received several emails from the campaign urging me to spread the word. In the latest WOTB polls shows Lisa getting about 28% of the vote and running in second place. I learned about this from a friend on a regional blogging list.
The second candidate that I heard from was Stewie Griffen. I have not been able to find contact information or a Facebook group for Stewie. However, they are up on MySpace. Their website is taking advantage of some nice Blue State Digital features, and it isn’t a surprise that I heard about it from Clay Johnson. Unfortunately, they are going nowhere in the WOTB polling, showing up at 5th place with a whopping 1%.
Mr. Burns 2008 campaign was the third that I heard about. A friend of mine whom I know from a mailing list about the 2008 Presidential election contacted me about Mr. Burns campaign. Their Facebook group can be found here. In WOTB polling, they are currently in 3rd place with 21% of the vote.
The most recent campaign to catch my attention is Maggie for America. I found Maggie’s campaign when I stopped by at Rosalyn Lemieux’s page on Facebook. Maggie’s Facebook group is here. Rosalyn is the executive director of New Organizing Institute and having her in your Facebook group counts for a lot. It isn’t surprising that Maggie is leading in the WOTB poll with 36% of the vote.
Through more searching I’ve also found a campaign site for Krusty the Klown. Again, Roz links to his campaign on Facebook. Krusty is running fourth with 14% of the vote.
The blog that seems to be capturing most of the action on this campaign is the NOI Blog. I am picking up rumors that Homer Simpson, and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon are running. Yet details of their campaigns have remained elusive.
As of the deadline for this article, none of the campaigns have responded to inquiries about their positions, schedules or the food that they are eating on the road. Time and interest permitting, a followup will be posted.
Lisa Simpson for President?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/03/2007 - 12:27I’ve been going through the endless stream of emails that have been piling up. A lot of them have been comments about Bush’s commuting of Libby’s sentence. I’ve read press releases from Sen. Edwards and from Patrick Fitzgerald. I’ve read standard form solicitations from Facebook groups and from the DSCC. Enough has been said already, and I’m not sure that I can add a lot to the discussion.
Instead, a different email, entitled “lisa simpson for president” caught my attention. I must admit, I do not focus a lot on popular culture, so when I received the email, I didn’t think of Bart’s brother, but instead wondered if she was the next Ava Lowery or some youth standing up for responsible healthcare.
Instead, Lisa 2008 is the project of a team of students at the New Organizing Institute in Washington DC. NOI runs a great program to help political activists learn how to use social media to get their message out. Some of the students may go on to write standard form email solicitations for the DSCC. Others may go on to something more creative.
Besides setting up her campaign site, they’ve also set up a Facebook group, Lisa Simpson for President!.
A friend of mine from a regional political blogging group sent me an email about the campaign. He also sent it to the blogging group. If I were instructing at NOI, like I have in the past, I’d probably give him a few of my thoughts on how they could improve the campaign, but this time, I’m just a targeted potential supporter.
So, signup to support Lisa Simpson for President. Lend your hand to the New Organizing Institute in training new social media savvy political activists, and for that matter, lets have a little bit of fun on this week in which we celebrate our countries independence. It sure beats rehashing yet another example of the Bush administrations distain for the rule of law in preference for tired cronyism.
