Tag Archive for ‘democratic’ at JJB Blog

yeswecanhas.com was in the New York Post a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, it was in the first edition of that day’s paper, but not in subsequent editions, so it didn’t make it onto the website. But I just found it via a newspaper archiving service, and took the below screenshots.

ShareThis

Reporting live from caucus in Houston, TX

Published

John

on 3/4/2008

in general

. 4 Comments

My friend Josh and his wife went to caucus in Houston, TX. Here are his reports as they come in. He is using instant messenger from his phone.

update: audio file from when the wrong numbers were announced

In chronological order. Newest updates are at the bottom. Last updated 9:31 pm, eastern

– 9:10 pm –

it’s pretty nuts - lost sign in sheets, ad hoc procedural decisions, etd.
in the beginning, everyone was told they could sign in (indicating the candidate) and then leave
if they didn’t want to be a delegate
[my wife] did, so we stayed
then, when the initial count of hillary voters for one of the precincts was off by an obvious order of magnitude… [update: see audio file above]
now we’re doing resolutions
1 - impeach bush/cheney
(didn’t see that coming)
anyway - a bunch of signup sheets were missing
and the chair suggested that we allocate the delegates based on who was still here (!)
(a bunch of folks had left - I would have if not for [my wife])
but then someone came out of the back with a bunch of sheets
and they’re still counting
there was zero control over the sheets
so I don’t think we can be too confident
- next resolution has to do with inaccurate vote counts in the past - hehe

– 9:20 –

rats - hillary took both precincts
but by a narrow margin
the total vote counts sounded sane
hundred twenty something total for one precint, hundred two for the other - but i’m going to count
about 100 still in the room - makes sense to think about that many left
back into 4 groups - one O & one H for each precinct
now voting on delegates, after hearing resolutions
there’s usually no competition for delegates.
right now a green party convert is stumping to become an obama delegate
our precinct gets 5 delegates for obama, and 12 people signed up for it ([my wife] among them)
we also get 5 alternates (makes sense), and so the delegates are expressing which they want to be
looks like we pared down to 10 and agreed to split off the alternates
no vote needed, and [my wife]’s a delegate - we’re taking off (baby’s cranky)

Josh had this to say after he got home:

John: well… from what you told me it seems like some pile of sheets came from nowhere
John: magically
yeah — someone had stashed them in the back
John: or at least– they could have been pre-processed by some party before they made their reappearance
there were enough signers present, and the sheets were in plain sight…
that it would have been foolish to try large fraud, I imagine
but the control really wasn’t there — one or more sheets could have been lost
all the addresses and voter reg (or drivers license) numbers will be verified
so from that perspective, it’s probably better than those damn machines we used for the primary :)

ShareThis

Why I like Obama better than Clinton

Published

John

on 3/3/2008

in general

. 7 Comments

I rarely feel strong support for one Democratic candidate over another in the primaries. Heck, I can usually barely get myself to vote for the Democrat in the general election. So what makes me feel so strongly about Obama? Well, there are 3 main reasons:

His stance against the war

Obama was against the war before it began, has criticized the war since then, and is now running a campaign centered around ending the war. All the way through he has spoken the plain truth about it: (a) there was no compelling evidence that there were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (b) we should have been focusing our military efforts on quelling terrorist networks (c) we need to work on improving our reputation and relationships with other countries and cultures in order to not incite terrorism in the first place.

His meta-policies

Reading Obama and Clinton’s policies side-by-side, one will discover that they are pretty similar. I happen to think that Obama’s are presented much more clearly and intelligently on his website, and smack of greater sophistication and detail, but it is arguable that this has more to do with audience targeting than with the quality of the goals and final details of the policies themselves.

What really impresses me about Obama, and sets him apart from Clinton, are his “meta-policies”, if you will; his policies and goals about government.

Obama wants to make our government more transparent, more accessible, and more accountable. To this end he has done the following work while in the US Senate:

Introduced the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires the full disclosure of all entities or organizations receiving federal funds beginning in fiscal year (FY) 2007 on a website maintained by the Office of Management and Budget (http://www.usaspending.gov/).
Put together, with Russ Feingold, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which amends parts of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. It strengthens public disclosure requirements concerning lobbying activity and funding, places more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.
Introduced the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections, including fraudulent flyers and automated phone calls, as witnessed in the 2006 midterm elections

(Not all have passed. Click through to see current status of each piece of legislation. Descriptions lifted from Wikipedia and slightly modified.)
Now, during his campaign, he has an incredibly impressive set of policies on using technology to improve government transparency and accessibility. I could give you an overview, or I could just direct you to Lawrence Lessig’s fantastic piece on why he supports Obama, which mostly addresses technology and transparency. In a nutshell: Obama wants to make government information and information as easy to access as your favorite blog. On top of that, he has the most sophisticated position on Net Neutrality. (quick definition of Net Neutrality: not allowing the phone/cable company to charge you more to access some websites vs. others, which is what they want to start doing.)

Previously mentioned here: this fantastic lecture Obama gave on government accountability, transparency, and ethics.

His style of politics

Obama has run an extremely long and beautiful grassroots campaign. He has established an extremely impressive network of paid staffers in most (all?) states. He has engaged his supporters using accessible and innovative online tools. He has the best website, by far.

He has not accepted any lobbyist contributions. (see extensive discussion of this topic here).

He has been able to spool up and sustain an enormous, million-dollar-a-day, grassroots fundraising machine.

Only 10 percent of Clinton contributors did not donate the legal maximum $2,300 for her primary campaign. In contrast, only three percent of Obama donors gave the maximum. The rest of the cash came from small sums from many more people. (source)

He has completely refrained from what, to my understanding, most people would call “negative” campaigning / mud slinging. As of a couple weeks ago, the Clinton campaign can’t say the same…

That’s why Obama is such a different candidate to me. I’d love to hear what folks out there think about the differences (or lack thereof) between the two candidates, if I am buying into hype, or if I am missing some important points.

ShareThis

Announcing obamasresume.org

Published

John

on 3/1/2008

in general

. 0 Comments

I’ve been putting together another Obama website the past couple of days: obamasresume.org.

ObamasResume.org aims to put together a simple and complete description of Barack Obama’s career, which will be useful for Obama supporters to show their Clinton supporter friends. Anyone may edit this wiki.

The content is a little sparse right now — but that’s why it’s a wiki! Head on over and help me fill it in, so that we can start sending it around to our well-meaning-but-tragically-uninformed Clinton-supporter friends in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, Rhode Island, Wyoming, and Missouri.

ShareThis

Barack Obama’s technology platform

Published

John

on 2/10/2008

in general

. 1 Comment

One of the areas where Obama impresses me is his technology platform. Not only is he hip on net neutrality and media consolidation, but he has a BIG emphasis on using technology to make the government more accessible and transperant. I was going to compare his platform to Clinton’s, but as far as I can tell she does not even have a page about technology policy.

Check out this list of people in technology I respect who also support Obama:

Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google

He is the most inspirational, he has the integrity to stand up for what is right and admit when he was wrong (a quality that Clinton seems to lack), and he is honest in answering questions where other candidates are political.

Most importantly, Obama is willing and able to work with everyone, not just with his base. Clinton wants to reach out to republicans and others who disagree with her, but the level of animosity that many others have towards her may make it difficult for her to do so. McCain and Romney seem to be intent on playing towards their base, and have not shown how they will reach out. Obama has shown he can do it — he can be the president that brings the whole country together and leads us in a new direction.
Greg DeKoenigsberg, über geek, Fedora community leader, something or other in Red Hat communications, OLPC evangelist
Lawrence Lessig, intellectual property guru / free culture messiah

… I believe in the policies. Clearly on the big issues — the war and corruption. Obama has made his career fighting both. But also on the issues closest to me. … Obama has committed himself to important and importantly balanced positions.
The XKCD guy, (makes this comic)

Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy … others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons … and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core…

Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one. He’s sponsored legislation to restrict gifts to Congress by industry representatives (which also carried a whole slew of anti-corruption measures that were a breath of fresh air). He’s fought against vote fraud. He’s been pushing for election and lobbying reform from the start, and in his campaign he’s refused to take lobbyist money.

Clinton has done nothing of the sort, and when questioned seems baffled that anyone would have a problem with what is, by any reasonable standard, bribery. I find her basic lack of integrity troubling, and I think as president she would continue fighting to maintain the status quo.
Tim Wu, intellectual property guru, coined the term “Net Neutrality”, professor at Columbia law school
Karl Fogel, software engineer, open source software community leader, copyright reformer

Barack Obama is exactly what he seems: terrifically smart, well-intentioned, utterly free of the personal insecurities that drive far too much of the decision-making in the current administration, and eminently electable. He stands a much better chance of winning against McCain than any other Democratic candidate would have. The canard that he’s light on policy simply confuses a primary-season tactic for a general electoral strategy. There’s no point trying to out-wonk Hillary Clinton, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t done his homework: when the time comes, it’s there in reserve.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, very successful entrepreneur/investor/visionary, down to earth and fun blogger

Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer.If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it.

Having met him and then having watched him for the last 12 months run one of the best-executed and cleanest major presidential campaigns in recent memory, I have no doubt that Senator Obama has the judgment, bearing, intellect, and high ethical standards to be an outstanding president — completely aside from the movement that has formed around him, and in complete contradition to the silly assertions by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns that he’s somehow not ready.

ShareThis

JJB Blog