Lone Star Democracy Builders Association

Michel Ventura, Two Hours A Day:

How much time are your convictions worth? Two hours a day? One? Two a week, a month? A vote every four years? How much time is it worth to you to live in a free and just country? On the answer to that question the future of the United States depends. Donating money to causes is fine and necessary, but it doesn't get you off the hook; active human energy is what generates change. How much time is it worth to you, to live in a free and just country? [...]

Groups of individuals, acting locally, leading themselves, created the environment in which leaders like [Martin Luther] King and others emerged. It doesn't start with a leader. It starts with you. It starts with people getting together with others whom they trust, discussing what they think the problems are, focusing on an issue, deciding upon an action. [...]

You can't wait for anybody else to figure it out for you. You get together with people you trust and you figure it out yourselves. Bite off a chunk of the trouble for yourself. There is no hope without you. There is no solution without you. Unless you get into motion, there will be no movement.

Marjane Satrapi, from an interview in Salon:

If I have any advice, it's that every day that you wake up, don't say, "This is normal." Every day, wake up with this idea that you have to defend your freedom.

Posted by Skye at 9:47 PM in Inspiration | Permalink

As a former volunteer coordinator, I'm pretty picky about the volunteer opportunities I'm willing to engage in. I'd like my effort to mean something, to make something, or to change something. As a stakeholder in this country, I have pretty high standards for the groups that are working to fix the mess we're in - if they don't do a good job, they're betraying the folks who are giving them time and money, as well as the "cause."

Volunteer-run organizations, or even organizations with small staffs, are often overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do. But volunteers are one of the most valuable resources for helping them manage that work.

What have we found so far in our attempts to volunteer for local political organizations?

The main problem seems to be completing the connection. Glenn has remarked that prior to the election, making a donation to a candidate didn't necessarily get him on the candidate's mailing list. I definitely noticed that volunteering for a candidate didn't result in any outreach to me to connect more with the Party - rather, I was treated simply as a resource for the election. I've also volunteered for one City Council campaign and one conference, but never received any information from the volunteer coordinators. Glenn had a similar experience with a Party organization.

So how can we help fix this, rather than just complaining about it? ;) I've thought of two ideas:

• Provide feedback on individual encounters. Since I have attended three Democracy for Texas meetings and have yet to get on the mailing list - or receive any response to my volunteer offer - I'm sending a friendly note to the organizers with some suggestions, and an offer to help.
• When volunteering, ask for more information. Ask where you can sign up on the state Party mailing list, ask what opportunities are available after this project, ask if any other organization could use your help. Start training the volunteer coordinators to think bigger.

Basically, I need to put my interest in making things better ahead of my pique at being ignored. Missing a connection alone is a blunder, but it may not be enough to differentiate between organizations that are ineffective in what they do, and organizations that could use a little help being effective in managing their resources.

Posted by Skye at 2:40 PM in Texas Organizations | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am aware that blogs are not part of daily life for the vast majority of Americans. I do not believe that the development of blogs represents a huge leap forward for human evolution, or that mainstream media will be replaced by blogs.

However, I'm fascinated by the ease with which individuals can now create websites and end up with strangers reading them. People who would have previously been talking to their friends in bars about what the Democratic Party or the President or Wal-Mart should do can now percolate those ideas much further - with luck and a bit of self-promotion. How does this change political discourse?

The writers on this blog and a few other folks (who haven't yet started blogging...) started a small study group after the election to figure out what to DO to fix the mess this country's gotten into. I've been around nonprofits long enough to see a wide variety of effectiveness, and I wanted to make sure that any effort I put in was going to an organization or a project that had a chance of succeeding.

So when I started thinking that we could make a directory of political blogs in Texas, I wanted to make sure that there was a reason for it. Why would a project such as a political blog directory be a useful thing? Is it just because I like making lists?

The Blogosphere: Insiders versus Outsiders gave me the first hint that there was something more going on with blogs than I could articulate. Here's the key observation:

The right blogosphere operates largely as part of the greater Republican message machine. Many of its bloggers are already part of that infrastructure, working as journalists for conservative publications, writing books and lecturing. Independent bloggers on the right hail from all walks of life, but the leading voices are either part of the political machine itself, like Mike Krempasky of RedState, or closely connected to the conservative media and think tank infrastructure, like Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin and the PowerLine bloggers. [...] As Garance Franke-Ruta writes in the April issue of The American Prospect, the right-wing blogosphere has also recently become useful to long-established political operatives such as Morton Blackwell, mentor to iconic GOP campaign strategists Karl Rove and Lee Atwater.

The article by Franke-Ruta is called Blogged Down, and it scares me silly. The Right is basically using the blogs in its camp to attack the mainstream media, and they're succeeding. They're also operating Internet Activist schools that train young conservatives on how to blog effectively, including presenting themselves as just average folks instead of conservative activists.

If there's one thing I've learned from our ongoing examination of how the Right works, it's that we shouldn't ignore tools they find useful. But since we don't want to be them, how are we using these tools differently?

You can read the Franke-Ruta for one example: the takedown of Jeff Gannon/Jeff Guckert, the bogus reporter who got press access to the White House. Franke-Ruta says this is an example of how the left blogosphere goes after conservative activists, whereas the right targets the independent press. I have my own reservations about how independent the press is, but I take his point.

Ted on Crooked Timber suggests that:

I suspect that, to the extent that this is helpful, it’s more about creating a community of activists than it is about the blogs in and of themselves. I strongly suspect that a person who starts and maintains a political blog is likely to end up significantly more involved as an activist (volunteering, donating, making calls and emails to politicians and media) than the same person would be if he hadn’t started one.

(His post was triggered by Focus on the Family encouraging its members to start socially conservative blogs. Again I say, if they think it's useful, let's not ignore it.)

And then let's talk about blogging in Texas. As I mentioned in one of my posts yesterday, the Harris County Democratic Party has supported a group of bloggers to start Houston Democrats in an effort to make more information available about local events and action opportunities while energizing Party members.

Texas Tuesdays, the domain name for which seems to have gone bonk temporarily, was a successful group effort by a group of Texas bloggers to highlight and funnel campaign donations to Democratic candidates all over Texas for the 2004 election. This mirrors the success of some of the large national blogs like DailyKos in raising funds for candidates across the country.

Finally, I've been noticing lately that Texas candidates for office, including Chris Bell, are arranging phone conferences with "prominent" political bloggers like Charles Kuffner and Amanda Marcotte while planning their runs. Mark Strama is hosting a discussion session with bloggers at Democracy for Texas about how blogging affects the work done by legislators. These folks believe that bloggers are a valuable constituency.

So if we want to get involved and share ideas, blogging is one way to get into the conversation.

Posted by Skye at 2:23 PM in Our Infrastructure | Permalink | Comments (1)

Now for some county websites, looking at the same factors as in Part I.

The Travis County Party website has current info on the front page, a very prominent link to the mailing list signup, and a link for registering to vote in the left nav. They also have a good calendar of events. The "Get Involved" page at least has some language that sounds welcoming - though they talk about becoming a precinct chair without any explanation of what that is.

Then it gets dicey.

The "Contact Us" page is apparently where you would go to find local clubs and the list of links - and the link list has some errors and formatting problems. (Their link list, though, does have some descriptive text for each link.) And the real problem, in my opinion: they created online forums, but the forums are dead. Only 23 registered users, and only 10 posts since the end of March. That looks embarrassing. At least, staff should have gone in and posted more content than this.

The Harris County Democratic Party, by contrast, is sponsoring a blog called Houston Democrats which I've been reading for a while. It focuses on local events, calls to action, and getting people motivated by reporting some of the bad, bad things that Republicans are doing. :) Without much ugly language, though, which is refreshing. It has a very positive, constructive tone. There is a prominent link to the blog on the Harris County Party homepage - which right now also has a list called "Good Things From Democrats." Nice work. (I like it a lot better than the current news on the front pages of the state party, which is about hating Tom DeLay. The Travis County Party has an article that reports the court decision, but focuses on Ann Kitchen. Much better.)

The organization of their navigation is also a dream come true, and includes a link to a volunteer form that I find much more helpful than the other ones I've seen. It's easy to find local club info. They have a few too many links that open other windows, but then again I think one is too many.

Using Google I had found this article on precinct chairing on the Harris County website, which I cannot find through the site's nav, and I found something very, very similar at Bexar County's site. I like these because to someone like me, "Precinct Chair" is abstract and intimidating. I need information about what that would look like before I'd be willing to do it. As Practical Progressive Activist points out in a blog post, this kind of work is similar to many kinds of volunteer effort:

There are precinct chairs in my area who have had the position for years and years and years. They do it because they want to be the election judge. BUT, they don't want to do the basic organizational work such as block walking, passing out flyers, and building a precinct committee. Since there has been such a shortage of precinct chairs in the past, I think the philosophy has been that somebody who would do even a little work is better than nobody.

But that doesn't mean it's not needed. Just like work on the Parties' electronic presence is needed in Travis County and at the State level. I know that late last year, I was criticizing their sites and strategy without having been there much. Now I have a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses - and better yet, what we could do to help.

Posted by Skye at 7:16 PM in Texas Organizations | Permalink

I took a tour through several Democratic Party websites lately, looking specifically for information about precinct organizing. Along the way, I checked on a few other things that I thought would be crucial on a Party website:

• regular updates
• easy mailing list signup
• local information
• voting information
• list of other sites to visit (to help visitors bond more with the party)
• inspiration for getting involved

Here are my impressions of the State Party site. I'll put the county parties in a separate post.

The Texas Democratic Party website has some good stuff going on. The front page is regularly updated with press releases. The mailing list signup page is prominently linked from the front page and the form is clean and easy to understand. And it's only 2 clicks to find your county contact. Just about every page has a logo that says "Register to Vote."

The list of links is basically a laundry list, and several links are filed in the wrong place. No description of why you'd want to visit any of these folks - and it seems a little strange to me that we're writing out the URLs and making them the links. It takes up a lot of extra space and makes the page harder to scan. But this is a minor complaint.

Unfortunately, there is some very, very bad stuff as well. When I visited a couple of weeks ago, the "Get Involved" page was just a list of actions you could take, none of which were very well explained or very inspiring. When I go to a page like this, I want to be excited, and to do that, I have to understand what the possibilities are. Why would I want to schedule a grassroots training? Why would I want to contact my county party, and what should I say when I dot? And why can't I volunteer - do y'all not use volunteers?

The "Get Involved" page has now been de-hanced with ugly, ugly graphics. I don't know about you, but I don't read drop-shadowed fuschia on electric blue very well. The choices for involvement aren't described any better - check out the page you get when you click on "schedule a grassroots training."

And OH MY GOD people, the Grassroots Guide is an 83 page PDF with no graphics that still weighs in at 33 MEG!!! It takes about 5 seconds for each page to render in Acrobat. There's no way anyone with a dial-up connection is going to see this. Since I am trying to be helpful, I opened it in the full version of Acrobat and tried to reduce the file size - but there was some kind of error. So I'm stuck with a document I can't stand to read unless I print it, and I can't imagine how long that would take.

Finally, and these are bad ones: as far as I can tell, there is only one page in Spanish on the entire site. Carrie's going to have to tell me what it says, 'cause my French only gets me so far in reading Spanish. Then check out "Why Am I A Democrat?" Five men, one woman, only one visibly Hispanic surname.

Time to get to work, y'all.

Posted by Skye at 6:37 PM in Texas Organizations | Permalink

From the latest Texans for Texas:

The East Gulf Coast Republican Assembly is hosting a 5-day grassroots educational cruise in the Caribbean!

The cruise ship Ecstasy will depart from Galveston, Texas on Saturday, September 23, 2006 and will return Thursday, September 28, 2006.

The educational program will be conducted during the cruise and taught by seasoned political activists from Americans for Prosperity. You will learn:

• How to build coalitions;
• How to speak effectively with legislators and the media;
• How to work effectively at the local, state and federal levels of government;
• And much more!

All constitutionally-minded individuals, of any political persuasion, are invited. We hope that we can all become better equipped and organized to make us more effective in preserving our nation. This program will take place during a cruise on a Carnival luxury liner, hosting the finest of recreational, dining, and living facilities; as well as providing the finest of meeting rooms and training equipment for educational advantages.

Carnival requires an initial deposit of $100 by May 25, 2005 to hold reservations. Total cost is as low as $500.00.

Hoping that they spend more time drinking pina coladas than learning...

Posted by GlennM at 9:30 AM in Who Are The Republicans? | Permalink

An opinion piece in the NYTimes proposes to do away with the Surgeon General and replace the position with a National Nurse. Makes sense to me if we're really interested in cheaper (preventative) health care.

Posted by GlennM at 4:12 PM in Health Care | Permalink

So Rep. Hartnett's last-minute amendments to SB 419 passed. The first one imposed severe restrictions on late-term abortions in ways that can seriously endanger pregnant women's lives and put families through unimaginable emotional pain. It doesn't matter if your kid has a thirty-second life expectancy; if you found out too late because you didn't have health insurance, hey, that's your fault, you layabout, and you're going to have to go through labor and give birth because we say so. The second one required parental consent for minors to have abortions. It's not as bad as HB 1212, which got killed last week, but it's still bad. It makes it so much harder for young women in abusive homes to have a range of reproductive options available. And who exactly do you think is most likely to be in need of an abortion, someone who's got a sitcom-perfect relationship with her parents or someone whose parents are beating her up or who had a family member rape her? Hello? Did someone miss Molly Ivins' heartbreaking column on this?

Why are there no cranky email alerts flying around about this except from organizations that work solely on reproductive rights? Why did the TX blogosphere largely ignore these events?

I give props to Rep. Pena for his play-by-play, to Byron over at Burnt Orange Report for for his mention, and to the fine folks at PinkDome for noting how left-field and sneaky the amendments were. But what I haven't seen is much outrage.

When other things happen that involve far less risk of, you know, being kicked out of your house or being maimed or killed, my RSS reader and inbox fill up with overblown rhetoric before you can say spam.

So why not this time? Because Ds take women for granted, that's why. We depend on women to vote Democratic and then hope they won't notice when we ignore their interests during session. Also because many Ds are just too damn spineless to stand up for repro rights for fear of '06 election repurcussions. These two issues are controversial, to be sure, but when other Republicans are standing up and basically saying, hello, have some compassion for families going through this, and Molly's already told us what these girls are going to go through... come on! Who the hell are we if we're not standing up for the most vulnerable among us?

Let me sum up:

Dear Women: All your bodies are belong to us. Love, the Lege
P.S. We don't care enough to do anything about that. Love, most of the Democrats

Posted by Carrie at 10:45 PM in Venting & Who Are The Democrats? & Women | Permalink

Max Sawicky had a superb post on "what exactly are we talking about?" a few weeks back. Specifically about Social Security, for which his blog is a great resource, but not exclusively.

Posted by Shane at 2:39 PM in Who Are The Democrats? | Permalink

Gristmill is one of my favorite blogs, even though I had been out of the loop on environmental issues for quite some time. The tone is generally witty and insightful, but without taking a know-it-all stance.

This article on individual choices versus systems change made me smile:

A humane, sustainable human society is not an individual undertaking. It cannot succeed solely through individual willpower. Already our culture works to atomize us, to make us feel like islands of consumer desire whose sole function is to accumulate as much as possible. It discourages us from thinking of ourselves as involved in communities that impose obligations and responsibilities. But if it is to mean anything substantial, a new ethic of sustainability must be collective. It's going to be about community, about our mutual bonds and mutual care.

Whether or not you recycle your plastic makes not one tiny iota of difference in the grand scheme of things -- really, it doesn't. If our society's survival rests on individuals' ability to refrain from easily-available ecological sins, we are screwed. It's the infrastructure that matters: the laws, the economic relationships, the physical structures we inhabit. [...] We have to establish a system in which it's easy and natural for people to live sustainably.

I don't know how to accomplish that cultural transformation, but I do know that for me, it has never been enough to make my own choices. Everything I do affects the world, and I feel a deep responsibility to contribute to changing the systems.

I don't know why it has taken me so long to realize that electoral politics are one part of that responsibility. Maybe it's just the next step in my evolution - from direct social services, to social services policy, to working on the leadership that makes the policy.

Posted by Skye at 9:11 PM in Inspiration | Permalink

The subtitle of this very small book is "Know Your Values and Frame the Debate," and I was expecting it make good on its claim that it's a practical resource for progressives. It's more of a series of essays about the concept of framing, values in politics, and the importance of thinking about identity and values more than policy and programs.

I would definitely recommend reading it - especially since it's only 118 pages - because it made me think about why I believe in the things I do, and it gave me a first step towards learning how to talk about those things without getting mad and losing all clarity of thought.

Here are a few bits that caught my eye:

Republicans have not just message discipline, but a clear sense of the ideas and values that their messages come from. I'm going to put these passages slightly out of the order they appear in the book to make his point:

One of the major mistakes liberals make is that they think they have all the ideas they need. They think that all they lack is media access. Or maybe some major bullet phrases, like partial-birth abortion.

But Luntz is about much more than language. He recognizes that the right use of language starts with ideas - with the right framing of the issues, a framing that reflects a consistent conservative moral perspective... For each issue, he explains what the conservative reasoning is, what the progressive reasoning is, and how the progressive arguments can best be attacked from a conservative perspective.

When was the last time you saw something like that from the Democratic Party? In issue advocacy, I usually see fact sheets, flyers, and action alerts that simply preach to the choir. If the choir was big enough, that would be a good strategy. But I'm not sure it is.

Lakoff gives a few hints on what we can do to "back up" the candidates who are running for office:

Progressives need to reclaim the moral high ground - of the grand American tradition of freedom, fairness, human dignity, and full equality under the law. ... We all have to put our ideas out there so that candidates can readily refer to them.

He also does an interesting analysis of the public's reaction to the lies of the Bush Administration:

Most people will grant that even if the statement happened to be false, if he believed it, wasn't trying to deceive, and was not trying to gain advantage or harm anyone, then there was no lie. ... These have been among the administration's defenses. ... The falsehoods have been revealed and they, in themselves, do not matter much to most people.

But lying in itself is not and should not be the issue. The real issue is a betrayal of trust.

He goes on to argue that the context of misleading the public (i.e. sending their children to war based on false pretenses) is more important than the specific issue of whether this or that statement was a lie. This amused me when I think of all the energy spent in the liberal blogosphere and elsewhere on "documenting" the lies told by the Administration. To most people, it's just what politicians do. They expect it, and they don't make decisions based on that behavior.

Posted by Skye at 3:18 PM in Book Reviews & How To Communicate | Permalink

I think Tom DeLay would be fine with me having this book about his life out for over a week past its due date. He is not a man who cares about playing by the rules.

Lou Dubose, one co-author of "The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress," will be a guest speaker at DemocracyFest 2005 here in Austin in June. It should be interesting to hear him talk about politics, because "The Hammer" isn't just a biography of Tom Delay. It's more of a wake-up call about how much the "game" in Washington has changed since Tom DeLay's ilk started their climb.

It's scary stuff. Basically, DeLay and his people have turned Washington into a pay-to-play arena, even more than I thought possible. They're all about power, except when they're about trying to start a war in the Middle East to bring on the Rapture. And the changes they've made aren't just problems right now - they're going to be problems for quite a few years to come.

Here are three items that particularly caught my eye:

• DeLay has supported candidates who will be loyal to him in a very organized way, with everything from campaign donations to a candidate school, including a video on effective use of yard signs.
• Dubose and Reid clam that the Republican Party has an edge over the Democrats in using college organizations as a "proving ground" for young party members. (I'd like to investigate this more.)
• Most of the Contract with America's policy ideas didn't get passed, but many procedural changes were made during that time: eliminating the seniority system for committee chair positions, setting term limits on committee chairs, and cutting committee and party research staffs that used to produce bill summaries. These and other changes concentrate power with the leadership, which means that the minority party becomes irrelevant and compromise is unnecessary.

For a better overall summary than I could write, check out this interview with Lou Dubose in Mother Jones. I would recommend reading that article, then only picking up the book if you like gory details.

To catch up on the current DeLay status, check out the Media Matters page on DeLay, or the House of Scandal.

Posted by Skye at 2:49 PM in Book Reviews & Who Are The Republicans? | Permalink

The Regular has a very interesting post summarizing some research into the 2004 presidental election:

Ruy runs the numbers on the crucial swing constituency of white working-class voters, and defends his definitions against criticsm from Chris Bowers of MyDD. At issue is whether the primary factor in defining the white working class, for purposes of demographic analysis, should be lack of a college degree (Teixeira's contention) or a certain income level (Bowers' preference). Ruy cites his earlier work in a book on this question, and sticks to his guns: "And among non-college-educated whites with $50,000-$75,000 in household income, Bush beat Kerry by a shocking 41 points (70-29), while leading by only 5 points (52-47) among college-educated whites at the same income level."

Links to the original articles on The Regular site.

In a related article, Slate talks about why the working class has been turning conservative. The writer dismisses a number of theories, including the one that says that conservatism is a pathology.

Posted by Ben at 10:48 AM in Elections and Voting | Permalink

Here's an article by a Catholic on why the religious extremists are going too far.

For finding middle ground (from the conservative side), it does a good job of saying what was good & bad about the protesters from the 60s. And then goes on to say why todays protesters from the far right aren't at the same level.

Posted by GlennM at 11:58 PM in Who Are The Republicans? | Permalink

The article on Montana's Governor that Carrie pointed out reminded me of something Ben's Aunt Kathy shared with us when she came to visit last year. Kathy is a district judge in St. Paul, Minneapolis. Somehow the three of us ended up discussing politics - imagine that! - and the topic turned to Jesse Ventura.

Kathy described that governor's race as having three candidates: a moderate-right guy who was afraid to alienate the right wing or the middle, so he didn't say much; a moderate-left guy who was afraid to alienate the left wing or the middle, so he didn't say much; and Jesse Ventura, who would pretty much say exactly what he thought. Kathy felt like he won because people felt like at least he was an honest person who spoke Engligh, as opposed to politicalese.

I've often wondered why the plain-speaking tactic isn't used more often. Many political speeches sound so constructed, rather than reflecting the feelings or even thoughts of the individual making the speech. I always figured that there must be a reason - polling shows this particular hot button word plays well with such-and-such group, etc. At least, that's what I was saying to myself for comfort when I watched Kerry debate Bush. :) But unless you have a truly gifted public speaker, do you lose more in connecting power than you gain in buzzword compliance when you focus so much on exact phrasing?

The best part of this article for me, though, was near the end:

Q: And how do you persuade the most conservative voters -- the ones for whom abortion and gay marriage are be-all, end-all issues -- that they should think about education and healthcare as important "moral values" too?

A: The most conservative voters? The beauty is that I only need about 50 percent to win. The most conservative voters will not even give me a shot. I don't need 100 percent of the vote.

Translation for my life: Don't waste any time on your die-hard conservative relatives. Talk to the ones who already share some of the same opinions you do.

Posted by Skye at 10:37 AM in How To Communicate | Permalink