McBush says he is using ex-cons to staff his campaign... and that we are winning the war

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Jul 22, 2008 10:26 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

Linked to campaigns: Obama for America

John McCain said today (Tuesday July 22, 2008) that most of his paid campaign workers were ex-cons on work release. 

This is not true: he was just joking (in response to a statement by a local supporter who was disappointed that the paid staffers weren't doing much for the campaign.)  His staffers are the usual mixture of college kids and older true believers.

That was not the only thing he said which was totally untrue.  He also said that we are winning the war in Iraq, that the “surge” had been a success, and that Iraqis in Basra and Kirkuk were already leading normal lives.

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event at Sununu's office, April 24 @ 11am

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Apr 21, 2008 8:56 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

MoveOn.org, an organization most of us are familiar with, asked me to host a small (or large) event in front of Sunnu's regional office in Portsmouth. (I hope it is OK to cross-promote on this forum.) They have put together a report, based on extensive polling, showing how the American people see the link between our endless war and the recession. We will be presenting this report to Sununu's staffers (he is unlikely to be there) Thursday, April 24 @ 11 am. The office is at 1 New Hampshire Avenue, Portsmouth, near the entrance to Pease.

 

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I tried to go to the FCC hearing in Boston on net neutrality

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Feb 25, 2008 11:55 PM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

There was a dramatic FCC "en bank" hearing about net neutrality today (Feb. 25, 2008) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School (which is the World's Most Famous Law School's center for studying issues related to new media & the 'net.) I heard about it through the Boston Second Life Meetup group, and we weren't expecting to have any trouble getting into the venue, which was a large auditorium. However when I got there two police officers were blocking the stairs, because the room was overflowing. The rumor amongst us rabble who lingered in the lobby was that Verizon had paid stooges to come in two hours ahead of time and take up all the seats.

However, Comcast were the big villains of the day. In fact, they were what drove me to take the day off and (try to) attend the hearing. They have been blocking certain types of traffic, especially any type of file uploads. Their main adversary at the meeting was BitTorrent, a peer to peer networking provider (for "lawful" content only their CEO was quick to add... although it is not clear what "lawful" means these days when American democracy is just barely clinging to life.) Thanks to the paranoia about copyright violators and hackers, Peer to Peer networking is a controversial subject (and in one of the funniest non-sequiturs of the day, Comcast's Exec VP David Cohen made a big point of the fact that the Harvard Medical School has banned p2p on its networks... evidently the fact that a medical school, which has all sorts of special security and privacy concerns, bans a technology justifies a common-carrier telecom provider from doing the same.) But it's not just BitTorrent and its less commercially acceptable sisters like LimeWire etc. who are being blocked: SecondLife usage has been severely disrupted by Comcast and other cable providers.

Broadband internet in the USA is effectively a duopoly: your choices are the local cable TV company or the local "last-mile" phone company. (The median number of broadband providers in any given area is about 1.5.) Even though there are dozens of cable and phone companies... in most areas cable is provided by Comcast and phone is provided by either Verizon, Qwest or AT&T (all three of which are descendants of the old AT&T which was forcibly dismembered 25 years ago and which seems now to be just a few years away from reassembling itself.)

We have a crucial choice: do we want to keep the internet as a free many-to-many medium, or do we want to centralize it in the hands of the Comcasts of the world? The people favor the first choice, but sadly our voice is not always the one which gets heard. I actually met Comcast's Cohen in the lobby: he was obsessed with the idea that his remarks might turn up on Youtube. Even though I am sure he knew this going in, he was very upset with the fact that anyone could rip the video of his remarks and put it up on Youtube. (Although he did have the slight consolation of knowing that the video would not be available for a while— although there was a live audio feed which I listened to in the overflow areas for a couple of hours before heading back to NH.)

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One Democrat's Primary Day & Morning After

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Jan 9, 2008 10:26 AM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

I probably should have stayed up and written a posting on Primary Night itself. I got back home (after a fairly long day in Durham, Dover and briefly Manchester) a not-too-bad hour (11:48pm.) But I went to sleep at my usual hour and woke up to a New Year's Day feeling (only without any football on TV and without a new year to look forward too.) The morning after, like Election Day itself, was unseasonably warm, and the signs in the snow bank are leaning at odd angles.

Click Read More for the rest of this post

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One Democrat's Primary Eve

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Jan 7, 2008 11:25 PM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

I spent most of the day campaigning and/or rallying for John Edwards. However, I began at 8am hoping to harrass Willard Mitt Romney at Young's Restaurant in the college town of Durham (where I live.) Willard M. has scheduled several visits to Young's during the last year or so. He never showed up at any of them. He didn't show up this time either. I would be tempted to think that the Young's thing is a running joke of some sort, were it not for the fact that W. Mitt has no sense of humor. (Young's, by the way, is where I first met John Edwards, back in the summer of 2003. For months afterwards, whenever Edwards was mentioned on New England Cable News, the network would run a closeup shot of him at this typical coffee shop, taken by a camera just inches above my head, and hence from a point of view virtually identical to my subjective point of view.)

After messing around with my web site and clearing away unsold Second Life Christmas trees from my avi's land, I went over to Dover to the Edwards office where I got a "turf" of about 40 houses, just a few blocks from my house. It was a mild, cloudy day, which would have been good for canvassing were it not for the ice all over the place, especially on the steps to people's front doors. Luckily, I was in a neighborhood where people still use the doors to their houses (rather than entering through their garages.) However, there weren't many people to talk to. The first person was a friendly gentleman in his 70s who was chipping ice on his driveway: however, he was a Republican and the brother of the man on my list. The second person was an obnoxious person who was pissed off by all the phone calls and people knocking on my door. As she shut the door on me, I started to make some remark about the value of her vote and Kenya and Pakistan (where people die for their votes.) It got a little better with the third person on my list, an old friend and ally who is going with Obama, but who was pleased to see me canvassing.  I finished the first turf  at lunchtime, drove back to Dover and got a second one:  my own block and a couple of neighboring ones (plus a third street 2 miles away included by mistake because someone mixed up "Magrath Way" with the next street in alphabetical order, which was "Marden Way.")  I started by coding myself "JRE," i.e. a committed Edwards supporter. 

Durham is a college town, and the neighborhoods I canvassed today were primarily handsome but generally unostentatious houses built between the 1920s and 1960s for faculty. In recent years, the faculty have been priced out of the town: many of the 30- and 40-somethings who bought the original owners are financial and high-tech executives. The executives, interestingly, are just as radical as the professors. My next door neighbor, for example, who is in the mutual funds business, is a Kucinich supporter. Durham is mostly Obama Country, especially amongst the professors: they like Edwards, but Obama is their guy. This is not shocking: aside from the fact that he is himself a professor, he has been endorsed by our Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter (who lives in Rochester, but who grew up in Durham.)

In the evening, after eating lasagna and making a few pages of phone calls at the Dover Edwards office, I headed to the final rally of the campaign, at the Dover Elks Lodge. Some of my neighbors showed up, perhaps because I canvassed their houses. I ended up as part of the backdrop of the event, up on the same proscenium stage where I once saw the late Tommy Makem singing. Edwards jumped up on a thrust stage built in front of the proscenium, and even though he was dressed in a crisp blue suit, he reminded me of a welterweight boxer. For better or worse, he is the scrappiest candidate in the race, and a fighter is what we will need during the General Election and during the years which follow George W. Bush's long-awaited departure on Januaru 20, 2009 (378 days after the Primary.)

 

 

Dawn Rally for Edwards

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Jan 4, 2008 11:54 AM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

Many of you will be envious when you hear that I was able to be at the 6:15 am "Welcome Rally" for John Edwards in Manchester, NH. About a dozen of us gathered in deep-frozen Dover, NH and headed over to an old mill building Manchester to give John and Elizabeth (as well as Kate) a warm welcome back to the Granite State. The event shows a lot of what is good about the state of politics in America and some of what is wrong.

It is great that a candidate like John Edwards can still speak the truth to power and still fight for regular working people while still being taken seriously. And even though several hundred citizens did risk hypothermia to journey to Manchester in the dark, the event still shows how marginalized the political process has become....

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Tim Horrigan's endorsement letter for John Edwards in the NH Primary

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Jan 1, 2008 5:42 PM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

On December 27th, 2007, I sent out a letter endorsing John Edwards for President to several New Hampshire papers. I am not sure if it will get published anywhere: the papers are all glutted with letters. The Portsmouth Herald sent me an auto-reply a few days later indicating that one if its editors had deleted my message unread. Foster's Daily Democrat might run the letter, but they ran another letter of mine (about Barack Obama) in late December.

To the Editor:

When I was in 2nd Grade, I placed a Barry Goldwater bumper sticker on the back of my red wagon, which I pulled all over my neighborhood. I changed parties by the time I was in high school, but I still believe that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! And that is why I am backing John Edwards in the Democratic Presidential Primary: he is committed with all his heart and soul to the defense of liberty and the pursuit of justice. John Edwards does not believe in the tired old Democratic Party politics of triangulation and me-too-ism. He has a strong progressive agenda for rebuilding America and restoring our freedoms. He is the only candidate talking explicitly about halting the hollowing out of our nation's economy. He is the candidate who can best lead us— the American people— into the tough battles which lie ahead of us as we take our nation back from the multinational corporations and the special interests.

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Huckabee robo-dials NH voters with push poll... even Democrats!

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Dec 16, 2007 8:00 PM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

Mike Huckabee is making push poll calls in NH as well as Iowa... or at least something named "Common Sense on the Issues" is making them on his behalf. These are positive push polls... if you say you're not voting for Huckabee, you are (if you don't hang up first) eventually subjected to a series of what would seem like positive talking points if you were a rightwinger. (To a leftist like me, they mostly sounded bad, aside from the fact that he recently renewed his vows to his wife of 30 years.) The call came from someone or something called "PS 07" @ 703-378-2990. I don't know why they contacted me, since Timothy Horrigan is a somewhat well-known partisan Democrat.

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Hillary in General Election Mode @ UNH campus 11-01-2007

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Nov 1, 2007 10:53 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

During the debate earlier this week in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton was justifiably ridiculed by John Edwards for saying she was moving into "General Election Mode" even though (as she herself points out in her speeches) no votes have been cast yet.  Her speech on a grey November afternoon in Durham, NH was, however, very much in General Election Mode.

For starters, during her UNH speech, she never even acknowledged that anyone else was running for the Democratic nomination.  (Although, in Philadelphia, there were half a dozen other candidates on stage with her, all of whom politely but firmly took issue with her stands on the issues.)  Strategically, this is understandable: she is very far ahead in the polls, and also in terms of locking up the endorsements of the party's apparatchiks.  The only way she can lose is if 1.) her campaign implodes and 2.) one or two candidates emerge from the pack as alternatives to Hillary.

She is clearly going to great pains not to implode: her presentation was carefully crafted not to say anything too controversial (and not to say anything about drivers licenses, of course.)  Unlike most of her competitors, who like to give brief presentations before going to Q&A, she answered no questions at all, not even on the "rope line" after the speech (although she did spend a good ten or fifteen minutes out there.)  Indeed, aside from the speech itself, the issues were avoided: there were for example, no stacks of issue papers available at the door, and no advocacy groups were encouraged to participate in the event.  Even though she laid out a number of strong policy positions, this event was about Hillary the presumptive nominee, not Hillary the policy advocate.  Her speech was designed to present a progressive agenda in a way which didn't directly confront the cliches of the right.  She came out in favor of universal health care and education and peace and all that good stuff, but she didn't say much about how she would actually accomplish those things.  Unfortunately for Hillary, the strongest voices amongst her competition are coming from the left... Edwards (whom I am leaning towards), Kucinich, and even Obama are all unabashed progressives.  They are all strongly rooted in Middle America, they are by no means Marxists (although I know Obama would have had to study Marx at Columbia during his Core Curriculum classes) but they are all unrepentant leftwingers.  (Also, the right wing noise machine is going label as a "Marxist" whoever the Democratic nominee turns to be... and in fact they are already calling Hillary a Marxist.)

The most interesting part of her speech was the section about "clean energy."  (This section even had a little controversy: she ignored nuclear power, but she did come in favor of wind power, which isn't controversial per se-- except when companies try to actually build wind turbines in a specific location.)  She claimed that green energy jobs would be jobs which "can't be outsourced."  I don't know about that: the actual machinery will probably be built in China, the work will be probably be done by H-1B visa holders from India and gastarbeiter from Mexico... and unless we restructure our economy pretty fast, Corporate America will try to get the work done without paying workers a living wage, without giving them health insurance, without properly training them, etc. During the education part of the speech, she spoke of how there was a skills shortage for (for example) auto and airplane mechanics.  Unfortunately, she still has the old paradigm of blue vs. white collar, with blue collars jobs being for those who don't want to go to college.  But one of the reasons our economy is in trouble is precisely because of that dichotomy.  She noted that vocational education programs are cut,  and she also noted that No Child Left behind is a bad idea partially because young people who might be learning auto mechanics and similar skills in school are now too busy being trained to take No Child Left Behind tests.  But she doesn't quite seem to fully grasp (as Edwards and some of her competitors DO grasp--- as does her husband, whose name she never mentioned in the speech) that we need to re-value work in our society.  And we definitely need to abandon the idea that actually making stuff and doing things is not important.

Anyway, I will definitely vote for her in the general election, should she get that far.  In the meantime, I find myself searching for the candidate who can push her away from the dead center and towards the progressive side of the mainstream.  So I guess, like Hillary, I am getting into General Election Mode prematurely.

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Very Quiet Before the Durham Debate

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Sep 5, 2007 9:12 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

I live three blocks away from the Whittemore Center, the University of New Hampshire's hockey rink, so I ducked out early from my monthly DFA meetup to see the pre-debate hoopla for myself. At 8:25pm, Main Street in Durham was filled with the glare of TV lights and there was a cheerful crowd of young people on the sidewalk. The crowd of students had nothing to do with the debate at all: they were lined up to buy textbooks from the Durham Book Exchange. The TV lights were illuminating Youngs Restaurant, a coffee shop which is normally closed this time of day, but which FauxNews was borrowing to use as a TV studio. One of the extras in Youngs was an old friend who theoretically should be my enemy, former state Senator and longtime GOP activist Jim Rubens.

Ten minutes later, and two blocks to the west, there were lots of signs hanging near the Whit: many from McCain and Romney but most from generally liberal advocacy groups. The Republican signs lacked the "union bat." However, there were very few people outside the arena... they were already inside. Although there were metal detectors at the gate, security was surprisingly lax. Even though we are fighting a war in Iraq, and even though the candidates are raising an alarm about "illegal aliens" and (with the exception of Huckabee) competing to see who will be the toughest about securing our borders, there was very little being done to prevent a terrorist from walking literally right up to the gate.