Give Your Voice Against 711
Nobody's talking about State Question 711, which will engrave discrimination into the Oklahoma Constitution? Yes they are! And you can lend your voice. Read on....
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Nobody's talking about State Question 711, which will engrave discrimination into the Oklahoma Constitution? Yes they are! And you can lend your voice. Read on....
I went down to the BooHaHa Parade on Brookside yesterday to get some pictures of my son's performance with the Edison Marching Band. Imagine my surprise to find myself catching John Sullivan in a little sophomoric stunt right under my nose! Thanks to my cheap little digital camera, I even have the pictures to prove it....
It started innocently enough -- Sullivan's crewe went by with little fanfare. I noted the absence of the candidate and assumed he must be off raising funds from out-of-state interests or talking to conservative church leaders who might be morally flexible enough to overlook his arrest record.
Continue reading "Sullivan Still Up to Tricks on Brookside" »
Sometimes it really IS just about voting for the best guy.
Doug Dodd, like me, is a Democrat. You probably don't agree with his positions on a number of the issues. I'm not going to try to convince you that he secretly agrees with you, or try to convince you to change how you think about such issues. Instead I want to convince you to vote for him in spite of those differences.
Why? Because sometimes it's just about choosing the better candidate. Who is going to best be able to look out for our shared interests and represent our shared values?
Continue reading "To my Republican Friends in the OK 1st District" »
Today: 26
Total Clothespins: 251
Weblog Hits: 1154
Now we're starting to get hits from this post on Daily KOS: OK-Sen: Brad Carson campaign stop in El Reno
I had no idea about this group - excellent link. If nothing else, it's great to know that there are more than 6 progressives here in OK :) I've bookmarked the link and will peruse it in depth. But at first glance, even the tag line is fantastic... "Hold your nose and be counted"
We're getting links from OkiePundit and the new Scissortail Café online community site.
OkiePundit is a long-standing progressive blog hosted by Alfalfa Bill. I'm glad to find it again (it had fallen off my radar) and add it to our "Where to find OK Progressives" list (see right margin of this page). Scissortail is not a blog, but an interactive site. If you're a progressive, you'll want to go there and check the online event calendar and list of websites -- or maybe add your own entry.
Before I came up with the Clothespin concept, I sought out alternatives. Despite my disdain for Ralph Nader's divisive tactics, I don't discount the validity of voting for third party candidates. I sought information on OK Senate Green Party Candidate Sheila Bilyeau. I didn't want to "throw away" my vote, but voting for someone I could believe in would be better than not voting at all. The story of Ms. Bilyeau's candidacy was not encouraging. While I respect her right to run for office and in fact agree with many of her positions, I simply find her lack of qualifications and more-than-erratic behavior make it impossible for me to support her candidacy.
Today: 18 Total Voters: 217 Weblog hits: 972
Okay, in terms of a social revolution, these numbers may not look so great. But one week ago, I was alone. Now I've got 200 voters on my side. And (statistically) conservative extrapolations show my message has reached at least 2000. If you saw the debate last night on Channel 8 (Tulsa KTUL), then you know Brad can use all the help we can give him.
Objective reviews of the debate (what can I be but objective at this point?) score the contest this way:
Coburn - Clueless, but likeable
Carson - On message, but smarmy
Was Carson just tired from his 77 county jaunt? Or is he having trouble believing what he is forcing himself to say? Will Okie voters go for the guy who can't figure out that we want good roads -- but has good hair? Or the guy who has an answer for everything -- but a demeanor like the Count of Muppet Cristo?
I'm thinking Brad will be counting his clothespins this time next week....
Paul the pollmeister has another piece of bad news for Bush:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/markosmoulitsas/story/0,15139,1336232,00.html
Of course, the fact that 40 states' presidential numbers don't matter (Bush is polling at something like 65% in OK) doesn't mean that Democrats in those bright red states should stay home. Elections aren't just about raw majorities, they're about trends. If we want better Democratic candidates in Oklahoma, we have to be better Democratic voters. We show at the (voting) polls and show the (telephone) polls to be wrong, even by a few percentage points, and the kind of people we want will be more willing to step forward and speak the truth.
I know this site is not about the presidential race, but I had to let you know about this editorial:
Why I believe in our president by Thomas F. Schaller.
I received the following thoughtful reply from a correspondent who clearly seems to agree with us on the issues. I hope you will give it -- and my response -- your full consideration.
While I understand well your position, I will respectfully decline to participate in the clothespin exercise. And Tom Coburn is dead set against all those positions you say you support. The difficulty, of course, is that if Carson came out for any of those positions, he would go counter to the positions and philosophy of about 2/3 of Oklahomans. Carson would get about 1/3 of the votes cast, as has many a doctrinaire liberal in this state. We must face the fact that most Oklahomans believe differently from us. Doesn't mean we have to give up, but it does mean that we must try to sway the minds of other people, not just pick on politicians. I witness for the viewpoint whenever I have the opportunity to do it without being obnoxious, i.e. if someone else starts the argument or discussion by presenting the conservative viewpoint, I never sit silently.
"I understand the vocation of the intellectual as trying to turn easy answers into critical questions and ask these critical questions to those with power."
Today's Count (as of Monday Oct 25, 10:00 pm): 49
Total Clothespins: 199
Included Bluenoses (Republican crossovers): 2
Website hits: 948
More Comments received by the Clothespins for Carson Campaign:
I received the message below and concur with it completely. I hope Carson gets the strong message that many Democrats are holding their noses and voting for him. Gawd, I hate voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and I fear from his service in Congress that is exactly what we are doing. Many of us need reassurance that he's not another Watkins or Brewster.*^*^*I regret that I am forced to cast my vote for Brad Carson in this election. I have been quite disturbed at many of the hateful and divisive positions set forth by Mr. Carson in his effort to win this election. Unfortunately, there is no alternative. Therefore, I'm joining the cause espoused in the attached email. Mr. Carson should know that a significant percentage of votes cast in his favor on election day will not be votes for him at all. Rather, they are merely votes to prevent a man with truly frightening ideas from representing our State in the Senate. Mr. Carson has much work to do to begin healing the wounds he has created within his core constituency.
Life and Deatherage comments on a recent online editorial suggesting OK gays withold their vote:
If Oklahoma gay people deny Carson their votes, they don't win. Coburn wins, and then gay people lose. Coburn has said that the "gay agenda," as he calls it, "is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today." He is against AIDS prevention for anyone who has sex outside of opposite-sex marriage, he is against all laws and rules that prohibit discriminating against gay people simply because they are gay, and if he favors the death penalty for abortion providers, you can just imagine what kind of anti-gay laws he'd pass if he thought he could.
Letter to the Tulsa World:
In his October 24 letter, W. D. Carson asks, “what would happen if ‘same sex marriage’ was the only type of marriage?” Think about it. What a twisted world that would be!
A woman whose husband (er, “male life partner”) died might find the courts had awarded their family’s home to his “normal” gay relatives, since she had no marital right to inherit it. A widowed father might find his children placed with the mother’s “normal” gay relatives, as he would have no legal rights of parenthood. If you were the child of a hetero couple, your mommy or daddy could be fired just because their “normal” gay coworkers just didn’t feel comfortable working alongside them. Straight activists who protested such discrimination would be accused of advocating that extremist groups be given special rights. “Heterosexuality,” the politicians would say, “is a choice.”
Absurd? Yes. Unfair? Absolutely. But that is the world that gay families live in today. That is the kind of discrimination that State Question 711 would have Oklahomans write into law. What a twisted world that would be indeed.
More data on why cel phone usage and call screening undercounts Democrats and youthful voters. This comes from that biased mouthpiece of the Left -- the Consumer Electronics Association.
Add this to the The Guardian (10/21/04) article America's Hidden Vote by Sidney Blumenthal. (Couldn't get to the Guardian when I tried just now. Give it a go later -- the Brits are sleeping now!)
We added 39 new voters, for a total of 150!
Blog hits: 733.
Mining the rich soil of my newest, most favorite Republican website, I find this truly helpful link: http://www.bradcarsonisaliberal.com/.
How liberal, you ask? Plenty.
Jeez, now it looks like Our Boy may need us even more than we thought. I found this on the Refubplican site -- very fresh numbers! This shows the reverse of some digits I read earlier this week in the World.
And this, in the extensive comments on a DailyKos post:
A frequent criticism of mainstream polling has been that these polls are skewed by two factors: The voters that they don't reach and the voters they don't count. Most polling involves telephone surveys that are conducted by calling random land-line numbers, causing these polls to miss voters whose primary telephone is a cell phone. By choice, many mainstream polls do not include the results from newly registered voters in their results because of the judgement that these voters are less likely to vote. While this assumption may be true in a typical off-season election, the circumstances of this election - including massive GOTV operations - warrant the inclusion of newly registered voters in presidential polling. These glaring omissions have skewed presidential polls toward Bush, making the current tie between Bush and Kerry (nationally) highly suspect. By my calculations, when the mainstream polls show a tie, Kerry is actually up by 3 percentage points.
Why the interest in polls?
Alert Reader sends in this quote:
How will undecideds vote on election day? Traditionally, there have been two schools of thought about how undecideds in trial heat match-ups will divide up at the ballot box. One is that they will break equally; the other, that they will split in proportion to poll respondents who stated a candidate preference. But our analysis of 155 polls reveals that, in races that include an incumbent, the traditional answers are wrong. Over 80% of the time, most or all of the undecideds voted for the challenger.(...)Link to full story and backup statistics
Now, that's great news for Kerry, of course. But how about our Senate race? Does Carson have the onus, on the basis that he is currently holding office in the House? Or Coburn, because he is the Republican candidate running for a Republican seat?
Guess you can add one more thing that Carson can't take for granted.
A member of the Clothespin Brigade submits the best "get out the vote" ad of the year.
Also I noticed that we just got our first Google hit for "Clothespins for Carson."
The message string on the Puckin' Refublican site is getting lively. Watch Marty take it to them! Only I really have to start work now. Fun is fun, but blogging don't pay the bills.
I met Ethan last night at the Poeformance, and he asked me about the Clothespin Campaign. He must have posted when he got home, because I am already getting hits from the link he provided at his orgdotcom LiveJournal site. He's one of the many young, thoughtful people who are going to turn out on Nov 2 and turn the polls on their heads. People who don't get included in the "likely voter" category because they 1) Haven't voted in the previous "X" election cycles and 2) Will never get called by a polling company because their phones are in their pockets and not on any directory listing. Even without these undercounts, John Kerry (and Brad Carson, God bless him!) are leading in the polls.
Now the Republicans are getting in the game. I found this link on the OKGOPChat discussion site.
Here's a funny website--about how a lot of D's have to hold their nose to vote for Carson! My advice to them? Don't bother!
Today we added 34 voters, for a total of 111.
The emotion expressed by you was remarkable. Brad Carson is getting all of these comments, and in case he loses them, he can read them here:
I am a registered Republican, but am voting for Brad Carson because he at LEAST doesn’t endorse the crazy messages that Coburn does. This isn’t an email to sway your vote, but to encourage you to check out the candidates and form your own decisions.If you ARE voting for Carson, this is your opportunity to let him know that his wishy-washy stance on monumental social issues is anything but appealing and if he gets your vote, he should be prepared to stand for the issues that directly affect our generation.
~^~^~
I do not support Brad Carson, but I will vote for him this coming election. However, I will never vote for him again should he continue to support the Iraq war and continue to vote against equal rights for Gays and Lesbians.
Not that it has anything to do with this, but if you want to meet me (not beat me), I'll be hosting an event tonight at LivingArtSpace in Tulsa.
Poeformance
This is not your grandmother's poetry reading. We're going to kick out the jams and bring the crowd to its feet!
[Click on through to read the poem]
The Class Warfare Guy gave us a postlette. Go see his site, or better yet, meet him at The Cains. (Okay, we made him laugh, but was he holding his nose?)
Read this exchange I had with a recipient of my message that wants me (and you, I guess) to vote for NOTA on Nov 2. Learn about the secret discovery I made after your responses started rolling in!
The message has been posted on echospirit's Friends LiveJournal site.
Also Rhysfunk and SoonerThought, one of the best political blogs, period.
Just posted on Okiedoke's blog:
Okies, clothespins, and the senate race Oklahomans agree - this Senate election stinks. When it comes to Brad Carson and Tom Coburn, many voters are holding their nose while marking their ballot for one of these guys. And still others are considering Sheila Bilyeu (hits to the Okiedoke interview with her have increased dramatically). This Okie decided to brave the stench and vote for Carson. But he wants something in return.
Here are some of the comments I've gleaned from the people who have responded:
Grassroots Activism at its BEST!!!*^*^*I’m plugging my nose and voting for Carson.... I will take the edited version of my message to Brad Carson in person.*^*^*It is very important that you act swiftly on this, like now. Read the instructions carefully, please. (this is not stupid chain mail!) This only works if we all send it too all the democrats we know as soon as possible.*^*^*
Why Carson Needs to Win
Brad Carson needs to win the Senate Race in Oklahoma. Despite the fact that most voters in the state are registered Democrats (reflected by legislature’s Demo majority), Carson has been the only Dem representing the state in congress, as the 2nd District Representative. Now, the least objectionable of our two Republican Senators is retiring, and Carson stands a good chance of turning the seat over, and moving us toward a Senate Majority.
Why Voting for Carson is Problematic
The problem is, while Carson has been, arguably, a good house member, he has run hard to the right in his Senate campaign. I’m not talking about the folksy equivocation that all thoughtful democrats need to invoke from time to time. I’m talking about coming out with first quotes in favor of the US Anti-Marriage Amendment (the one that only serves to prevent minorities from marrying), then raising that invective to the point that his campaign staff stuffed anti-gay flyers under windshield wipers at a hate-filled Anti-Marriage rally sponsored by Tulsa’s Republican mayor and featuring national leaders in the anti-gay movement.
Continue reading "Clothespins for Carson – Theory and Practice" »
We added 30 voters today, for a total of 77.
Not as much as I'd hoped, frankly. I'm looking for network effect with geometric progression here. But then again, the first day's totals were the cream of the crop -- direct links from me, many of whom are activists. Of course, we've also had 270 hits on this weblog, which I created just before I sent out my first message. So we've got eyeballs. Maybe hearts and minds will follow.
This is How We Grow
Some respondents "exposed their contacts," putting names on the CC line instead of hiding them in BCC for privacy. These showed that most were sending on to about 9 or 10 others, on average, which means we hit about 770 with our message. Tomorrow, those folks will forward on to 7700, and so on. Sure, there's some duplication -- some of you got the message more than once. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so.
One of the beautiful aspects of my hare-brained scheme is that it gives the lie to the notion that we are all alone. There are a lot of others who have the insight to see that America does best when it does good. We honor our history and our succeeding generations when we are generous, tolerant, and embrace freedom as a rallying call rather than a war cry.
An anonymous donor (no we're NOT paranoid, those W-ites are really out to get us) donated the cool new logo that appears at the top of the page.
I had suggested that we hoist the Oldenberg clothespin and balance it on Thomas Jefferson's Mount Rushmore nose for a photo, but Fed-X from Philly to Sioux Falls was a little steep. Silly putty was more in our price range, and perhaps a bit more apropos, considering some of the things we're catching wind of in this campaign.
From Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights' eNEWS :
INNOVATION IN POLITICAL POWER BROKERING
I received a most interesting email today from one of those progressive bloggers who have been speaking out on the Oklahoma anti-gay marriage amendment, among other things. He's got a pretty interesting idea. This guy's a Democrat who is disgusted with Brad Carson. His initial salvo reported something that none of the news outlets did: "[Carson's] operatives placed anti-gay campaign flyers at a 'Pro-Marriage' rally sponsored by the Religious Right." Disgusted or not, the guy says he's figured out a way to vote for Carson and then twist some power out of Brad should he win the election. The blog has already got some of the state's more visible progressives pushing the idea. Calling his ambitious plan "Clothespins for Carson" he intends to deliver the election to Brad Carson, but at a price. Voters hold their noses while voting for Carson, and join a "Clothespins for Carson" list. Carson and his party will get the loud and clear message that if they want future support in the next squeek-by election, they're going to have to deal gays and progressives in. It's an interesting twist on power-snatching by a gay voting block. Here's how his idea works: http://martinjensen.typepad.com/clothespin/
[Disclaimer: As you know, we don't allow TOHR to become embroiled in politics---not entirely because we don't want to, but because it would be a flat violation of the tax code. I hope you'll agree that the eNEWS has been equally demanding of the candidates of all political parties. By way of balance, I should let you know that those incorrigible Bush-bashers, the Log Cabin Republicans, just had an organizational meeting at our Tulsa GLBT Community Center. Regardless what your political orientation may be, TOHR supports your right to live it out loud!]
The same issue linked to a poll that shows Carson with a margin-of-error+sliver lead. How many progressives do you think are on the Coburn side of that equation?
For a free subscription to eNEWS, click here.
We KNOW that Oklahoma Progressives are going to be responsible for electing Brad Carson to the Senate. And that causes us dismay. He's just so WRONG about so many things. But so much better than any alternative. The worst thing to do would be to elect him and not let him know who he owes his seat to. So we're going to let him -- and the Oklahoma Democratic Party -- know, in no uncertain terms.
How to play:
Okay, exactly 24 hours after I sent out my first notice, we have 45 new voters donning the clothespin, for a total of 46. These people, I know, tend to be well connected (I myself am not well connected, but I am connected to people who are VERY well connected). The network effect suggests that every Progressive in Oklahoma is connected to every other Progressive in Oklahoma in a few short hops. If those who are going to vote for Carson because of national priorities will publicly don the clothespin, I will amass a list of names that exceeds the electorate of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri in about, um, five days. Okay, maybe that's a little overambitious.
But if you are going to hold your nose, stand up and be counted! I am sure the total will exceed Carson's inevitable margin of victory, if we can just collect the numbers.
Also, BTW, do not be concerned about offending the Carsonites by copying them with your intention. They are, I am sure, truly hoping for the success of this project, as they had been taking our votes for granted, and must have begun to realize that this was a strategic error. We're going to DELIVER this election to them, but we are not going to GIVE it to them.
HOLD YOUR NOSE AND BE COUNTED!
"Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear."
William Gladstone
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