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Showing posts from June, 2007

Abel Guillen: the Rise of the Millennials

I talked politics at Lanesplitters pizzeria on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland the other night with two young progressive Democrats who, in my view, epitomize the future of politics in America. My two compatriots were Abel Guillen , recently elected member of Peralta Community College Board, and Matt Lockshin , his '06 campaign manager (whom you might know as the founder of the local blog SayNotoPombo .) If you care about the direction this country is taking and how the millennial generation is going to shape the American political landscape for the next twenty-five years, I'd like to invite you to read a bit about our conversation and what it means for American politics below. :: a commitment to public service Abel Guillen is a young, forward-looking, progressive Democrat, but the overwhelming sense you get in talking to him...the "take away"...is his zeal for good government and reform . Listening to Abel discuss the Peralta Community College System on issues fr

one million letters: piolín!

The Piolín petition was a vast success . Thanks to everyone who helped; we did something good together.

the Spirit of '06

My activism didn't come out of the blue. I've had the privilege, as I came up, to meet with and learn from so many people representing the legacies of the last 70 years of political activism in the United States: whether it was my cousin Mark who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s, or my parents who took me door-knocking community organizing in the St. Paul neighborhood where they still live, or my own time in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s...side-by-side with veterans from the US Civil Rights movement. To this day I feel a kindred solidarity with so many activists from the 1980s and 90s for whom the names Jesse Jackson and Paul Wellstone evoke progressive hopes and dreams from what is now a bygone era . When it comes to learning from and having access to those who've come before me, my life has had an embarassment of riches. What I'd like to do today, however, is do something that was never really explicitly done for me, which i

Berkeley Health Icon: Jack Lalanne...lol

Reading today's Sally Squires WaPo profile of 92-year old "fitness icon" Jack Lalanne, this passage leapt out at me: To baby boomers and their parents, the name Jack LaLanne is synonymous with health, vitality and fitness. But this famous muscle man, who now serves on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Council on Physical Fitness, says he started life "as a weak, sick, miserable kid," addicted to sugar. He dropped out of a San Francisco Bay area high school and was a self-described troublemaker who wandered into a health lecture one day and changed his life. The speaker advocated eating healthful food -- a tenet that resonated with LaLanne. "I was this young 15-year-old," LaLanne recalls. "What the hell! . . . I wanted to be an athlete. I wanted the girls to like me. I wanted to go through the day without headaches." That night, he prayed for guidance to help him kick the candy, meat and other foods that he thought were killing him.

State Legislatures: the fulcrum point for progressive power

I'd like to make a simple point. Progressives and progressive-friendly candidates winning seats to State Legislatures is the fulcrum point to achieving the goals of the progressive movement in American politics. When progressive reformers win seats to state legislatures it advances three core political goals: a) electing true progressives to office b) reforming the Democratic party from within c) holding entrenched Senators and Representatives in DC accountable in the only way that really counts, by making them scared for their political lives in their own districts :: On the American political playing field there is one slow-moving power dynamic that trumps all others: victory in State Legislatures. Control of State Legislatures is the surest way to: a) advance policy through the legislative test tube of 50 separate States implementing solutions particular to their environmment b) shape the make up of the U.S. House of Representatives through influence on the redistricting process

Pedro Guzman: US citizen "mistakenly deported"

Todd Beeton of the Courage Campaign has the story at Calitics .

the Hadzabe face an ethnic cleansing in Tanzania

This story from Stephanie McCrummen in the Washington Post is absolutely heartbreaking: One of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet is on the verge of vanishing into the modern world. The transition has been long underway, but members of the dwindling Hadzabe tribe, who now number fewer than 1,500, say it is being unduly hastened by a United Arab Emirates royal family, which plans to use the tribal hunting land as a personal safari playground. The deal between the Tanzanian government and Tanzania UAE Safaris Ltd. leases nearly 2,500 square miles of this sprawling, yellow-green valley near the storied Serengeti Plain to members of the royal family, who chose it after a helicopter tour. The story of Gonga Petro and his people is nothing new. The eradication of indigenous peoples and their language and way of life has been going on for two centuries. This is simply a more brutal and needlessly greedy displacement. Some rich and powerful people who have sway with t

Lute: little reason for optimism in Iraq...Iraqis off the record say pessimism is more like it

This nugget of reporting is buried in this Peter Baker and Karen De Young's Washington Post report on General Lute's confirmation hearings: While insisting that incremental progress is being made, administration officials acknowledge that the benchmarks will be all but impossible to meet by the time progress reports are due to Congress. "If the test is peace and reconciliation and flowers blooming by September, that will be hard to meet," said a senior administration official. At the least, the administration hopes to be able to demonstrate movement in the right direction. During a recent visit to Washington, a senior Iraqi official said sectarian divides are deepening. "People may look for benchmarks, achievements, legislation here and there to look for progress," said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity. "This will not reflect the reality. This country is in deep, grave tr

The Clintons, Bob Shrum and the Defense of Marriage Act

John Aravosis at Americablog has a monster analysis of Bob Shrum's claim that Bill Clinton advised John Kerry to support some of the anti-gay ballot initiatives during the 2004 elections: As Pam Spaulding noted last week, Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum claims in his new book that during the 2004 elections, Bill Clinton advised John Kerry to support the Federal Marriage Amendment, i.e., the anti-gay amendment to the US Constitution that would have banned gay marriage and vitiated scores of other rights that gay couples may have, including health insurance, inheritance, child custody, parenting, and more. Shrum reports that Kerry refused to endorse the amendment. I decided to check with Bill Clinton's office and the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign to find out if this is true. Here is what I found. Jay Carson, spokesman for President Clinton told me: "I checked and it's completely untrue. He never advised John Kerry to support the gay marriage ban President Bush

Being Bush means never having to be Accountable

Remember this ?: In the days ahead, my national security team will fully brief Congress on our new strategy. If members have improvements that can be made, we will make them. If circumstances change, we will adjust. Honorable people have different views, and they will voice their criticisms. It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed. Acting on the good advice of Senator Joe Lieberman and other key members of Congress, we will form a new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror. This group will meet regularly with me and my administration. It will help strengthen our relationship with Congress. We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Marine Corps, so that America has the armed forces we need for the 21st century. We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilia

Enthusiasm for Wind Power in Los Angeles

Elizabeth Douglas reports in the LA Times today from the wind power convention being held in Los Angeles: The wind-energy business in 2006 booked its second year of record growth, and executives are pushing the industry faithful to think bigger. Much bigger. By 2030, they want wind farms to supply 20% of the nation's energy — a huge leap from today's contribution of less than 1%. "It's not a forecast, but it is a plausible scenario," Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Assn., told attendees at the opening session of the group's Windpower 2007 conference. During one panel discussion, industry executive Robert Lukefahr urged wind advocates to keep their enthusiasm grounded in reality. "We have not yet made the case to the American public broadly about why this is right and why it's worth paying extra for cleaner power," said Lukefahr, president of Power Americas, a unit of oil giant BP's alternative energy busines

Congressman Rick Boucher D (VA-9) to CA: Breathe Smog, Suckers!

Congressman Rick Boucher, representing Virginia's 9th district comes from coal country; this senior Democrat has some misguided notions about what's good for his district. Today he teamed up with Congressman John Dingell (MI-15) to propose legislation that would wipe out California's ability to regulate auto emissions in ways that both cut down on smog and reduce total CO2 emissions. In effect, Representative Boucher wants to use his seniority to shove a little more auto smog and coal-fired smoke down Californians' collective throats. Boucher and Dingell are senior Democrats who don't give a rat's ass what anyone in the grassroots or netroots that just won them a majority perch in Congress thinks of them. They pitched this legislation just as Speaker Nancy Pelosi returned from a trip to Europe building support for progress fighting global warming. Coincidence? Sure. Truth is, Boucher and Dingell were going to do this anyway, and for one reason...they are se

Scooter Libby: the meaning of 30 months

Scooter Libby, convicted felon and perjurer, was sentenced to 30 months in prison today. According to the WaPo: "Libby is the highest-ranking White House official to be convicted of a felony since a group of cases that arose from the Iran-Contra affair of the Reagan era two decades ago." Dan Froomkin explains the immediate politics of the aftermath, including the issue of a push for a presidential pardon: Ever since Libby was convicted, his supporters have been urging President Bush to grant him a pardon. If Libby remains free on appeal, Bush would probably postpone such a hugely controversial decision, potentially until his last days in office. If Libby is sent to prison, however, that would likely spark an immediate and furious internecine battle within his administration. Libby has never admitted that he did anything wrong... Or, as Andrew Cohen notes : If you are surprised by the tough sentence U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton just handed down to former White House

G8 preview: Merkel wants specific benchmarks

Lionel Beehner at CFR.org has a preview of what's in store at the G8 summit. This stands out: the most controversial topic may prove to be climate change, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the G8’s host (Deutsche Welle) , has put atop the agenda, and which British Prime Minister Tony Blair views as something of a legacy issue. But Europe and the United States do not yet see eye-to-eye on greenhouse gas emissions ( NYT ) . President Bush laid out a proposed new approach to climate change Friday at the tail end of a speech on development aid . Merkel wants specific benchmarks set, which include G8 members cutting greenhouse gas emissions to half of their 1990 levels by 2050 and limiting temperature rises this century to two degrees Celsius. Because the United States accounts for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions, “Merkel argues, we Americans really have a moral obligation to take the lead on this,” William Drozdiak of the American Council on Germany tells CFR.or

Bush is/not a Conservative

Gleen Greenwald tracks the ups and downs and slings and arrows of Bush's love affair with conservatism here . With Digby adding the coup de grace: "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals. I've always thought conservatism was spelled Katrina . Tags: Conservatism

China Echoes Bush: Burning Coal Rejecting Caps

The Christian Science Monitor has the must read . China echoed the Bush administration's stance on global warming Monday, refusing to set firm caps on its greenhouse-gas emissions and saying that economic growth remained its "first and overriding priority." Releasing the country's first plan to deal with climate change, the government rejected international demands that it should fix ceilings on Chinese emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. Try this Elizabeth Economy post in the Nation for a related view: China vs. Earth . Tags: China Coal Global Warming

Walter Pincus on CIA Perfect Storm Memo

Walter Pincus at the Washington Post had a fascinating article yesterday regarding a CIA "Perfect Storm" document from August of 2002. The report, whose official title was "The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq" was written seven months before the start of the war and five months before Ryan Crocker and William Burns created a State Department memo using the same "Perfect Storm" construction. the CIA paper...cautioned about outcomes such as declining European confidence in U.S. leadership, Hussein's survival and retreat with regime loyalists, Iran working to install a friendly regime "tolerant of Iranian policies," Afghanistan tipping into civil strife because U.S. forces were not replaced by United Nations peacekeepers and troops from other countries, and violent demonstrations in Pakistan because of its support of Washington. Before the war, while the Bush administration was putting a spotlight on the CI

a sad day

There really aren't words for the measure of the voice we've lost, and how sad a day this is. Much love, Steve, we will miss you .