Attendance

Naomi
Andy
Judy
Babette
Bruce
Mary
Noemi
Jeff
Bill

Education and General Discussion

Judy met with Nancy Skinner, trying to get her to sponsor a bill to repeal a provision requiring sheriff candidates to be police officers.

Naomi and Andy had coffee with Ammar Campa-Najjar. He’s the candidate who got 48.3% of the vote running against Duncan Hunter. This district is our best chance at flipping another California Congressional seat in 2020. Darrel Issa is thinking about running in this district because Hunter is weak. Ammar thinks he (the Democrat) has a good chance either way because Issa would be a carpetbagger, and Hunter wouldn’t benefit as much from the confusion with his father as he did the last time. Naomi told him to come back later because we’re prioritizing Virginia right now.

Andy talks about how and why Trump is pushing nonsensical consipiacy theories about Russian interference in the 2016 .

Bruce talks about the book “We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint For Democracy After Trump”. If they get enough pre-orders, it can get on the NYT best-seller list. The proceeds go to Indivisible’s new “Save Democracy Fund”. Info at https://book.indivisible.org/

Indivisible has a 5-minute ‘Impeachment Daily’ video on Twitter and YouTube. The first episode is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvxAX8eIT_I.

Indivisible has a 72-question questionnaire for presidential candidates. It’s currently a draft. Bruce suggested some questions about education.

Naomi put a new thermometer on our website because we reached the goal with the earlier one. The current goal is $1,000 for the Virginia candidates we’re supporting. If it gets to $1,000, we might raise it to $1,500.

Action Items

From Andy’s discussion:

1) Pressure the New York Times to improve their coverage of Trump’s disinformation campaign. They should present facts as facts and lies as lies rather than practicing both-siderism. We need a drumbeat of the facts. Information about letters to the editor is at https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014925288-How-to-Submit-a-Letter-to-the-Editor . Here is Andy’s suggested wording:

Experts in authoritarianism agree that rather than impose their own version of events as truth, today’s dictators are promulgating fake news in an attempt to make readers abandon any attempt to discern the truth, and to rely on the Strong Leader instead. Your recent headlines accept incorrect or even nonsensical claims uncritically, even when they are refuted in the stories themselves. This initial misimpression is not doing your readers a service.

2) Make sure we don’t help feed the beast. Media Matters made a list of companies advertising on Fox. This worked with Breitbart, but Fox is trickier. The list is at https://www.mediamatters.org/these-are-fox-news-leading-advertisers.

3) Talk it up with other Democrats. We need to keep the morale up.

Postcards

We completed postcards to 150 addresses for Agnew and Guy since the last meeting. We did 200 more for Guy at this meeting. That’s all we have right now for Virginia. Tony the Democrat is currently doing the slate of Kentucky statewide offices.

Next Meeting

The next meeting is Sunday, October 20.