Happy New Year! (England celebrated the New Year on March 25 from some time in the 12th Century until adopting the Gregorian Calendar reform in 1750.)

Happy Birthday: My sister and my brother’s daughter.

Also on this day: (3019, Third Age) Gollum bites the One Ring off Frodo’s hand and then drops into the fires of Mount Doom, ending the reign of Sauron in Mordor. Sauron is later resurrected in the guise of a real estate developer from Queens, New York.

I had been meaning to write about the latest in Israel: the terrible mistake Benny Gantz was about to make, joining Bibi Netanyahu in a rotation “Unity” government with Bibi as Prime Minister first. (Bibi literally has to remain as Prime Minister to remain in the Knesset at all: PM is the one exemption from existing law requiring members under indictment to take leave.) But at the last minute, Gantz came to his senses, realizing his Blue and White party would crumble, lose all leverage, and his turn to be PM would never come to pass. The current situation remains fluid. Gantz’s big problem is that 4 MKs nominally in his coalition refuse to sit in his government if it relies on support from the Joint Arab List. (To show how crazy this is, Avigdor Lieberman, one of the most overtly-bigoted politicians in Israel who has called for denaturalizing Israeli Arabs and incorporating largely Arab parts of Israel into the rump Palestinian Bantustan, waived his longstanding insistence on this principle out of his even greater hatred for Bibi and his ultra-Orthodox supporters.)

So, instead, what I was going to say about Gantz, without Gantz.

Continue reading →

It was great fun to see everyone on-line today. We hope more folks can join us in two weeks.

1. We are updating the fund-raising thermometer for our new campaign as “Doctors in the House” supporting Dr. Hiral Tipirneni running to flip Arizona 6 and Nurse Lauren Underwood running for re-election in Illinois 14. What better time to ask for funds too make sure we have some medical experts in the House!
2. Time on your hands? The next two weeks everything is Wisconsin Wisconsin Wisconsin. Tony the Democrat has postcards to elect a democratic judge to their Supreme Court and Votefwd.org has addresses to encourage primary voters (scroll down to find it).
3. For texting, the Payback project does not seem to be up and running yet but another worthy campaign is run by the ACLU and can be found at go.peoplepower.org.
4. Next Zoom meeting in two weeks. If anyone want to learn how to Zoom, please us give a call or send an email or ask for help in a comment. Using Zoom is going to be vital in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: For those of you who missed the meeting and want all the details, the audio is below.

We have decided that, in view of the health emergency, we must hold meetings over the Internet until further notice.

How this will work: I have opened an account with Zoom. At 3:30 pm (early on purpose) I will post a link to the Zoom meeting here on the website. You do not need your own Zoom account to participate. The Zoom meeting should start opening in your web browser. Depending on your operating system (Mac, Windows, different versions thereof), you may have to authorize use of the microphone and, optionally, your camera if your device is equipped with one. You should be able to log on from a computer, a smartphone, or a tablet, as long as it is connected to the Internet.

Please call our landline or cellphone if you have trouble setting up or logging on. It probably is not a good idea for everyone to wait until 4:29 to try out the system.

1. There is no sign of a youth surge in any state. This is bad news for Bernie Sanders two ways: it hurts his numbers in the primary, and it hurts his campaign to the extent he promises a General Election win based on voters who are still not showing up. Sanders is trailing most of his 2016 numbers, even if you add in all of Elizabeth Warren’s support, which isn’t realistic. His campaign’s attempt to catch flies with vinegar instead of honey seems to be backfiring.
2. We’ve had our first coronavirus-tinged result. Maine voters rejected an attempt by Antivaxers to reverse the state legislature’s restriction of vaccine exemptions to medical necessity, by almost three to one. Maine becomes the fifth state with this law; California was third; New Jersey narrowly failed to enact, but before the latest epidemic arrived.
3. The Far-Left wing of the Democratic Party is doing poorly. Nancy Pelosi’s opponent from the left, one Shahid Buttar, lost in the primary 72–12. Even 12 was better than any of the Republicans running, so under the Top Two primary rules, he gets another shot in November. Good luck. More on Pelosi below.
4. Meanwhile, in CA–25 there were two elections: the regular primary for November and the special election to finish Katie Hill’s term. The list of major candidates was identical. In both, State Assemblywoman Democrat Christy Smith is ahead, and newcomer Republican Mike Garcia is second. The special election runoff may tell us something, because the Republicans totaled together are more than Smith plus Far-Left Democrat and TV personality Cenk Uygur, whose vanity campaign crashed at 5%. Republican Steve Knight, who lost to Hill, was third and is eliminated. As for Hill herself, she’s founded a new, probably unnecessary, PAC to elect women, which is run out of the WeWork office at University and Shattuck.
5. Disaster: Republicans took the top two slots to replace Smith herself in Assembly District 38, guaranteeing a Blue-to-Red flip. The two Republicans are splitting about 55% of the vote, while four Democrats are splitting 45% with the best at about 12, distant third. We can prevent shutouts by going back to partisan primaries, or by adopting ranked-choice voting as used in our City Council races, or, less technically, by getting some of these candidates to put society’s needs over their own oversized egos’.
6. Pelosi, Part Two: The Left’s bad results were not limited to ephemera like Buttar and Uyghur. In TX-28, wretched conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar defeated liberal Jessica Cisneros. We donated to Cisneros, who was endorsed by both Sanders and Warren. Cuellar was endorsed by Pelosi and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Sanders isn’t all wrong in his attacks on Democratic leadership. They prefer suffering the occasional betrayal by Blue Dogs like Cuellar, especially when they hope to control him with offers of endorsement or committee assignments, to more challenges from the Left. I hope we don’t regret Pelosi’s choice here as much as Senate Democrats’ truly-calamitous decision to stick with Joe Lieberman after he lost his Democratic primary, which good deed he repaid by constant warfare against Obama.
7. Other California results: Josh Harder finished first, but well under half the vote. We need to see the usual increase in Democratic turnout between the primary and general. Ammar Campa-Najjar finished first, and he needs a similar turnout bump. TJ Cox, on the other hand, had a dismal primary, finishing behind the man he defeated in 2018, David Valadao, by 60–31. That should shrink as mail ballots come in, but not enough to make it look close. Besides poor turnout, Cox has had an issue with the IRS. He looks like he needs major help.
8. And on another election, Bibi Netanyahu looks stuck on 58 seats. He needs 61 to form a government. So far he has used both bribery and extortion to induce opposition members to defect. A lesson for us: notwithstanding Bibi’s aggressive, inciteful past campaigns, the center-mush opposition parties were completely unprepared for his viciousness. “No one could know he would do that” rings hollow and true at the same time. Bibi opened a phony investigation into his principal opponent Benny Gantz’s entanglement with a bankrupt enterprise (see: Burisma) to balance his own well-founded corruption indictments; he sent a rabbi with a secret recorder to talk to Gantz’s lead campaign aide, and got admissions that Gantz might not be strong enough to defend Israel from Iran, which were then leaked to mass media. (I don’t know how Trump plans to imitate that particular coup.) If we want to win, we have to prepare for every imaginable cheat, and the unimaginable, too.

Find OpenProgress.Com in your browser

Click on Join TextTroop

You will be transferred to Slack where you’ll be prompted to create an account.

Enter your name and password

In Slack you’ll be prompted to edit profile

In Slack, lefthand column, choose #welcome

If you see a link to slideshow on how to text, choose that link

Alternatively introduce yourself in comment window at bottom of main screen. Then watch for replies, click on them, and follow the instructions of the helpful moderators.

That’s it for this intro! There’s more to say about TextOut and what happens once you start work on a texting campaign. You can find out more from Karen or Dan at the next meeting. Or contact Andy and Naomi. Or leave a comment below. Happy texting!

The meeting began early with text-bank training. We heard that targeted texting by Reclaim Our Vote (and organization to get disenfranchised African American voters back on the rolls) had an 85% success rate in Alabama and 60% in Georgia.

We practiced how to join the Red2Blue text program. (If you want to, and missed it, start here.) Instructions for how to join the Open Progress text program are a separate post. And Indivisible’s Payback Project also has a texting plan against ten targeted GOP Senators.

Bill Marthinsen distributed a Volunteer Commitment Form ideal for getting your less-involved neighbors to contribute. Ann Overton reported that the owner of Pasta Bene restaurant (Telegraph near Blake St.) wants to put Vote posters in all the Telegraph commercial windows. We discussed optimal design. Consensus seemed to be a QR code for voter registration.

The next target for our Donation Page is the Michigan House Democratic Fund. That’s a chamber close to flipping.

The current postcard campaign is for Judge Jill Karofsky for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Names and script available from Tony the Democrat.

Our friends at East Bay Activist Alliance have a calendar web page here. I have asked them to consider a subscription URL.

Today seemed like a heavy news day.

At a time we need people with courage, Disney/ABC shows an unusual amount of cowardice. Project Veritas taped one of their reporters saying he was a socialist who supported Medicare for All. No sign of bias in his work, but he’s suspended and taken off the politics beat.

Maybe his real sin was saying Good Morning America now just spent its time shilling other Disney products and that news was secondary to viewership and advertising throughout.

Paul Waldman in WaPo; Dan Froomkin in his own newsletter.

Also on the journalism front, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit against The NY Times over their op-ed asserting Trump and Russia work towards a common purpose. Of course, the lawsuit will be dismissed immediately on multiple grounds, and, ironically, if for some bizarre reason it is allowed to proceed, the Trump Crime Family will fold as soon as the Times’ lawyers ask to depose Don Jr., Trump, and others who were able to evade the Mueller Grand Jury. One theory is it is just part of the ongoing War on Truth, to show that everyone lies. I tend to doubt that, not when the suit will be dismissed quickly. I think it’s to prepare us for more such suits after Trump has corrupted the judiciary. Bogus libel judgments were used to end the Free Press in Turkey, Hungary, Malaysia, and other autocracies. But Trump is out over his skis, still, here.

And two articles that Bernie isn’t the electoral disastercthat the Punditocracy claims. Salon. Local guy Robert Reich in WaPo. Keep an eye out for moderate House and Senate candidates trying to wiggle away from him. We lose more votes from the picture of disloyalty and disunity than from the alleged extremism of Medicare for All. And Castro? Obama said the same limited positive compliments of Cuba and no one cared.

I have created an iCloud calendar for Indivisible Elmwood (I am encouraging our sister organizations to make theirs as easy to use). Depending on your browser set-up, the URL below may automatically offer to subscribe when you click it, or you may need to copy it, then paste it into the New Calendar Subscription item in your Calendar program (under the File menu in Apple Calendar, something similar is available in other calendars).

webcal://p35-caldav.icloud.com/published/2/MTA1MTUwMTA3NjEwNTE1MNgC30hvEaMmImfcZMokr1IsZxniX9-PrdbVtO8lEx3EW_mJtv-eczClUDA5LczAAhWMI1lbym0LOhhlwCbUwHs

The article everyone is tweeting about today is Adam Serwer in The Atlantic on Trump Unchained. About as enraging as you would expect. Today’s move of Trump lickspittle Richard Grenell from Ambassador to Germany to Acting Director of National Intelligence is another example.

The acquittal vote ratified the authoritarian instincts of the president and the ideological convictions of his attorney general.

Our son Gideon forwarded an announcement from former Rep. Katie Hill (CA-25), who resigned over complications from a broken ménage a trois. She is founding a PAC (isn’t everyone), HER Time Pac, “to ensure that great candidates who are getting overlooked have the resources they need to win.” More specifically, this seems to be support for women entering politics with a non-political résumé. Although Hill is from Southern California, the HER Time mailing address is 2120 University Avenue, here in Berkeley. I looked it up; it’s a WeWork building.

Meanwhile, the Special Election to replace Hill coincides with the California Primary, March 3. Christy Smith should come out on top.