For those of you in a hurry, these images can be downloaded and shared with friends. The theory is you point your smartphone camera at the square, even just on the screen, and it opens the page in a browser: no need to type in tedious URLs. A visual hyperlink? (It worked on my phone. More tests welcome.)

Some articles this week you may have overlooked.

Religious Never Trump conservative Michael Gerson on the sacrilege of Trump’s Prayer Breakfast jeremiad. (WaPo)

Sixty-four percent of New Hampshire Democrats would rather have all life on Earth extinguished by a meteor than have Trump re-elected. Sounds about right. (Rolling Stone)

Rachel Bitecofer explains her theory that there aren’t enough swing voters to care about. (Politico) The best news is she thinks any of the major Democratic presidential candidates can pull off a big win.

Our new cards have a small typo and we will be reprinting them. The correct link to go straight to ActBlue is secure.actblue.com/donate/indiv_elmwood. Thanks to those who have chipped in for TJ Cox already. From this page, you can always click on the “DONATE” part of the menu.

First of Andy’s periodic updates evaluating the various postcard campaigns:

Two safe seats in the Kentucky State House where he wants to make sure we aren’t complacent, a no-hope campaign in Georgia, and closer to home a San Luis Obispo County Supervisor race that will be the swing vote. That looks to me like the one to pick. Voting is starting now as mail ballots go out. An additional advantage is that California postmarks won’t seem foreign.

NOTE: You can get addresses for the campaigns at : postcardstovoters.org. If you need help, email nhjanowitz@me.com

Ann Overton reported on the East Bay Activist Alliance meeting yesterday. EBAA is our local successor to Sister District, which has a narrower focus. Some EBAA contacts: Penni Takade [Campaign Liaison, Textbanking], Paul Costello [Canvassing], Jody Lerner [Fundraising], Jan Murota [Postcarding].

Bruce Jackson reported on Indivisible. Indivisible remains neutral in the Democratic Presidential primary; they did have a score card on Democracy Reform (voting rights, ballot access, gerrymandering, etc.) in which Elizabeth Warren finished first, Pete Buttigieg second, then Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, with Joe Biden last.

Lanny Weingrod reported on his research into voter turnout. The more personal, the better. Reminder, Reclaim Our Vote is meeting this Tuesday, February 4, at the Berkeley City College Auditorium. Tickets here. Donate here.

Naomi talked about the changes coming in the California ballot. Some counties have switched to sending everyone a mail ballot, but Alameda County does not appear on the list. For the March 3 election, besides the primary, there is one State measure and several county/local measures, all either taxes or bonds as I recall.

We had an extensive discussion of Sister District targets and where Elmwood should focus. Michigan State Assembly is close to flipping. SD also thinks the Arizona statehouse may flip.

We discussed our five-point action plan

1. Postcards. It is time to start again. Time to buy stamps before they are all gone (Lanny said he would buy some in Mountain View). Ann offered new postcards from the EBAA meeting. Andy will rank Tony the Democrat’s postcard campaigns so that we can concentrate on the most competitive. He will also start posting summaries and links to articles that members may have missed. Ann O will pick one day a week to postcard at Roma while the live music is going in hopes of recruiting others to join. When she decides on the day, the info will be sent out.
2. Fundraising. We are beginning a program of rotating fundraising both via our familiar thermometer on our website and also via the cards Michael made with our website link printed on them. Our first two-week drive is $1,000 for TJ Cox (CA-21), whom we helped drag across the finish line in 2018. His 2020 race will be very competitive and his fundraising so far is anemic. At the next meeting we will decide what to fundraise for next, perhaps a Voter outreach program. We’ll see at the next meeting what people think about the Reclaim Our Vote program Tuesday and we also have the Voter Participation Center. We also mentioned Josh Harder (CA-10), who calls frequently. He is a top GOP target, as is Cox, but his fundraising skills are much better. See also last meeting’s discussion of top Senate races.
3. Interns. If anyone know of any 18-19-20 year olds who would like to be sent to work for a month on a campaign, please send the info to Naomi or bring it to our next meeting.
4. Texting. Meetings will now start with texting training from 4:00–4:30 for anyone interested in starting up or just having a refresher course.
5. Education. We’ll spend 10–15 minutes at each meeting educating ourselves about important articles that have appeared in the press, polls and race info that Andy wants to share with us and anything else anyone thinks is important.

I have to admit, not my style, but in case some of you have escaped the Postcards4VA mailing list, I am publishing your opportunity to buy their celebratory T-shirts!

I think I am more-than-average prone to fear that Trump will win again. The wonderful Michelle Goldberg writes in today’s NY Times about an antidote.

“The best answer to despair is recognizing that you’re not helpless,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible and co-author of the new book “We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump.” …

Levin reminded me that in 2017, Democrats’ chances of winning the House seemed bleak, given the effect of gerrymandering. “In early 2017 we got laughed at when we said we could take the House,” he said. The blue wave of 2018 wasn’t preordained — people built it.

https://nyti.ms/2NtCKdW

By Friday, all the mainstream news organizations will be explaining why Attorney General Barr is in Italy and has been in contact with Australia. They will probably be doing it in a way that maximizes credence in the bonkers conspiracy theory that the Trump regime is furthering as their counterattack against Congress and the Rule of Law.

The conspiracy theory begins with the assumption that the Deep State (that is, the intelligence community and the Civil Service) are executing a coup against the “duly elected President”. The specific purpose of Barr’s counterinvestigation is to prove that the Mueller Report was an unfair slander that should never have been inflicted on The Autocrat, from whom all blessings flow. To this end, they are trying to discredit the Australian intelligence operative who reported on George Papadopoulos. They are in Italy to meet the obscure academic Joseph Mifsud, a one-person think tank with no obvious source of support thought to be someone’s secret agent. Simplest to understand are two ways in which Ukraine is implicated. The first is that Ukraine faked the evidence that Putin-ally Yanukovych paid off Paul Manafort. Or, perhaps, the evidence is not fake, as the amounts correspond to sums he deposited offshore without paying taxes, but that given Manafort’s friendship with the Autocrat, it should have been suppressed. The second association with Ukraine, which may be the strangest claim of all, is that the compromised DNC server is in Ukraine. This is the server Trump mentioned on his phone call with Zelensky. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the server, or the hackers, were Ukrainian (Mueller indicted Russians for this act and laid out evidence).

Tying the loose ends together is the Steele Dossier. Much of the dossier has been proven to be true. Some still seems rather far-fetched, as its own redactor agreed. But in Trumpland, its very existence is an Original Sin, not yielding before the Autocrat. People who should know better insist it couldn’t be used as evidence for warrants because it was paid for by Trump’s opponents. If so, our prisons will soon be emptied when felons learn the police can no longer use evidence obtained from tips given by professional rivals, jilted lovers, and others who don’t like them.

The big hole in the theory is why this Deep State waited until after the election, while before the election their main accomplishments were (1) announcing an additional inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email server less than two weeks before the election; (2) letting Moscow Mitch McConnell bully them into silence about Russian interference in the election; and (3) keeping completely silent about the connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, involving Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and others, that they already knew about. But like other conspiracy theories, the point is not the plausibility, the point is the shared membership in the club. In fact, believing the impossible is a strong attraction (see also: miracles in religion). So, the question is how to fight the Trump counternarrative. We don’t need to persuade everyone: we just need to keep the believers to the irreducible minimum core. The floor is open.

We still have about 90 postcards left to write (addresses from Noemi), and not all postcards have been returned to us for sending. Election Day is coming… We need them by the next meeting.

By the way, we spent a good half-hour with Mr. Campa-Najjar. He is probably the most flippable of the seats still in Team Orange Red hands, especially if Hunter is the Republican candidate. Former Rep. Darrell Issa has also filed to run. (Ever notice how the DC swamp-hating Republicans all want to go back there after a brief stay at home? See also—Paul Ryan.) He will need both cash and postcarding.

You may recall, he ran against future jailbird Duncan Hunter in 2018, coming close but not quite. He will be at our house this Friday 9/27 at 9:00 am. We are supporting his second try as part of a non-Indivisible commitment we made to J Street. (By the way, Washington, DC does not have a J Street. The grid goes from I Street to K Street.)

RSVP to us if you would like to meet him here.