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Big protest in the Elmwood

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 4 Comments

Let me thank all of you who came, yelled, waved signs, gave leaflets to passerby. The troops are ready; the D.C. leadership is still mostly missing in action. My own iPhone photographic skills are modest. If you have some good pictures you’d like to share, please email them to me, and I can post them here.

Author with protest sign
Your author and his sign
Northwest corner, College & Ashby

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New visitors: Scroll down for our recommended Resistance Reading Diet and other PDFs of possible interest.

Update: By popular request, today’s handout.

Courage is ContagiousDownload

Notes from the February 9 meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / Leave a comment

Record attendance! The Resistance grows. Welcome new members.

Some other local Indivisible chapters: Indivisible Marin claims 10,000 members. Zoom meetings and action items. Indivisible East Bay has monthly meetings, sometimes in person, large scale action items. Indivisible Elmwood has in-person meetings bi-weekly, returning politics to a socially-engaged experience. We also do action items: postcarding, joining phone banks, fundraising, and sidewalk presence. (Our meetings alternate between two members’ houses. We realize that yesterday’s meeting was crowded. We may set up an RSVP system.)

Anyone who wants to post to this blog: email me, and I will authorize you. If there is interest, I will also explain how to post.

February 9 agenda

  1. Courage is contagious: How to be brave and mentally stable
  2. Support vital media  [copy of the handout will appear here after beautification]
  3. Recruitment of activists: Goal 3.5% of the population
  4. Daily political flossing: Many, many actions to choose from
  5. Future meetings: learning about social media, BlueSky, vital readings, action items

Yesterday’s handouts are available in the post right below this one.

We also wrote nearly 400 postcards for Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford.

We have postcards and addresses for WI Supreme Court

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / Leave a comment

Our candidate is Susan Crawford.

This is one of the most consequential elections of the year, to retain our 4–3 majority. Among other accomplishments, the Court nuked one of the two most extreme state legislative gerrymanders in the country, where one year Republicans attained a veto-proof supermajority with fewer total votes than the Democrats. (North Carolina also has an extreme gerrymander, where the State Supreme Court may award the 2024 Supreme Court judicial election to the loser on some-or-another pretext. Best guess is that the most moderate Republican on that court will follow the law instead of his party; the other three are definite weasels.)

We Choose to Fight

/ db13jackson / Leave a comment

Unless you’ve been forcefully tuning out the news, you must be  experiencing some of the horror/panic/disgust we’re feeling at the blitzkrieg of Trump nominations and wondering what, if anything, can be done.

Indivisible, the national organization, is organizing “We Choose to Fight” actions at senators’ offices—something not everyone can do at this point.  But phone calls and emails to Senate offices are still worth doing this week. Below is an email we sent (in slightly different versions) our Senators today, based largely on these resources from Indivisible. You might want to contact them as well. Both Padilla and Schiff have spoken out in hearings on Vought and Patel, so we start by thanking them.  Here is our email, (with parentheses for the Padilla version)

Dear Senator Schiff (Padilla),

I appreciate your outspoken opposition to Kash Patel’s nomination as FBI director (Russell Vought’s nomination as federal budget director). We need real leadership from Democrats in the Senate on this and on what amounts to a fast-moving coup attempt by Trump and his allies.

Our democratic institutions can only survive this authoritarian onslaught if those of you in leadership positions act forcefully to block this attempted blitzkrieg.  This could involve: denying a quorum by walking out whenever Republicans don’t have 51 votes in the chamber; blocking unanimous consent to force Republicans to take the longest possible route for each step of the confirmation process; using all 30 hours of debate on Patel (Vought) and other MAGA nominees to expose Project 2025, Musk’s Treasury takeover, the funding freeze and the mayhem at the FBI; forcing roll-call votes, quorum calls, and procedural delays to slow everything down; refusing to vote for even moderate nominees while this power grab continues; and making the case that this is a constitutional crisis requiring all hands on deck.

There is real fear in your constituency that Senators may try to appear “reasonable” to the MAGA steamroller and allow it to roll on.  You can offer reasonableness once the money and power grab is stopped, but at this critical moment, you need to make the case loudly and publicly about why you’re blocking this coup.

Your constituent,

Actions for Today

/ Naomi Janowitz / 1 Comment
  1. Call the California Democratic Party office and encourage those voting tomorrow for the new DNC leader to vote for Ben Wikler. The number is 916-442-5707. I said that he has broad support among the activist community in CA (which he does).
  2. Put our next meeting on your calendars. Sunday Feb 9th 4:00-5:00. Postcarding for vital Wisconsin Supreme Court election, info about Virginia and much more.
  3. MediasPlus communications has been getting under the skin of MAGA. Send them some love.
  4. Finally, we are thinking of bringing back our Friday late afternoon protests at the corner of Ashby and College. They were fun and we need some fun. Stay tuned.

Minutes of January 26 meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 4 Comments

The vote for DNC Chair is February 1st. We support Ben Wikler, currently Chair of the Wisconsin State Democrats. He has done a fantastic job there, with grassroots organizing and fundraising. (His principal opponent appears to be Ken Martin, who holds the corresponding post in Minnesota and is currently a Vice Chair of the DNC. In Minnesota, we are at best standing still.)

We distributed a list of California DNC voting delegates. VotePro has a Google doc of the delegates’ contact info. The list of current DNC officers and their phone numbers is here. Please contact the officers, or any of the California delegates, especially if you know them.

Our DC representatives need us to help stiffen their spines. Well, maybe not Lateefah Simon, but I’ll include her number for convenience.

The first significant 2025 election (other than DNC) is for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, April 1st. Wikler helped flip this court, with immediate benefits on gerrymandering and reproductive rights. Our candidate is Susan Crawford. Our postcards and addresses for her have not arrived yet, but we will write them when they come. You can donate at that link via ActBlue.

We also have the entire Virginia House of Delegates and the statewide offices up in November 2025. Our gubernatorial candidate will be Abigail Spanberger, formerly a Member of Congress. The current Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor, both MAGA nuts, will fight it out in the Republican primary. In 2023 Naomi and I (and our son in Brooklyn) knocked on doors for Delegate Michael Feggans who flipped HD-97 (Virginia Beach). We’ll help him again.