Minutes of the May 11 meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / Leave a comment

Overview of Virginia: we are paired up with Del. Michael Feggans again, and we have in a request for a Zoom with him where we can ask him questions. The campaign is hoping this meeting will also generate some donations. As soon as we know the date for the Zoom session, we will pass it on and everyone can invite their friends. Meeting our candidate is a lot of fun. We committed to write 500 postcards, but as of now, Sister District has no Feggans addresses and asked us to write for Del. Nadarius Clark (running in an adjacent Tidewater district) instead. The 2025 elections in Virginia look good. The Republican candidates are making no pretense of Youngkin-like moderation, and they are arguing amongst themselves over their Lieutenant Governor candidate, who is openly gay. (Their gubernatorial candidate is against same-sex marriage.)

We talked about our Friday protests. People are enjoying them quite a bit. Last Friday we handed out several hundred action flyers—people love them! We talked about adding some new items to the protest and for this week 1) Naomi is putting together a songbook so we can sing together on one corner and 2) Ken will be recruiting for the June 14th protest. We will also add some new button styles and hand out some stickers (very popular to put on laptops). The band will be back though perhaps not this coming week. Everyone should continue to pass on word about the protests. We can always use more participants. We also talked about perhaps in the future adding another flyer distribution point, such as the Downtown Berkeley BART station.

For the action part of the meeting we wrote postcards for next Tuesday’s Scranton City Council election and some of us wrote to the Florida Bar asking for Pam Bondi to be investigated.

April 5 protests

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 2 Comments
Hands Off

We will have our Friday protest on April 4, but there are also nationwide protests on April 5. The Oakland protest is at Frank Ogawa Plaza, 1:00–2:30. San Francisco is at Civic Center Plaza, 1:00–3:00. Numerous other communities have protests planned, e.g. Orinda.

I’m writing this before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has closed. However, the FL–06 special election is almost in the books. We didn’t win this Trump+30 district, but we overperformed November 2024 by about 20 points: looks like a single-digit win for the Republican.

This bodes well for Wisconsin.

[Update, 8:30 pm PDT] The Florida results slipped a little bit: we lost the Sixth District by 14 and the First by 15. In 2024, they were Trump+30 and +37 respectively. But, as you surely saw, we won in Wisconsin, with double-digit improvement relative to Kamala Harris’s campaign. The Democrats have much work to do, but perhaps this will push the doom-and-gloom columns away for a few days.

Dealing with DOGE 💩

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 5 Comments

Several members have brought to my attention Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D–MD) form to make Freedom of Information Act requests of DOGE and its alter ego, the U.S. Digital Service. To save you a few clicks, I’m putting it below. Note that it appears to require a ”wet“ signature (for grumpy old fountain pen users like me, it really is wet) and goes by snail mail. Rep. Raskin asks that after you mail it, you also let his office know at this link. He promises to keep you updated. Whether he will also badger you for contributions, I can’t say. (He doesn’t need them; he is in a very Blue district.)

Raskin_DOGE_Privacy_RequestDownload

Oppose the continuing resolution

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 2 Comments

The House of Representatives just passed a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. The Republicans lost one of their own, but picked up Democrat Jared Golden of Maine. (They didn’t need his vote.) It now moves to the Senate, where it needs sixty votes to avoid a filibuster.

Senate Democrats appear to be divided on what to do. Some seem simply unable to stand up to anything that Trump demands. That’s reserved for Ukrainians and Canadians. Alex Padilla is not currently listed as opposing the resolution, which does nothing to stop Elon and his Doggies from cutting whatever they want. Padilla’s contact information.

UPDATE: Padilla and Schiff are both committed No. Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, is rumored to be caving. The problem is not the Democrats leaders are too Left or too Right. They are too chicken.