politics

Minutes from the September 14 meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 1 Comment

My notes show three action items, besides finishing the Virginia postcards, which I have mailed to Jessica Anderson Campaign HQ in Williamsburg, VA.

  • Most of the donation action is going to happen in 2026, although I have gotten multiple requests from Dems running against each other in Michigan and Illinois. I haven’t looked hard at any of these races. Eighteen[!] Democrats have filed to replace retiring Jan Schakowsky in IL–09, a very blue district where the primary is everything. Sister District has sent a donation link for this year’s Virginia House of Delegates races. Early voting has just started in Virginia. Voting in swing districts has been off to a quick start, but not at all clear whose voters were in a big rush to turn out.
  • Buy Blue. We can see from Disney’s hasty and inadequate retreat that boycotts are a serious worry for the cowards running our major corporations. (The Washington Post has lost 500,000 digital subscribers since 2021.) But we can use our money two ways: depriving the bad guys, but also supporting the good ones. I think I was promised a source for politically liberal companies (e.g., Costco), but I don’t see it. Whoever promised, please send again. There was a Buy Blue website years ago, but it’s gone.
  • Thank the judiciary. Standing up to Trump is a thankless job. Judges have been doing it since the beginning of this Trump regime, even though the Supreme Court has seldom shown inclination to back them up. We can write them thank-you notes. I believe someone has assembled a list of addresses. I simply started with a list of some of the most heroic judges: Paula Xinis [immigration], James Boasberg [immigration], Allison D. Burroughs [Harvard], Beryl Howell [spite against law firms]. As you can see, Google finds email and snail mail addresses with one click. (Two for some of the snail mail.) I’m going to get out the nice pen and stationery.

Friday protests continue.

Yes, I know I haven’t done minutes of the previous meeting yet. And if I have omitted something from this meeting, the edit button is never far away.

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.

Notes from the 2/23 Elmwood meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 1 Comment

We will have a recurring visibility event at College & Ashby from 5:00 to 6:00 on Fridays, starting this Friday 2/28. Bring signs!

Economic Boycott: Buy nothing Friday, February 28, all day.

Short report about prior activities: We wrote 400 postcards last meeting and over 100 people turned up at our Not My President Protest last Monday (photos in previous post).

Current actions:

Sue Hildebrand, one of two Cal Dems staff members working on engagement joined us for a spirited fifteen minutes via Zoom. The useful part of her visit was explaining that the lowest level of the Party comprises the County Central Committees and we should get in touch with our County Committee to express concerns (good idea to learn who yours are!). Half of the Cal Dems budget ( 6 out of 12 million) goes to conventions and such. The other half goes to support candidates and field operations so they only can afford 2 full-time organizers. Hildebrand emphasized how little power Democrats have today.

Afterwards we split into three working groups.

I helped one group get on Bluesky, reviving my own account in the process. Bluesky is basically a drop-in replacement for what Twitter was before Musk turned it into xhit. Bluesky is growing. Musk’s right-wing sewer is not.

Twitter revenue chart

The second group did postcards for Susan Crawford in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, April 1st. We got our postcards from Activate America. There are also letters available from Vote Forward.

The third group is organizing a NEW branch of Indivisible Elmwood. Watch for more info here.

Next meeting is March 9.

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 Choose to Fight

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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,

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.

From the Carson River front

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / Leave a comment

I am in Dan and Karen’s Alpine County cabin (thanks, guys!), after two days’ canvassing in Reno, two in Carson City, and one in Gardnerville. It’s gone the way door-knocking usually does: many not at home, a few houses festooned [besmirched?] with MAGA signs we skip, and some who had already voted for Harris or had a clear plan to do so. So far, we have netted two new Harris voters, both young, both eligible for the first time.

The one-and-only source for understanding Nevada elections is Jon Ralston, founder of the Nevada Independent online newspaper. His analysis for Nevada is discouraging. The big hole is Las Vegas (Clark County), where the percentage of ballots received either by mail or early in-person is too low and, while plurality registered Democratic, not by enough. In the 2022 cycle, almost ninety percent of Nevadans voted early. Northern Nevadans who heeded Trump’s advice to wait got a bad surprise when a blizzard came in Sunday night before the election and many roads were still impassable on Election Day.

Similar analysis of other swing states is mostly good news for us, especially in the Blue Wall, but the people doing the analysis don’t have Ralston’s track record. What he can’t predict, of course, is how many Republicans are voting for Harris. We have met some while canvassing. They were not on our voter contact list, but their Democratic wives were. He also admits he can’t predict how the large number of “No Party Preference” voters will go: exit polling in 2020 said Biden +6. Harris will need better.

At the same time, it is worth mentioning that the national Republican organizations have pulled their TV ads for the Nevada Senate race and all three blue House seats. Trump also cancelled a potential appearance in Minden, Nevada, fifteen minutes’ from this cabin. While the County Supervisors approved the permit unanimously—I assume the First Amendment controls here—there was apparently some grumbling over the unpaid bills when he came to the same site in 2020.

And Harris is going to Texas!? What do they know that we don’t?