Congressman Peter Welch met today with a group of some 100-120 Vermonters to discuss the war in the Aldrich Library in Barre today. Hoo boy, where to begin… Let's just say that it was the most heated confrontation that I've ever personally witnessed between constituents and a politician. Much more below the jump, it's a long one…

Continue reading Welch meets with anti-war constituents, gets quite the earful →

Sometimes you get taken by surprise.



I was in Bellows Falls tonight to do a gig and saw a sign that said “special event tonight: expect delays.” Nothing was happening in town, but when I parked and got out of the car, I heard drums. I set up the camera and realized that there was a Veteran’s Day parade coming through, so I grabbed a few photographs. Night photography is tricky work, and not everything comes out as expected, but I particularly like the two shots I’ve included in this post. The first is of the parade itself. You can see the ghost flags as part of the shot.



The second picture is what followed after:
when the march ended, there was a ceremony to dispose of old flags that were no longer of use. I’d never seen one of these ceremonies before and I found it profoundly moving. All the participants were clearly veterans or family members of veterans. I couldn’t tell you the words they spoke during the ceremony; I wasn’t even paying attention to the language as much as just the raw feeling of it.



But what the feeling boiled down to, at least for me, is that there was a point in my life where my country meant a lot more than it does today, that there was something profound and meaningful about the flag.



I remember thinking I lived in the greatest country in the world. I’m not stupid. I know some of that was an illusion. But I always thought that we tried, even though we didn’t always do it the best we could, to do what was right. I always thought that we lived in a country where people could make big changes by the power of their purse and the power of their vote.



Today, I find myself regretfully embarrassed by how our flag and our love of country have been used and abused by some in our government and how easily we allowed them to appropriate a symbol that was meant for everyone; how easily we allowed them to steal our love of country and turn it into something profane and disgusting.



I don’t know about you, but I want my country back. I want to stop being repulsed by what’s being done in our name and I want to find a way to move beyond treating the military as a political football.



I know that, as a country, we’ve done some horrendous things in the past.



But we’re better than this. We’re better than torture. We’re better than illegal wiretapping. We’re better than the occupation of Iraq.



We’re better than the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We’re better than the treatment of the Jena Six.



We’re better than a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. We’re better than drilling for oil in Alaska. We’re better than refusing to let people help clean up toxic waste in California.



We’re better than stolen elections. We’re better than the Supreme Court intervening to appoint our President. We’re better than pardoning Scooter Libby and we’re better than outing Valerie Plame.



We have to be.



Or what the hell’s the point of even pretending to be a Democracy any longer?

Although taking place in Iowa, not in New Hampshire, the traditional Jefferson-Jackson Dinner is a a must-see for Democratic political junkies.

Suffice to say, there is one speech in particular that people are talking about this morning.

David Yespen of the Des Moines Register wrote:

Obama was particularly impressive Saturday night.  Should he win the Iowa caucuses, Saturday’s dinner will be remembered as one of the turning points in his campaign in here…

Garance Franke-Ruta of theGarance.com wrote:

If anyone comes out of this dinner with The Big Mo, it will be him.

And Michael Crowley of The New Republic wrote:

If I had to declare a winner it would definitely be Obama, who made me think anew about his potential as a nominee who can excite voters.

Tim Foley
Proud to be a NH staff member for Barack Obama’s movement for change

This is part of an ongoing series I’ve been posting over at Daily Kos that I thought might be interesting to post here as well –Julie

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Sometimes it’s complicated to talk about creativity in terms specifically of activism.  So today I’m going to talk a bit about creativity of other sorts: artistic inventiveness, creativity and exploration, with a nod towards the end about how it applies to activism and political work.

But first, about the picture.  There is no Photoshop effect at work here.  This is a light sculpture (see Eric Staller’s work for the original concept of light sculptures– the man’s a genius) which I created through a fairly simple process using long exposure shutter work.  For technical explanations of long exposure work, I’ve written two pieces, one for digital SLRs and another for non-digital SLRs.  The much shorter explanation is that you set the camera up in very dark settings and leave the shutter open for a long time, allowing the light that hits the camera’s film to take prime focus in the frame.

In this case, I was in a parking lot that had very little light surrounding it and pulled out a couple of those glow-sticks you see people selling at fireworks displays and similar events (believe it or not, I keep some in my trunk for just such an occasion).  I moved them into different positions, would hold them there for a moment to get the exposure, and then move them again.  First I did them around my head, curving them, and then straightened them out to do form the lattice work grids.

My intent is to do a lot more of this, using all sorts of light sources: sparklers, torches, light-up toys.  There are tons of possibilities here and lots of room for experimentation.  Winter is perfect for this: when the nights are long, the darkness is my friend for this sort of shot.

So how does this apply to politics & political movements? 

Read on…

There’s a concept I teach my students called “functional fixedness.”  The idea is that we often think of what we’ve got in front of us as being fixed and rigid in its purpose.  A butter knife is for a specific set of tasks, but when you find yourself without a screwdriver, it might do in a pinch.  A lot of us simply don’t think of this, because we don’t think beyond the obvious.  Realizing that I could use a camera to take pictures not only of what’s there at the time I click the shutter and what’s going to be there ten seconds later has transformed my sense of what photography is.  My camera is no longer a way to document and capture moments.  It’s a way to render the passage of time; not through animating images but instead through capturing the whole path of light, and the way that light reflects off of mist, and how that light curves and bends.

In the picture shown, I captured the same light source multiple times, in different positions.  You see very little of the movement of the light because it’s such a low-strength source that it wouldn’t capture it except when still for long enough to show up on the image.  In politics, we often can’t see the effect that what we’re doing is happening.  We don’t know how much of an impact we’ve had until we see the whole picture.  But with experience, we can get ideas as to what works and what doesn’t. 

With politics, however, our greatest enemy can be the expectation that comes with experience: not knowing how to move beyond expectations because we’re so used to them.  A variation on that functional fixedness keeps us from thinking of new and different ways to approach people about issues. 

And before I continue, I will explain that I fully admit to bias here: I’m personally oriented towards creativity and my willingness to expand my own ideas beyond the obvious is probably my primary survival skill.  For a living, I find ways to take complicated concepts and integrate them in fashions which make them clear to people who don’t need to fully understand them but need to understand the basics.  I’m one of the few people I know who can translate easily between geek and non-geek.

So for me, being creative is key to everything.  I’m drawn to works that challenge my assumptions and I’m drawn to works that inspire me to create new material.

So, to politics: as activists, we’re often stuck in a bad situation: we have numbers, but not nearly the resources of large, multi-national, corporations.  We can’t afford to launch high-profile PR campaigns and because we’re smart people who like to think, we don’t just fall into line with daily talking points, so it’s harder for us to get a coherent, specific, and simple message into the media meme the way that conservatives (who, preferring to just repeat the same talking points over and over again, because it presumably shouts out the screaming voices from deep inside the recesses of their blackened, dying souls) are able to do.

But here’s the thing: if we approach these problems with enough inventiveness and creativity, we don’t need to act like conservatives in order to get our messages out there.

Three years ago, global warming was viewed by the mainstream media as just a theory but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in climatology to realize that when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, it really did change things for people.  It didn’t do this through just providing good, solid, information.  It did this through providing it in an creative and engaging fashion.

Think about that for a moment: people paid money to go see a lecture about climate change presented by a guy who, when he ran for President in 2000, was just not a particularly engaging presence on the campaign trail.  Don’t get me wrong: I like Gore, but prior to an Inconvenient Truth, I would never have thought I’d be able to sit through more than ten minutes of Gore speaking without falling asleep. 

It was creativity that took this presentation of his and turned it into something much bigger.  It was looking beyond the message itself and thinking about the delivery system that changed things.  Now we’ve got a transformed debate.  No one’s pretending its not real any longer.  We’ve got people pretending it’s not bad but now no one’s pretending it doesn’t happen. 

For me, what this boils down to is that we’ve got a lot of really smart, clever and sophisticated people on our side.  But we don’t use those skills well enough.  We write.  We argue.  We fume.  We seethe.  But what are we going to do that’s going to step outside of the comfort zone?  What are we going to do that draws attention to big issues in a way which engages people without scaring them off?

There aren’t easy answers to this but it does sometimes involve a lot of patience.  Daily Kos started small, and started primarily because Markos and his merry band of Orange Heathens were willing to speak truths that no one else was willing to do at the time.  They were representing a voice which was seldom heard at the time.  This separation from the norm helped garnish enough attention and power to be derisively attacked by Bill O’Reilly.  Admittedly, being attacked by O’Reilly is a low bar, but clearly he’s in some fashion threatened by ‘Kos.

And really, although I joke about it, it’s pretty amazing that this site has attracted some major attention from high-profile (even if insane) media figures.  It’s not because ‘Kos is backed by large finances or a strategic ad campaign.  It’s because ‘Kos set up something which gives people the ability and choice to contribute in whatever way they see fit and allows us the choices to promote, recommend and/or ignore whatever content we so desire.  We use it to get informed, to inform others, to share ideas and it’s free to use for those of us who don’t chose to purchase a subscription.

There’s something revolutionary about this that pushes it to a new level of creativity.  Anything we can place online we can include in Daily Kos.  Think about  the youTube video that Ms Laura posted which outlines the writers strike.  It’s simple.  It’s clear.  But it’s funny and clever.  And I know about it because of Daily Kos.

Back to art: how many of you viewed this diary because of the unusual photo on the preview?  I included partially to talk about art and creativity, but I also included it because I knew it was something most people don’t see every day and I knew it would intrigue some people.

This isn’t something surprising or original; I used a hook.  The only unusual part is that I’m not trying to sell anything.  I’m just trying share my own experience and hope that someone finds it useful.

I think, for me, it’s that I see so many people who are afraid of trying things that will make them look foolish– I see us all wanting to find ways to create change but not having the resources to do so.  We’re stressed out, tired, not sure where to turn and our representatives capitulate to the Bush administration too often. We try things and fail and we get discouraged.

All of this is valid and understandable.  But sometimes we try so hard against those brick walls without thinking that maybe we’re seeing a wall where it doesn’t exist or that it just doesn’t look like it really appears.  We push and get frustrated and discouraged and feel isolated.  We get lost in the morass of corruption and insider politics and don’t know how to break through to the people who are supposed to be representing us.

And we forget to give ourselves the room to look at problems in new light.  We forget to give ourselves the mental space to find new and creative ways to look at the world around us.  We get so caught up in the day to day struggles that we forget that so much change happens through art and exploration and that change happens in subtle ways that aren’t obvious on the surface.

Look at that picture again.  Each of those lines of light that appear in it took time.  No one watching me create that picture would have imagined what it would look like after the fact.  I wasn’t even sure myself.  I was experimenting.  And out of the two dozen experiments I tried that evening, that’s the only one I liked enough to post.  People watching would see me hold a light then move and then hold it somewhere else.  Over and over again.  People watching would probably think I’m a bit odd and have no idea what the hell I’m trying.  But that’s because you can’t see the big picture when you’re in the day to day struggle. 

So we work.  And learn.  And experiment.  And explore.  And sometimes it works.  But when you try to get a message across, and do so in a creative fashion, somewhere with someone it probably takes hold.  That makes the message more available to people the next time they hear it.  And then when it gets presented again in a different fashion from another venue, they’re a little more ready to hear it.  And again, they may not be ready to take it in yet.  It takes time. 

I will end this with a summary of a story that most of us know, to show just how presentation can change how it impacts our recollection of the story:

A work of fiction which was written, which has been presented as a musical, has shown up in many movies, has experienced many parodies on sitcoms, has appeared as multiple plays, including a one-man play in which Patrick Stewart plays every part:

When Scrooge was first visited by Marley, he was unable to take in what Marley had to say.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, he chose to ignore his history and did not want to hear it.  He left the better part of himself behind, unable to learn from his mistakes.

When he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present, he was affected, but not enough to influence change.  He still resisted.

When he was finally visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, he was forced to come face to face with the direct consequences of his own behavior and his own choices.  It wasn’t until that path was drawn for him that the connections were made. 

What we’ve done that can not be changed.

What we’re doing now that we can change.

What will happen in the future should we refuse.

And what happens to others when they make the wrong choice.

Until we find ways to tie these messages together in ways that the rest of our country can understand, we’re still, as a nation, heading towards an abyss.  But we can influence the messages.  We can convey to our people that there is no question that waterboarding is torture.  We can communicate to our friends and colleagues that with our decisions on the environment come consequences that we’ll only escape by not surviving long enough to bear witness to them.

We can learn from our mistakes, but we have to be open to learning and we have to be open to finding new and unusual ways to communicate those mistakes to others and draw on the motivation that comes from wanting to change.

And when we harness that interest in change, we have to be ready to present real and meaningful alternatives.  In “An Inconvenient Truth” we were not just presented with information about the horrors of global warming.  We were presented with alternatives and things we can do right now to reduce the damage to the planet.  When we find creative ways to change our world, we also need to present ways that people can tap into that change and be part of the solution. 

What’s all this take?

Creativity.

In Cryptograms, every letter represents some other letter, and it’s consistent throughout the puzzle.  I.e., if you determine that the letter “A” represents the letter “X” at some point, it will represent the letter X throughout the entire puzzle.  In this case, I compiled a list of things that all have something in common.  The two word phrase at the top is the description of the list and each line has its own item for the list.

What is this a list of?

LCPSZSYMP LMKZSIG:

• MFIKSYMW WMHS
• YCFFAWSGZ
• XIFCYKMZSY
• VKIIW
• SWXILIWXIWYI
• PMECK
• PSEIKMP
• PSEIKZMKSMW
• WMZAKMP PMN
• LCZ LMKZJ
• KIBCKF
• KILAEPSYMWG
• GCYSMPSGZ

Yep, there's still an election going on… some of the latest from the tubes:

TPM has the Ultimate Kerik Scandal List, because there's just so many to keep track of. Rudy's boy is in some deep water. 

And speaking of Mr. “A Noun, a Verb, and 9-11”, Rudy's come up with a surefire method of explaining the reason the military is stretched to the brink… it's Bill Clinton's fault! Can you believe they're still using that one?

Barack Obama has a soft spot in his heart for mining companies. Apparently the 4 percent royalties they currently pay to extract from our public lands is good enough, and he's opposing a recently passed House bill that reforms the Mining Act of 1872 that would raise royalties for new operations to 8 percent.

In other Dem news, Obama and Edwards have cut into Clinton's poll numbers in NH. 

The GOP wedge issue of immigration didn't treat them as well as they thought it would in VA elections last week. As the Right's Field points out, Giuliani thinks that nativism is still a winning strategy.

The man who has been and continues to be wrong about everything in the universe, chickenhawk Bill Kristol, knows who he'd like to see in the GOP VP slot. Can you guess who it is? Hint: he's already run for VP once this century…

And finally, Dave Johnson over at Smirking Chimp lays out the various scenarios that the GOP will try to lay out for the 2008 elections, and why it's important that progressives get their act together now to counter the messages.

HAve a good week, and don't forget to make it to the meeting with Peter Welch about the war, today (Sunday) at the Aldrich Public Lirary in Barre at 1:30 if you can.

Well, for better or worse, Anthony Pollina announced at the Progressive Party convention today in Royalton that he “expects and intends” to run for governor. From WCAX:

Pollina, a Progressive, made the widely anticipated announcement this afternoon at the Progressive's annual convention. He is the first candidate so far to unofficially challenge incumbent Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican. 

Pollina made the announcement before an enthusiastic gathering of over 100 supporters at the Progressive Party's annual convention in South Royalton at the Vermont Law School.

  He also said he is actively seeking the support of Democrats and would accept the nomination of the Democratic party.

  “I would accept the Democratic nomination and I would be pleased to run as a Democrat-slash-Progressive because I think that's what it's going to take to bring people together to make sure we can defeat Jim Douglas,” said Pollina, who says Douglas would undoubtedly easily win a fourth-consecutive term if Democrats and Progressives each run a challenger.

At the very least, it's good to know somebody is running against Douglas, and it's also good to finally hear an acknowledgement that a three-way race mans 2 more years of Whinin' Jim. Whether Pollina's got what it takes this time remains to be seen, but at least there's now a race to talk about. More to come… Poll below the jump.

I'm way too tired to post today, but I wanted to call a discussion question…

Glenn Greenwald has stated, again, what we've all been thinking in light of the Mukasey nomination.

First off, let's acknowledge what a disgraceful display by Washington Democrats this whole vote was. All the Senators running for President managed to hide from the vote (and yes, I'm sure they all happen to have just dandy excuses, how-dare-I-complain), and you have the spectacle of the head of the DSCC up there saying that the now-Attorney General of the United States is “wrong on torture,” but he should be confirmed anyway. My god, are civilized people in generations to come likely to look back on someone like Schumer with anything other than absolute scorn and contempt after that? 

But Greenwald's point is:

   Every time Congressional Democrats failed this year to stop the Bush administration (i.e., every time they “tried”), the excuse they gave was that they “need 60 votes in the Senate” in order to get anything done. Each time Senate Republicans blocked Democratic legislation, the media helpfully explained not that Republicans were obstructing via filibuster, but rather that, in the Senate, there is a general “60-vote requirement” for everything.

So why would 44 Democratic Senators make a flamboyant showing of opposing confirmation without actually doing what they could to prevent it?

So, the question is: with our Constitution in shreds, and our congressional leadership pacing nervously while the Republicans are dancing tangos on the pieces, are cloture votes now the only REAL votes that have any meaning on Constitutional matters (and don't try and tell me the Mukasey nomination wasn't a Constitutional matter)? Is it all or nothing on such votes, when dealing with the Bush GOP?

Should we even care about how our Senators vote, or otherwise speak out, if they aren't doing everything in their power – including filibuster – to protect us from things as serious as legalized torture? I'm having a hard time imagining how that answer could be anything but 'no.'

(Don’t know that it’s “the best” argument, but it’s a damned fine one. – promoted by JulieWaters)

The best written argument I have read thus far on the marriage issue.  As a Justice of the Peace recently presiding over my first marriage, this is how I read the JoP manual and understand the law. 

Enjoy one and all. 

From today's Times Argus letters: 

Civil versus religious marriage 

November 9, 2007 

Though religion is an essential component of marriage for many couples, legal marriage in this country is a secular institution. 

The required license does not mention God, faith or children. It establishes a state of legal, not holy, matrimony. It confers no divine blessings, but provides hundreds of civil rights, protections and benefits, among the greatest of which is the word “marriage” itself. Opponents of same-sex marriage would like to read capability of procreation and Biblical injunctions against homosexual relations into the civil marriage laws, but they are not there, either overtly or by implication. 

Couples who want religious wedding ceremonies of course have every right to them, but this does not mean that religious marriages may be substituted for civil ones. The state invests the clergy with the authority to sign marriage licenses and thus to perform the civil and religious marriages simultaneously. The religious ceremony may be more important to couples and their families, but it is immaterial to the state. The legal part of the marriage is the civil portion only. 

The essential point is this: a duly executed state marriage license is valid without a shred of religious ceremony or any ceremony at all; a religious marriage is not legal without a civil marriage license. 

Members of the clergy must never be compelled to perform marriages which violate their religious principles, but neither may they force their convictions on other clergy — a steadily growing number — who believe differently, or on civil marriage law, which must always remain secular. A slight change in wording will make the standard state marriage license equally applicable to same-sex and heterosexual couples. There is no defensible reason not to make the change. 

Judy and Michael Olinick  Middlebury

Well, then. Turning up the heat does seem to work sometimes. Peter Welch has agreed to have a meeting to discuss the war, this Sunday, November 11th at the Old Labor Hall Aldrich Public Library in Barre. The meeting is open to the public, so I'm hoping you'll attend if possible, and more importantly, spread the word to anyone you know who would be interested. As Odum pointed out earlier, the next few votes on Iraq funding will be here shortly, and Welch is definitely running out of chances to back up his words with action and refuse to sign on to anymore war funding. As you probably know, patience is starting to run rather thin lately. Hope you can make it.