( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

I think this Diary sums up how many Obama supporters feel:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…

Will Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney be on the Presidential ballot as a Green this year? (For that matter, do the Greens want Nader back after he used and abused the party apparatus so badly the last couple times? Would he even accept losing in a Primary? Doubt it.) From Third Party Watch:

According to the Alameda County (CA) Green Party, there will be a Presidential Debate on January 13, 2 p.m. in San Francisco. Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Elaine Brown, Jared Ball and Kent Mesplay are all listed.

The California Primary on February 5 will include all five of these candidates as well as Kat Swift of Texas, and Jesse Johnson of the West Virginia Mountain Party, which affiliated with the Green Party (US) this summer. In most states, delegates to the GPUS Presidential Nominating Convention will be selected by state convention or other internal methods such as balloting, but in four states (Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, & Illinois) and DC there will be a state run primary.

Calitics (GMD’s sister 50-State-Blog-Project/Soaplblox site in California) will likely liveblog, if it’s your kinda thing.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

UPDATE: Here's the VIP attendee list from the Edwards site: Ben Cohen, Kevin Leahy, Matt Dunne, Doug Racine, and John Campbell.  I'm certainly planning on showing. -odum

Good morning Friends:

I'll have more details later, but here is the gist:

This Saturday  (5th of January) a group of Vermonters will be banding together and heading to New Hampshire to canvass for John Edwards.

Here are the tentative details: Meet in Lebanon New Hampshire at 9 a.m. Begin canvassing around 10:00 a.m.

There will be a Vermonter kick-off event at 9:00 a.m. hosted by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's .

January 5, 2008 – 9:00 AM
Lebanon Canvass Kick-Off
Rivermill Commercial Center
Building #5, 85 Mechanic Street
Lebanon, NH

There may also be a rally/event with John Edwards in the early afternoon in the river valley area although that is in flux and I do not expect to see final plans until after the Iowa caucus.

More info, and a Wednesay evening update, below the jump

I expect the Edwards campaign will have more on the itinerary later. 

I will post more details as we come closer to Saturday. I will link to emerging/final details as soon as they are available.

I hope you can join us and help on “Vermonter Day” in New Hampshire.

There are plenty of opportunities (read: “all help is greatly appreciated”) between now and Tuesday.  Vermonters for Edwards, who cannot volunteer on Saturday, are welcome all other days too!

Contact me directly at caoimhin [underscore] laochdha@verizon.net for more information.  Better yet, the Edwards for President event information page is http://www.johnedwards.com/nh/events/ .

———————

[UPDATE: Wednseday at 8:00 p.m.] In addition to the information Odum put up earlier:

Manchester, NH – As John Edwards' momentum builds in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Edwards for President campaign today announced the endorsement of 13 Vermont elected officials, labor leaders and progressive activists including Ben & Jerry's co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. The Vermont leaders have committed to work to ensure John Edwards wins the Vermont primary, and a group of them will travel to New Hampshire on January 5th to hand out free ice cream and build campaign momentum for the New Hampshire primary.

“John Edwards has the backbone and integrity to stand up to wealthy, powerful interests and deliver the real change our nation needs,” said Ben Cohen. “We're proud to stand with him in this fight.”

The following Vermont leaders support John Edwards and will work to ensure he wins the Vermont primary:

    * Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield
    * Former Vermont Lieutenant Governor Doug Racine
    * State Representative John Moran
    * State Representative Dexter Randall
    * State Representative Chris Pearson
    * President of Champlain Valley Labor Council/President National Writers' Union/UAW 1981 Jerry Colby
    * Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 597 Ron Rabideau
    * Vermont Labor Activist Connor Casey,Immediate past president Vermont State AFL-CIO Federation Teamsters Daniel Brush

Also, thank you to Greenvtster for the directions.

Full press release from Edwards campaign is right here.

——————————— 

Sláinte,

-cl 

This is mostly as an aside to Julie's post on the Kos/Obama dust-up. I read a few comments over ther but had to leave because my eyes started bleeding- it was like listening to a bunch of fifth-graders.

Nevertheless, like many, I've been quite distressed at Obama's apparent lurching farther and farther to the right in this campaign. It's almost as bad as Hillary, but from a different angle. Matt Stoller at Open Left ad this to say in his Reality-Based Candidate Evaluations post that sums up the Obama phenomenon better than I ever could, and gives us much to be concerned about:

Let's do a thought experiment.  Let's say I were to put a generic candidate forward, and ask whether Democrats should choose him or her as our nominee.  This person rejected the Iraq war at the time of the war authorization vote and has a very liberal voting record as a Senator, though, like much of the caucus, has done little of substance to lead us out of the war.  He has a good if unremarkable career as a Senator, and is loved by Democrats all over the country for inspiring rhetoric.

Since declaring for President, this person has called Social Security a 'crisis', attacked trial lawyers, associated unapologetically with vicious homophobes, portrayed Gore and Kerry as excessively polarizing losers, boasted as his central achievement an irrelevant ethics bill, ran against the DC establishment while taking huge amounts of cash from DC, undermined Ned Lamont in 2006, criticized NAFTA while voting for a NAFTA-style trade agreement, compiled opposition research on the most effective liberal pundit in the country, refused to promise that American troops would be out of Iraq by 2013, and endorsed the central plank of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy doctrine, the war on terror.

How would you react?  You could concoct a 'theory of change' and argue that all of this is just deceptive, and the candidate is worth supporting anyway.  You could make arguments that this person can change the electoral map, with no evidence, and support him for that reason.  Or you could decide that this person means what he says and is running a campaign promising the country premised on conservative ideas such as the war on terror, maintaining an American presence in Iraq, and 'fixing' Social Security…

We like to think we live in the reality-based community.  And if you know all of these things, and you still support Obama, you have to concede that you are supporting a conservative candidate for President.  And that's fine.  But just go into this with clear eyes.

I'm just worried that people aren't paying attention enough to see this.  I wouldn't fully agree with Stoller that Obama's a full-blown "conservative" but he's hardly the progressive we need to get things going in the right direction. If we do indeed get yet another mushy "centrist" candidate, we can fully expect to remain in the political wilderness for some time to come. The stakes are higher than ever right now, and in view of this, Obama's "change" mantra is starting to sound Orwellian.

This is mostly as an aside to Julie's post on the Kos/Obama dust-up. I read a few comments over ther but had to leave because my eyes started bleeding- it was like listening to a bunch of fifth-graders.

Nevertheless, like many, I've been quite distressed at Obama's apparent lurching farther and farther to the right in this campaign. It's almost as bad as Hillary, but from a different angle. Matt Stoller at Open Left ad this to say in his Reality-Based Candidate Evaluations post that sums up the Obama phenomenon better than I ever could, and gives us much to be concerned about:

Let's do a thought experiment.  Let's say I were to put a generic candidate forward, and ask whether Democrats should choose him or her as our nominee.  This person rejected the Iraq war at the time of the war authorization vote and has a very liberal voting record as a Senator, though, like much of the caucus, has done little of substance to lead us out of the war.  He has a good if unremarkable career as a Senator, and is loved by Democrats all over the country for inspiring rhetoric.

Since declaring for President, this person has called Social Security a 'crisis', attacked trial lawyers, associated unapologetically with vicious homophobes, portrayed Gore and Kerry as excessively polarizing losers, boasted as his central achievement an irrelevant ethics bill, ran against the DC establishment while taking huge amounts of cash from DC, undermined Ned Lamont in 2006, criticized NAFTA while voting for a NAFTA-style trade agreement, compiled opposition research on the most effective liberal pundit in the country, refused to promise that American troops would be out of Iraq by 2013, and endorsed the central plank of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy doctrine, the war on terror.

How would you react?  You could concoct a 'theory of change' and argue that all of this is just deceptive, and the candidate is worth supporting anyway.  You could make arguments that this person can change the electoral map, with no evidence, and support him for that reason.  Or you could decide that this person means what he says and is running a campaign promising the country premised on conservative ideas such as the war on terror, maintaining an American presence in Iraq, and 'fixing' Social Security…

We like to think we live in the reality-based community.  And if you know all of these things, and you still support Obama, you have to concede that you are supporting a conservative candidate for President.  And that's fine.  But just go into this with clear eyes.

I'm just worried that people aren't paying attention enough to see this.  I wouldn't fully agree with Stoller that Obama's a full-blown “conservative” but he's hardly the progressive we need to get things going in the right direction. If we do indeed get yet another mushy “centrist” candidate, we can fully expect to remain in the political wilderness for some time to come. The stakes are higher than ever right now, and in view of this, Obama's “change” mantra is starting to sound Orwellian.