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TIME TO VOTE: MOVEON.ORG's PRIMARY

Guest TEARZ

By Guest TEARZ
in Channel Zero

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Guest TEARZ

Guest TEARZ

Posted
Posted

click here to register for their primary.

 

a little info: In most presidential primary processes, pundits, pollsters and wealthy donors determine the outcome long before the actual primaries. By the time the rest of us cast our ballots, the nomination is typically a done deal. The MoveOn.org PAC Primary will allow hundreds of thousands of voters to speak out now, adding their weight to the campaigns of their choice. Voting in the MoveOn.org PAC primary starts Tuesday, June 24 and will last 48 hours. Existing MoveOn members will be sent a unique email ballot, which is good for one vote only.

 

some of you may not know, but moveon.org is a powerful organization, not just some shitty web group. they have clout. they raised 1 million dollars for wellstone in one day last year. the stakes are real, because they'll endorse the candidate that wins a majority.

pretty cool shit.

 

PS- VOTE KUCINICH!!!!

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Poop Man Bob

Poop Man Bob

Posted
Posted
Originally posted by TEARZ

poop man,

in a totally respectful way, i'm interested in why you like dean. bless us.

 

1) What initially got me interested in him was his stance on the war. He has been anti-war from the beginning, and I respect him for that. I respect him even more because he continues to be an outspoken critic of the war.

2) What he did while governor of Vermont (passing a law allowing civil unions for gays/lesbians, reduced their debt; quote from The Burlington (Vermont) Free Press on 9/13/2001 - "This equal emphasis on creating jobs, balancing budgets and expanding government's social activism sums up Dean's approach to the office he has held longer than anyone in this century ... Dean's stunning political success - five re-election bids, none of them close - has been built on that balanced approach to government.")

3) His views on the issues - repealing Bush's bogus tax cut; universal health care; as I said earlier, his stance on the war with Iraq; possible civil union push nationally?; funding of special education; click to read.

4) Intangibles. Things like how he commands himself in a speech (hop on over to www.howarddean.tv and you can watch a lot of his speeches and coverage throughout the past few months). I like that his campaign was the first ever to provide ongoing blogging, keeping anyone interested in their up-to-date views and activities. I respect the fact that he's a doctor and is clearly educated.

 

There's more, but I have to shower and go eat steak.

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Guest TEARZ

Guest TEARZ

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btw, thanks for your response PMB, i appreciate it. i'll get to your opportunist ? tomorrow or something when i sobner up.,llcasm

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Guest TEARZ

Guest TEARZ

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stuff in my inbox

 

WHO IS THE PEACE CANDIDATE?

 

Beginning Tuesday, activists who've joined the peace and justice group

MoveOn.org will be able to vote online. If you are one of the many

planning to vote for a "peace candidate," please read this email

closely, and forward it to others.

 

An interesting exchange occurred at yesterday's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

Candidates' Forum, in answer to a question about the "Digital Divide"

that separates minorities and the poor from middle class whites in

computer access. Congressman Dennis Kucinich received warm applause

when he declared: "As long as we're spending so much money for the

Pentagon, and so little money for education, we're going to have all

kinds of divides in this country…The only way we're really going to

close the divide in this country is to start cutting the Pentagon

budget

and put that money into education."

 

Howard Dean spoke next and commented: "I don't agree with Dennis about

cutting the Pentagon budget when we're in the middle of a difficulty

with terror attacks."

 

That's a stark contrast on one of the biggest questions facing

Democrats. Dean describes himself as a fiscal conservative adamant

about balanced budgets. But if the soaring Pentagon budget is

untouchable, are we being candid with voters about delivering them an

enhanced domestic agenda of which Democrats can be proud?

 

With Democratic candidates promising increased spending in such areas

as

healthcare, education and the environment, how can the federal budget

be

balanced while Pentagon cuts are deemed off-limits?

 

Dennis Kucinich has made cuts in the bloated military budget central to

his campaign. He has repeatedly pointed out that Pentagon spending

will

soon rival the military budgets of all other countries in the world

combined, that unneeded and Cold-War era weapons are still being

produced, that Star Wars missile defense is a boondoggle, and that the

Pentagon has a trillion dollars in irreconcilable accounts.

 

Kucinich's commitment to fundamentally shift our nation's budget

priorities toward civilian needs like healthcare, schools, cities,

retirement security and environmental cleanup has attracted thousands

to

our campaign, and last week helped earn the endorsements of progressive

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey and leading peace activist and businessman

Ben Cohen. (Text of endorsements at http://www.kucinich.us.)

 

If you're an activist committed to peace and justice, think about these

issues before you vote in any primary, including the MoveOn Primary

that

occurs this Tuesday and Wednesday.

 

If you have not yet signed up with MoveOn, you must register today to

vote for the genuine peace candidate, Dennis Kucinich, in this week's

balloting: http://www.moveon.org/pac/reg/.

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Guest BROWNer

Guest BROWNer

Posted
Posted

whoa, dude is goin' after the

pentagon budget! good for him,

but that's untouchable shit, don't

you think?

 

koo-see-nitch? kuh-sa-nick?

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Vanity

Vanity

Posted
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yeah, i checked it out, but saw that i had time, and when you go to actually vote (in this state anyway), you can register at the polls.

 

i was going to vote KUCINICH too... didn't agree w/ everything he had to say (i dont think the retirement age should be lowered)... but he seemed the best out there.... dean seemed too reactionary to bush in that what he had to say was "im going to undo everything bush did."

as if the economy is going to go back to the clinton days and everything would work out.... where kucinich had a plan.

 

though i'll prolly end up voting for a third party despite the outcome

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Guest TEARZ

Guest TEARZ

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^yeah dude. :rolleyes:

 

i'm a little disappointed with the results, but kucinich definitely repped well. anybody else vote?

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Guest BROWNer

Guest BROWNer

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After The MoveOn Primary

Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator.

 

 

 

The MoveOn electronic presidential "primary" held last week has a lot of inside-the-Beltway types fretting. From the Democratic National Committee to the AFL-CIO and some of the leading liberal political action committees, the panjandrums and bureaucrats of liberal conventional wisdom are worried about the meaning of and fallout from the new experiment in candidate selection, in which over 317,000 people participated. That's more folks than turn out to vote in actual primaries in many states -- combine the total of those who participate in both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries, for example, and MoveOn still topped them.

 

Originally founded by a gaggle of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to fight Bill Clinton's impeachment, MoveOn saw a huge jump in its membership because of its opposition to the war in Iraq, and now counts some two million online adherents.

 

It's not just that so many people unexpectedly participated. After all, as the group's organizing director, Zack Exley -- a former organizer for the Service Employees International Union -- noted on C-SPAN's "Morning Journal," the online voting for a candidate in and of itself "means nothing." But MoveOn's electronic electors also voted with their checkbooks.

 

And the cash instantly came flowing in to the two top MoveOn vote-getters, both of whom the conventional wisdom had long decreed were underdogs with no hope of nomination or election. Howard Dean -- who, not surprisingly, was the top MoveOn vote getter at 43.8 percent -- saw a mega jump in his already-effective e-fundraising, making him the presidential candidate who raised the most in the second quarter of this year's "money primary" -- more than $7 million. Dennis Kucinich, who corralled 23.9 percent of the vote, announced he'd be filing over $1 million in new contributions, which his campaign directly attributes to the effect of the MoveOn election -- it brought in over $100,000 on one day alone to the campaign that hadn't even been able to afford the $65,000 necessary to buy the electronic likely-voter lists for the Iowa caucuses, without which effective campaigning there is nearly impossible.

 

Dick Gephardt's campaign was particularly disconcerted by the results. Dean on economics, they fumed, is an Eisenhower Republican and a centrist, so why didn't our guy -- with his long record on liberal-labor economic issues -- do better than 2.4 percent? That Gephardt's people thought he'd actually carve out a bigger chunk of the MoveOn vote reflects that campaign's tin ear for where the electorate is. They assumed the anti-war MoveOn voters had forgotten Gephardt's Rose Garden sellout to George Bush in co-sponsoring the blank-check resolution that gave away Congress's constitutional war-making powers to Karl Rove's pupil, or that it didn't matter all that much now that the tide of postwar national opinion, as reflected in the polls, has solidified overwhelmingly behind Bush's position on the issue. They were dead wrong.

 

The MoveOn results couldn't have come too soon for Dean's campaign, which had been seen by the press as floundering. As antiwar sentiment waned, Dean had been sinking in the New Hampshire polls, losing his once neck-and-neck position with John Kerry, who now leads him by 8 points in the latest Concord Monitor survey. Dean's recalibration of his message hadn't seemed to work, as evidenced by the universally disastrous reviews provoked by his recent hapless "Meet the Press" appearance. And political reporters have been spewing out stories about Dean's supposed "foot-in-mouth" disease which led him to retract or apologize for a series of remarks about other candidates. Now, the dour Dean is uncharacteristically beaming, as the MoveOn results and his fundraising success have suddenly catapulted him into consideration as one of the "top-tier" candidates. And the fact that Tim Russert went after Dean so aggressively -- as well as Dean's "I-don't-knows" in response to some questions -- seemed to have actually helped Dean (never underestimate the resentment against the media among the electorate), who's unscripted poppings-off give him a McCain-like aura of "honesty" with lots of cynical voters, particularly when compared with the bland and colorless boilerplate coming from his front-running congressional competitors.

 

As for Kucinich, he was desperately in need of the money and publicity boost his threadbare campaign got from the MoveOn exercise. Just days ago, his hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, noted that Kucinich now has enough support to keep his candidacy going "at least through the summer." The paper's comment was a backhanded way of saying most Ohio political observers expect Kucinich will drop out of the presidential race in time to file for re-election to the House next March, if not sooner -- a supposition fueled by the fact that Kucinich, unlike his busy-campaigning presidential rivals, hasn't missed any votes in Congress.

 

Doubts, too, linger about about how well Kucinich's campaign is being run. Days before the MoveOn results were released, Kucinich sent out an e-mail letter to his supporters announcing that "three top professionals" were being added to his staff to run his campaign. Two of them, though, probably won't help him win credibility with the press, or among the union rank-and-file to which his Iowa campaign is addressed. His new deputy campaign manager is a disciple of Kucinich's guru, Marianne Williamson, and is described as lately having been coordinator of the Global Renaissance Alliance's Peace Circles, a Williamson front group. One of the group's guiding principles proclaims that "the depth of a conversation is more important than the number of people in it" -- not exactly a vote-producing strategy for primaries and caucuses. And Kucinich's new national fundraising director is the former CEO of the Chopra Foundation, the fundraising arm for the TV spiritual salesman known as "Deep-pockets" Chopra to the cognoscenti. Sources requesting anonymity within the Kucinich campaign said these hires have created concern among some of the candidate's close supporters.

 

What has Washington's liberal-establishment types worried is that the Dean and Kucinich MoveOn supporters seem not to function on the basis of orthodox political criteria. If, as expected, MoveOn holds a run-off to formally endorse a presidential candidate, the winner could rake in some $10 million in new money, which would be doubled by federal matching funds. That's a warchest to contend with by anyone's reckoning -- and to see it deployed on behalf of a candidate whom the Beltway libs are convinced hasn't a prayer of beating Bush has them fretting (negative coat-tails from a Democratic nominee would further erode the already-slim chance the Democrats have of forestalling new House and Senate losses to the GOP next November).

 

Moreover, there's much concern by Beltway types that if the Democrats nominate a candidate unacceptable to the MoveOn tribe they could bolt the party and support a third alternative to Dubya. A lot of poor and working-class and black and Latino Americans who are key parts of the Democratic base don't live on the Internet, and so there's a middle-to-upper-middle-class tilt to the MoveOn rank and file, as Gephardt discovered to his discomfiture. That's why some worry, like the liberal writer Bruce Shapiro, that MoveOn "will further promote the kinds of fake reformist 'insurgent' campaigns which leave nothing behind -- John Anderson rather than Jesse Jackson."

 

The half-dozen people who run MoveOn have enormous power as the site's administrators. Although they've said quite frequently -- as their man Exley did on C-Span last weekend -- that their hope is to unite around the eventual Democratic nominee to defeat Bush, what happens if MoveOn's members start demanding accountability and democracy in the running of the organization? A grassroots MoveOn revolt and party bolt against an eventual nominee named, say, Lieberman or Edwards is not out of the question.

 

Despite a few blunders that led to charges that Dean, Kucinich, and Kerry -- the only candidates permitted to e-mail directly to MoveOn's list -- benefited from favoritism in the voting, it nonetheless seems that the electronic primary's results reflected the online members' real preferences: a poll of over 1,000 Moveon voters taken by Stan Greenberg showed almost no difference in the results. But, as internet expert Larry Gross -- a professor at USC's Annenberg School of communications -- observes, "First time out, this is a gimmick that might make some difference. After that it will be something everyone will have to learn to manipulate, and that will probably cancel out any particular advantage."

 

But for now, MoveOn has carved out a niche as a counterweight to Big Money in politics and as a new grassroots organzing tool that rounds up more than the usual suspects among party activists. Is the MoveOn constituency a mile wide bt only an inch deep? Only time, and the playing out of electoral politics in actual as opposed to virtual voting, will tell.

 

from www.tompaine.com

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Guest TEARZ

Guest TEARZ

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Dick Gephardt's campaign was particularly disconcerted by the results. Dean on economics, they fumed, is an Eisenhower Republican and a centrist, so why didn't our guy -- with his long record on liberal-labor economic issues -- do better than 2.4 percent?

 

i like that someone in mainstream media is actually talking about how non-progressive dean is in terms of his budget.

 

The MoveOn results couldn't have come too soon for Dean's campaign, which had been seen by the press as floundering. As antiwar sentiment waned, Dean had been sinking in the New Hampshire polls, losing his once neck-and-neck position with John Kerry, who now leads him by 8 points in the latest Concord Monitor survey. Dean's recalibration of his message hadn't seemed to work, as evidenced by the universally disastrous reviews provoked by his recent hapless "Meet the Press" appearance. And political reporters have been spewing out stories about Dean's supposed "foot-in-mouth" disease which led him to retract or apologize for a series of remarks about other candidates.

 

dean catches quite a few bad ones in this article. ouch. some shots are warranted, others a little harsh. anyone catch the overall tone of condescension from the author regarding the whole process and the ascendency of "fringe" candidates like kucinich & dean?

 

example:

 

Moreover, there's much concern by Beltway types that if the Democrats nominate a candidate unacceptable to the MoveOn tribe they could bolt the party and support a third alternative to Dubya. A lot of poor and working-class and black and Latino Americans who are key parts of the Democratic base don't live on the Internet, and so there's a middle-to-upper-middle-class tilt to the MoveOn rank and file, as Gephardt discovered to his discomfiture. That's why some worry, like the liberal writer Bruce Shapiro, that MoveOn "will further promote the kinds of fake reformist 'insurgent' campaigns which leave nothing behind -- John Anderson rather than Jesse Jackson."

 

i think that the author agrees with shapiro, which is fine, but the sentiment is certainly anti-populist, pro-eclectoral college type thinking. which is at odds with the campaigns being run by kucinich and dean. like everything else, this is another arena where the internet is starting to change the game, and like the majority of cases, the shift is a populist one. democratic party get your asses ready.

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