October 2008 Archives

I received my ballot today and will be going off in tomorrow morning's mail -- I'd like to wait for a ballot party, but I know that this is the best way to avoid wasting the time of volunteers calling me to remind me to vote (while I was typing this I got a call).

On Saturday Betsy and I walked around the neighborhood for about an hour and distributed sample ballots from the Multnomah County Democrats -- there's a lot of things to be excited/worried about on this election, not just the president and their endorsements are pretty solid -- you can also check out Just Out's endorsements, or Defend Oregon. It kind of broke my liberal, criminal-lovin' heart to vote "yes" on 57 (the less insane of the two "get tough on crime" measures) -- but after much soul-searching about the meaning of my vote I decided it was, in the end, an act of politics more than of conscience, and it does seem like the alternative is bad.

The Dems don't weigh in on non-partisan races, so I'll share one that I'm particularly excited about: the race for City Council. I enthusiastically support Amanda Fritz -- I enjoyed walking my neighborhood with her during the primary, and here are some of the reasons why I support her now:

1) She's been working with City politics for years as a citizen activist. If we have to testify about land use issues in our neighborhood, or police accountability, or what have you, she's been on our side of the podium and knows what it's like:

A long time ago, when I was new to citizen involvement, I buckled up my three small children into their car seats and drove to Salem for a hearing on school funding. We had to wait more than three hours for my turn to testify; it was perhaps one of greatest achievements of my mothering career that with the aid of industrial quantities of crayons, books, and grapes, my offspring contributed to the cause by behaving themselves impeccably in the packed hearing room. But after I had given my three minutes of input, driven home exhausted, and read that the committee had voted contrary to the urging of all those testifying, I realized it had, in fact, been a Fake Public Hearing. The votes had been lined up ahead of time, and ten times the testimony would still not have made any difference. "Why don't they just post 'Token Public Hearing' on the announcement, so working people don't waste their time going?", I muttered to my friends." (Amanda Fritz 2007: amandafritz.com/blog/3?page=37)

I believe she WILL increase accountability and transparency in City government and I don't think testifying before her will be an exercise in bullshit.

2) She's been a health worker and union member for years. She's Jobs with Justice pledger, and understands the needs of working people. When asked what can be done for unemployment among communities of color at a recent forum, Lewis suggested increased support for small businesses and Fritz suggested the large number of unfilled union apprenticeships. I think Fritz's suggestion makes a lot more sense if you're actually going to create a large number of living-wage jobs, and Lewis's borders on naive -- you just can't have an economy where everyone owns their own business.

3) She's an open and thoughtful communicator - you can see this on her blog, amandafritz.com, which she's maintained since late 2006. It's a great source of information on what's going on in city politics, and she doesn't hesitate to give her opinions. And unlike a lot of people who blog about politics, she doesn't seem motivated by crankiness - she actually seems to believe in the potential for change, and that makes me hopeful.

4) She's a woman and I frankly think that matters. We haven't had a woman on City council since 1998 (Gretchen Kafoury - I'm not counting mayors, but even if you do, we've only had 6 in total) - and I believe that a woman's perspective is important. You can have terrible woman politicians -- I don't need to remind anyone of that -- but Fritz's isn't one of them - she's an experienced, progressive political activist who is also a woman who understands first-hand the particular challenges women face. Charles Lewis is surely a fine person, and he agrees with Amanda Fritz on a lot of the issues -- but even if it were not for the vast amount of experience she brings to the table, I would, all else being equal, vote for the underrepresented person -- and right now we've got an all-male lineup.

5) She has a demonstrated passion and ability for things that a many people find dull, but are incredibly important, like financing and procedure. Amanda's attention to detail and financial nit-picking will be a another reason why she will be an important addition to our upcoming City council slate, especially with Sam Adams (whom I like) as mayor.

For more information, see:

amandafritzforcitycouncil.com
amandafritz.com

I also found this debate
recap helpful.

Anyway, huzzah! hurrah! yay! woot! change is coming!

("Yay" collage from Cute Overload).

The audio from this would make a very nice sleep podcast.

Missing from this video is my favorite part, though, when a bunch of the crowd took a pyramid group photo with the Obamas at the end -- I'm wondering when/if any of the pictures the audience took will find their way onto the internet? I wasn't watching closely enough to see whose camera (or how many) took the group photo.

I found the whole thing very compelling -- much more so than the actual debate.

Other great ideas: TiVoing C-Span instead of CNN or PBS. So much more peaceful without all that chatter.

What we did to make our lawn signs was take a bunch of cardboard (which was handily available because Betsy just got a new dining set from Ikea), cut it into pieces (we should have made them smaller), trim them with masking tape (to make them more water-resistant), and paint them with primer (for water resistance and general beauty).

Then we made some letters to stencil.

My favorite stencil (which I made): "Democatic." It was a mistake that I only noticed after painstakingly cutting out the whole thing.

We used interior house paint to do the painting. There were some experiments with sparkles and stuff, but they didn't catch on. I ended up using giant Sharpies on a lot of them after the paint had dried -- outlining letters and such, and that tightened things up a bit. Then we used a heavy duty stapler to staple the signs to posts. A local lumber yard made the posts for me by cutting some longer piece of wood in half and then sharpening the edges. Cost effective ($.50 per post) but sticky! (pine sap). I had a problem with the staples going all the way through some card board, and fixed that by putting packing tape on top. If I did it again, I might put masking tape down the center before painting them to give the staple something to stick to.

Here are the results -- I made a couple voter registration ones, too:

They look pretty good, if I do say so. One problem I had with the bigger signs is if it's windy, they can sort of flop in half. The smaller signs (like the "Go Bama" one) work better, and if I was going to do it again and had a longer message I'd make a series of them, a la Burma Shave signs.