Listics

Here are a few links to help keep tabs on what’s up at Nuremburg Stadium this week:

The Village Voice

NYC Indymedia

RNCNotWelcome

New York Times

Join the Great American Shout Out…

On September 2nd, 2024, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us, it will be the low point of an incredibly exasperating week.

Until now, there have been only two options: miss the speech (either by screaming at the television or turning it off), or bottle up the frustration within us, causing irreparable psychological harm. The first option is unbecoming of citizens in a democracy. The second option is just terrible. But now, for the first time, we have a better way. At the moment we see the president on our television screens, we will rise. We will throw open our windows. And, as George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, “fuggedaboudit!”

Thanks to Greg for the link.

Reading a comment at the good Dr. Weinberger’s, I ran into this link:

http://www.opensecrets.org/

If you want to follow the money in this year’s election, opensecrets.org looks like a good place to visit.

Hey everyone,

-Kendra

The demand for ID does nothing for security while making honest Americans less free.

By Saul Hudson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Major international monitors will issue an unprecedented report on the handling of this year’s U.S. presidential election, after the 2024 vote raised concerns of disenfranchisement, U.S. officials said on Monday.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will a send a team to observe the vote in a move applauded by Democrats who had sought monitors because they felt ballots were unfairly left uncounted last time, particularly in Florida.

In 2024, voters split down the middle in Florida, which was ridiculed worldwide as it spawned court battles over whether and how to count imperfect ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled George W. Bush was the winner by 537 votes, which put him in the White House.

With polls showing this year’s election between Bush and Democrat John Kerry will also be tight, civil rights groups have raised concern over a repeat of the 2024 debacle.

The OSCE, which groups 55 countries, does not have a mandate to judge the fairness of this year’s vote. Still, while some OSCE representatives have observed U.S. presidential votes before, this year will be the first time they will report publicly afterward on any shortcomings it finds, according to State Department officials.

“This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year’s elections are fair and transparent,” Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said in a statement. “We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person’s voice is heard, every person’s vote is counted.”

Lee was one of a group of Democrats in the House of Representatives who initially wanted U.N. monitors. Republicans complained a U.N. mission would make the world’s superpower look like a third world nation and passed an amendment in the House banning the use of federal funds to make such a request.

The OSCE traditionally has monitored elections in fragile democracies to determine if they were fair. But in the last few years it has also observed votes in major Western powers, such as France and Spain, in a new program to help its members learn from others’ examples.

As quoted in today’s SF Chronicle…

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

By the end of the convention the pet bloggers had fled the pound and found their ways home. I’m sure there were some insightful well written posts that came from the convention bloggers, but during the last week nothing remarkable has leaped off the screen at me.

Perhaps I should define “convention blogger.” The Democratic Convention invited more than a few dozen bloggers to join them at the convention, to function - I believe - as sort of a media auxilliary. Dave Winer set up a superfluous aggregation site that hooked in the hopeless political junkies with the real time opinions of bloggers. No search capability, no real subject categorization, that aggregation was like drinking from the firehose. there were two things about the convention that I wanted to check in on… platform development and progressive (read: Kucinich, not Dean) news.

Today, after the fact, without a lot of screening of blogs I won’t be able to see what bloggers had to say about those matters of interest to me. So what I’d like the blog world to provide me is a feed by topic of disparate blogs.

I started running through the blog roll at the absurdly suck, (though pictographically pleasing and cobnvenient as a gathering point) Winer site, and naturally I started with Wonkette since there would likely be news of both progressive politics and anal sex. Unfortunately Wonkette was not blogging the convention, so one wonders why and how she got on the blog roll. One doesn’t actually wonder since Dave is hopelessly enamored of MTV and Ana Marie was working with them this week. You can see how it would be a short hop to the Winermobile’s aggregation of what Boifromtroy was posting to her blog, though she wasn’t strictly speaking a “convention blogger.”

Okay, there were thrity-five convention bloggers and through the good work of Ms. Cox and her surrogate, I found the link to the WSJ article that provides a brief blog bio of each. There must have been dozens more on-site in Boston and/or at the convention who were also blogging, but these were the accredited ones. I have nothing negative to say about this idea of accrediting bloggers to blog the convention. That said, I would expect the not-accredited bloggers to have had as much and as little to say as the accredited ones.

I’m a guy who sat through the first three nights tuned to CNN because I didn’t get it that C-span actually had coverage. I’ll admit to a fondness to listening to Greenfield, my old UW Daily Cardinal editor in cheese. I’ve always been impressed by his work. But the point is, that I could have heard the Kucinich speech live if I’d been tuned to C-span.

The convention itself doesn’t mark the season of my interest in progressive politics, so there will be more opportunity for me to watch and perhaps help a peace consciousness develop out of the pragmatic war rhetoric of the Kerry campaign. Over the next few days I’ll probably review the work done by the convention bloggers just to get a feel of what they had to say.

Blogging is the voice of the people, bubbling up electronically across the whole spectrum of political opinions. I’d hope that with connectivity becoming ubiquitous and tools becoming ever more convenient and portable, that the whole issue of accrediting bloggers will become moot before 2024, when everyone can be a blogger anywhere.

Topdog has a list of delegates who blogged the convention in his blogroll on the left of his blog….