Alex Wise's blog

Voting In The Rain

Check out this multimedia portrayal in the SF Weekly of my voting-in-the-rain experience from Sat. Pretty hilarious (sound required):

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2008/11/voter_suppression_in_san_franc.php

Tomorrow will be the day that so many thought we'd never see.

A "San Francisco Dude" Votes Early

Tuesday could not come any sooner for me - this is definitely an unfortunate weekend for daylight savings time to roll around! Because I will be sequestered in CREDO Mobile's Election Day bunker from sunup to sundown on Tuesday, I went to SF City Hall to vote early yesterday. Needless to say, the press was all over it!:

Worried your vote won't count? Bring a video camera

Alex Wise -- the San Francisco dude behind the swing state-transport group ObamaTravel -- checked in Saturday to say that folks were waiting 20 minutes in the rain to vote at San Francisco's City Hall when there seemed like there was plenty of room inside. What if people got discouraged and left?

Among those people waiting in the rain to vote: Wise. "And I'm such a shmo, I didn't bring an umbrella."

Worried that there are going to be major problems at the polls on Election Day? Get in line. Literally and figuratively.

There's something you can do other than handrub or wait in the rain: Bring a video camera/phone. See something untoward going down? Fire up your camera. See somebody getting the shaft/runaround when they're trying to check in/cast a ballot? Interview them, then post it to Videothevote.org.

Alex knows about Video the Vote. So why didn't you bring your camera? "I would have," he said. "But I just gave my video camera to my sister who is going to Nevada to Video the Vote." D'oh!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=32222

The Homestretch

My apologies to all of my devoted readers for being so slack with the updates the past couple of months. I won't waste your time with excuses of fatherhood and election-oriented activities (I have posted some cute new baby photos!), but, instead will catch-you up on my current projects.

If you haven't checked out ObamaTravel.org, it has been more successful than we could have hoped. There are nearly 250 with profiles on the site and a good chunk of them have received the resources they needed to get to swing states and make a difference for the election. A huge "THANK YOU" to Kevin, Kelly and RIchard who donated their valuable time to help make the site a reality.

I have also been working for CREDO Mobile (part of Working Assets) on two election projects: One, is running CREDO's Election Day immediate response text message network. You can sign up to be on alert to help protect the election here: http://act.credoaction.com/election/

The other project I've been involved with has been creating a mobile version of FiveThirtyEight.com, the polling site founded by Nate Silver. To check out the mobile 538 site, check out: http://credomobile.com/538. And to sign up for daily text alerts about polling data, simply text keyword 538 to shortcode 30644.

I promise to resume writing regularly after the election. In the meantime, let's keep our fingers crossed!

Introducing ObamaTravel.org

Once again, the presidential race will be determined by the outcome of a few key states (commonly known as swing states or battleground states). I'm pleased to announce the launch of ObamaTravel.org, a swing state project that Moira and I have been working on with three very dedicated web geniuses for the last couple of months.

ObamaTravel.org is a platform that connects volunteers who want to travel to a swing state (like Virginia or Colorado) with financial sponsors and swing state host families. It's sort of a political hybrid of Craig's List, Team-in-Training and Kiva.org - volunteers post profiles and solicit sponsorship from their family and friends. Sponsors can see their donations in action by following the activities of their volunteers.

In order for this project to have a real impact, we need to spread the word as far and wide as we can. So please volunteer or sponsor someone on the site. And forward this post to everyone in your address book who might want to travel to a swing state or who lives in a swing state (actually, just send it to everyone who supports Barack Obama!).

To learn more, please go to: http://www.obamatravel.org

Palin Effect

Screenshot 7

Here are my two cents on the Sarah Palin nomination:

- Palin may be stealing all of the headlines and getting high ratings but this actually helps Obama. As Chuck Todd of MSNBC keeps saying, if this election is a referendum purely about Obama, that helps McCain. Obama had all the press in July and McCain narrowed the gap. Put another way, if voters have to choose between McCain and Obama, Obama has the edge, but if voters have to choose between liking Obama and not liking Obama, it will be a tight race.

- Bush got elected because the GOP had great message discipline in '00 and '04 while the Dems didn't. This year, the reverse has been true: Obama has stuck to his "I'm change, he's more of the same message" through thick and thin. Much like Hillary Clinton's campaign, McCain has thrown the kitchen sink at Obama in terms of messaging. This latest pick of Palin is a concession by the Republicans that the experience card has already been played, so it's tome to ignite the base. Which leads me to my last point:

- While Palin may have ignited her base, she also has lit a spark in the Democratic base which has been pouring money into Obama's coffers this week. The numbers don't add up for the GOP this year if it's Dem base vs. GOP base. So igniting the GOP base would have been fine if she hadn't raised the ire of Obama's base. Beware of the Base!! (Even that drivel-spewing Republican strategist Mike Murphy is with me on this one: I think she’ll ultimately be a polarizer.... In a year where the Democrat generic numbers are 10+ points better than the Republican, I don’t like the math of a strategy that just polarized the election along party base lines.)

Mile High Recap

My apologies for not doing a better job of live-blogging of the Obama acceptance speech last week but I thought it better to enjoy the event than spend the whole time furiously punching my cellphone keypad. Hopefully, most of you saw the speech on your own and weren't counting on yours truly for any vital insight or analysis. But assuming that most of you didn't know many folks who attended the event, I thought I would jot down a few random thoughts unrelated to the content Obama's speech:

- I realize that this was a made-for-TV event and passing out American flags was a clever marketing idea. But this was a very patriotic event in a way that I hadn't ever experienced first-hand. By patriotic, I don't mean in the way that the G.O.P. has co-opted the words and symbols of our country but in the IDEA of America. It felt cathartic being able to chant "U-S-A!" without an ounce of sarcasm - almost like watching the Olympic men's hockey team upset the Soviets in Lake Placid in 1980 all over again. As you can see, everyone got in on the action:

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- I've posted a few more photos (and a very short video) that you can check out here but if you really want to get a feel for the layout, check out this interactive photo from the NY Times.
- As far as the other speakers featured that night, I think Bill Richardson gave the best received speech of the lot. I was quite unimpressed with him during the campaign, as he seemed to go to his resume as a crutch whenever he was asked a tough question, but he was terrific last week. His pointed references to the failures of the current Administration to uphold and protect the Constitution got some of the loudest pre-Barack applause of the night, and rightly so. Just like I found it refreshing when John Edwards called the poor the poor, instead of "hard-working middle class Americans" on the campaign trail earlier this year, I liked how Richardson laid it out plainly:

"It's time we had a president committed to fighting poverty in the Third World and ending the genocide in Darfur; who leads international efforts to stop global warming, strengthens our friendship with Mexico and Latin America, and stands behind Israel with full-time diplomacy to achieve peace in the Middle East; a president who ends the global scourge of AIDS in our time and sets an example of moral leadership by following our Constitution, shutting down Guantanamo and ending torture."

- With the Republican National Convention now blessedly in our rearview mirror as well, it's worth noting the stark contrast of the audience. Not only in terms of demographics, which was fairly obvious to most TV viewers, but also in terms of the general vibe. It was a very positive crowd and even the red meat that they were thrown by some speakers made them rally around their candidate and ideals more than hating their opponents, which seemed to be a constant undercurrent to the recent GOP gathering.

Mile High

> While Stevie Wonder's two songs were a bit of a let down, the individual stories after Biden were spot on. A few minutes from the big guy himself...

> Tim Kaine is speaking right now - it's been a little numbing with the slew of speeches thus far but they're pretty short and sweet on the whole. Will.i.am recreated the Yes We Can vid and Sheryl Crow played 3 or 4 songs. Just spoke to a lady who just arrived after a three hour wait - and there's still a line outside. Kaine just finished and Bill Richardson got one of the biggest applauses thus far.

> Please excuse my sloppy mobile formatting. The Yonder Mountain String Band just started picking to a mostly empty stadium.

> Not as bad as it looked at first-about an hour and a half to get inside. Security was tight but friendly.

> Well, we got off the light rail at the stadium and shockingly, there are lines as far as the eye can see...

>Apparently the day will be a long one. Doors open at one and we may be back around midnight. Time to pack and roll!

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Moira and I have been here in Denver all week, volunteering for the Obama campaign and pretty much ignoring the hoopla surrounding the convention. We were, however, fortunate enough to get score some last minute credentials to tonight's event at Invesco Field/Mile High Stadium.

Usually Haven wakes me up pretty early but I was too excited about the festivities to sleep past six this morning. I will try my hand for the first time at live blogging from the stadium. In addition to Barack's speech, Stevie Wonder will be playing. If you didn't have a chance to read my reactions to his Jazz Fest performance, check it out here. This should be one for the ages and I'm so happy Haven will be able to tell her grandkids someday that she was there (in her ObamaBaby onesie) to witness a truly historic event.

Oily Questions Part Deux

2) "Hurricane Katrina and Rita proved that offshore drilling techniques are safe."

The fact that the above statement has become a Republican talking point for the past year or so demonstrates the height of laziness on the part of the mainstream news media. Louisiana's Governor, Bobby Jindal, either doesn't know the facts concerning his own state's disasters or is blatantly lying when he said that "one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills." (Think Progress)  John McCain was right in line with this thinking and used it to rationalize his reversal on expanding offshore drilling leases: "it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston." (Think Progress)

The reality is that Hurricanes Rita & Katrina created 595 spills throughout the Gulf region, dumping 9 million gallons, the second most in U.S. history only eclipsed by the 11 million gallon spill by the Exxon Valdez in 1989. Here's the government's own Assessment Report on the damage of Katrina and Rita if you're skeptical.

One of the more precious aspects of McCain's recent grand-standing about the offshore drilling issue was a recent cancellation of a speech he was planning to give on a oil-rig in the Gulf. The same day, the Coast Guard closed 29 miles (47 kilometers) of the Mississippi River at New Orleans after a 600-foot tanker and a barge loaded with fuel oil collided, breaking the barge in half. More than 419,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil spilled from the barge and a 12 mile oil slick was created. (Raw Story).  That kind of undercut McCain's message that offshore drilling is completely safe, I'd say:

“In selling his absurd coastline drilling plan to the American people, ” said Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez last week, “McCain has time and again pointed to advanced technology that would supposedly eliminate the threat of massive oil spills. … Having to cancel your big oil drilling photo op (in Louisiana last week) because of a massive oil spill is like canceling a crime safety photo op because the house next door just got robbed. Look up ‘irony’ in the dictionary and you will find a description of this turn of events.”

I read on a conservative blog that this tanker spill actually PROVES McCain's point that we need more offshore drilling because if we drilled more, than we wouldn't have tankers from countries like the Netherlands bringing us fuel. This person obviously doesn't read this blog and thinks that Americans get to keep all the oil that multi-national oil companies find on our soil!

Oily Questions

Since I've found another productive way to put my Obama obsession into action through our volunteer program, one topic that I will start focusing on here will be all things oil: geopolitics, conservation and alternative energy (namely, the cottage veggie oil industry I've been learning about for the past two months). Before I get into telling tales from the underworld of Chinese restaurant refuse, though, let's begin a multi-part series exposing a few of the fallacies being pumped out of the well-oiled bullshit trough by the right-wing regarding oil:

1. If we can find more oil here in the U.S., we can become less dependent on "foreign oil."

I have yet to hear anyone in the press challenge a politician on the details of what they mean exactly by this goal of "Oil Independence." Do members of the media not understand that we don't have a nationalized oil program in this country? WE don't get ANY of our nation's oil - multinational energy conglomerates do!

Shell can sell as much Alaskan crude to the Chinese as they damn well please and there's nothing that our beloved free market economy, as presently comprised, can do to prevent this. Sure, Alaskans might get some tax revenue kick-backs but the whole concept of not being beholden to the Saudis if we can pump enough oil out of Alaska or North Dakota is absurd. Is this so complicated that Americans can't wrap their brains around it? Oil markets will undoubtedly respond to any new, significant oil discoveries on U.S. soil but it's not like the oil will be ours to burn.

If anyone out there sees, hears or reads someone in the media informing the public about this reality, please let me know.

Back to Blogging

Sorry for the long delay in between posts. I've been waiting to make an announcement in this space detailing an Obama volunteer project that Moira and I are helping to create but we have yet to officially launch. We should be up and running quite soon, though, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you live in Northern California and are interested in being sent (for free!) to a battleground state to work to get Barack Obama elected, please fill out the following survey:
ObamaTravel

Much more on this front to follow...