The Young Democrats of Oklahoma are hosting a phonebanking marathon this weekend to get out the vote (GOTV). I certainly don’t qualify, but very encouraged to see young folks working so hard for their party in a state where doing so can be pretty discouraging. But that’s probably why they keep the membership below a certain age — so the fresh, idealistic youth won’t be infected by jaded old politicos like me!

Anyway, here’s the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where and why):

Saturday, Nov. 1 - Tuesday, Nov. 4
Sat. 12-5 pm, Sunday 1-5 pm , Monday and Tuesday, 12 - 6 pm

Democratic Party Headquarters, 4100 N. Lincoln, OKC

Bring your own cell phone, call 18-29 year olds and remind them to vote on Nov. 4.

Oklahoma DP candidates will be stopping by to say thanks and lend some encouragement — maybe bring pizza?

If you are of the Democratic persuasion, under 30, and in the OKC area, this would be a good time to volunteer for your country. Take it from a political veteran: you will have fun, and feel pride about the effort for the rest of your life.

From email announcement:

This election cycle is almost over but we have one more important task. Young people all over the nation are pitching-in these last few days to help Get Out the Vote. Young Democrats of Oklahoma are no exception. We are planning the largest GOTV phone bank in the history of our organization.

It’s easy, fun, and most of all effective. All you have to do is call another young person 18-29 yrs old and say “Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday”. That’s it, can you help?

Sign-up Now.

We really need people for Saturday, Nov. 1st and Sunday, Nov. 2nd. We’ll provide you with a list to call, info for any questions you might get, and food and drinks. Also, we’ll have at least two chances to win a new iPod Nano. Are you in?

Sign-up Here.

Young people have one last chance to make a difference in this election. This will be our last offensive strike, and our last chance to show people how effective, engaged, and relevant young people can be in an election. Will you be there?

Sign-up here and help make history.

See you next weekend,

Josh Smith
President
Young Democrats of Oklahoma

Warning: I hope to come by with a camera.

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, “America’s Promise,” given on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Full text follows.

(more…)

Tammy Duckworth’s speech to the DNC was awesome. I so wish every American could hear her indictment of the Bush Admin. on what “supporting the troops” really means. As a disabled vet, her voice is so powerful and authentic. I’m against war and the mission of the military (solving conflict with violence) on principle, but our treatment of veterans is unforgivable; if we send our young people out to fight, the least we can do is take care of them when they return, as we promise them to get them to go in the first place.

And now, John McCain wants to ration care. Under his plan, the VA will serve combat injuries, but everyone else gets an insurance card. Barack Obama and the Democrats have a different idea. Barack Obama will live up to their tradition of honor and sacrifice. Barack Obama will use war not as a first choice, but a last resort. Barack Obama understands that for a commander-in-chief to support the military, he needs more than a
“Mission Accomplished” banner, more than wearing a borrowed flight suit, and
definitely more than four more years of the same failed foreign policy. President Obama will restore the might of the military, invest in our troops and only send our sons and daughters to war if they have a clearly defined mission and the tools they need to succeed.

And now, John McCain wants to ration care. Under his plan, the VA will serve combat injuries, but everyone else gets an insurance card. Barack Obama and the Democrats have a different idea. Barack Obama will live up to their tradition of honor and sacrifice. Barack Obama will use war not as a first choice, but a last resort. Barack Obama understands that for a commander-in-chief to support the military, he needs more than a
“Mission Accomplished” banner, more than wearing a borrowed flight suit, and
definitely more than four more years of the same failed foreign policy. President Obama will restore the might of the military, invest in our troops and only send our sons and daughters to war if they have a clearly defined mission and the tools they need to succeed.

Transcript here.

Plutonium Page has posted to Daily Kos a diary which helps to expose some important background information about T. Boone Pickens and his "plan" that supposedly will liberate us from foreign oil. T. Boone Pickens' Fancy Sales Pitch

Devilstower and I just went to a talk here at the DNC featuring T. Boone Pickens. Everyone was under the impression that the event would involve an actual discussion (as in, a Q & A session, like nearly all of the other Big Tent special topic sessions). We had a really energetic live blog thread going, where all of you were submitting questions. Sorry, guys. Apparently, the whole thing was just a sales pitch. T. Boone hightailed it out of there before anyone could even raise their hand.

I'll post some excerpts below, but really, go to the original, where you can also read the comments, which are just as illuminating.

Maybe he was afraid we'd ask questions like:

In 2004, you helped pay for the Swift Boat ads, along with fellow billionaire Harold Simmons, who's funding the Ayres attack ads this cycle. If you're willing to tolerate, and even encourage, that level of dishonesty in political discourse, why should we trust you on any subject?

(From Devilstower) I wanted to ask him:

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is well known for saying that global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and is one of the most outspoken climate change science deniers around, as well as being joined at the hip with the oil companies.

In your presentation today, you specifically said that you "believe global warming is real".

However, you have heavily funded James Inhofe's campaign. How do you reconcile your support for Inhofe with your promotion of renewable energy programs?

From an energy expert acquaintance via email:

Can you please explain why people should take your plan seriously when, for example, you do not include any energy efficiency measures within it?

For a real and honest debate on the topic of energy policy, see the liveblogging thread. On which Devilstower summed up the Pickens Plan with this update: Update [2008-8-27 15:7:47 by Devilstower]: And T. Boone heads for the door without taking a single question. Which makes the whole presentation worth about as much as day old spit.

Documentary intro, narrated by Michell Obama’s mother

Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention

Their story makes me so proud to be an American, and it will be so great to feel that way again.

I’ve been scouting out the best online news resources for following the Democratic Party convention in Denver, other than the well-known, corporate news operations (that I generally avoid anyway), which I think we can all find on our own. Below is what I’ve found so far, and I’ll add to the list as I come across others.

Note: If you only care about the Oklahoma angle, jump down here.

The official convention site is worth a look for speaker schedules, logistics, last minute updates and the like.

This is the first convention where bloggers are more than an afterthought, so check out the official list of bloggers credentialed by the Party. These independent (that is, not Party funded; all are fiercely partisan Democrats) bloggers will be “embedded” with their state delegations, so as to bring all the surprise and spontaneity of the convention to life for their readers back home. (Seriously, it’s a good thing, and probably demonstrating much more integrity than that other embedding project the government tried with the media a few years back.)

The Big Tent - there is literally something called “The Big Tent” (subtle enough for you, Dems?) serving as bloggers central for the convention; this site is not for news reporting apparently (bloggers do have their own outlets, after all), but for coordinating use of the facility. Still interesting for those of us into the meta stuff. This not run by the Party, but by a group of bloggers and sponsors like Digg and Google.

Just to keep everyone confused with information overload, some of the credentialed state blogs (including Oklahoma’s), along with some non-credentialed ones, decided to aggregate their convention reports on yet another site, Roots Wire.

DemConWatch is an independent blog run by grassroots Democrats that has a pretty thorough background and coverage of the event — including live cams! And check out the DNC history links in the sidebar

Colorado sites that will probably have major resources dedicated to the convention.

• Politics West - Denver Post site for convention coverage
• Rocky Mountain News another mainstream newspaper
• Colorado Independent
• Square State
• Colorado Indymedia

A number of netroots/Democratic/progressive sites have dedicated sections for convention news, and have folks on the ground there.

• Daily Kos
• Huffington Post
• The Nation
• Infoshop
• Air America
• Democratic Underground

Plus, some really good news: Democracy Now! will expand to two hours live broadcast on radio and tv for the next two weeks, covering both conventions. Unless you live at or near UCO, you’ll have to pick the show up after the fact on the web, but it’s worth it. Their in-depth interviews are unequaled.

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the Twitter Search tag #dnc08 that Twitterers in Denver at using to flag their tweets. Or, the Denver Post has a dedicated Twitter account for convention related updates, The DNC - a warning though: this is high-volume so you may just want to visit the page once or twice a day, rather than follow and hve your timeline completely swamped.

Okies in Denver

Last but not least, there’s the Oklahoma credentialed blog team, Calvin and Tim from DemoOkie Forum. Yes, Oklahoma’s credentialed blog is a forum, but I think it was an apppropriate selection, since it is the major site for the grassroots of the state Democratic Party. Anyway, thanks to Howard Dean, they will be right there in the Pepsi Center and INVESCO Field with the Oklahoma Delegation.

I’m very happy to see that the boys, once selected, actually realized they would need a real blog to pull this off, rather than trying to stretch that Snitz 2000 forum, which is already distorted way beyond its intended purpose (bless ‘em, they do keep things hopping over there, it’s just clumsy and ugly as shit, and about as state-of-the-art as Windows 98, and I obsess about those things). I’m hoping they’ll like the new format so much that they will come home and do a complete overhaul of their site once Barack has moved in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with Michelle and the girls.

Tim posted about their plans for Denver:

f you want Gavel to Gavel, watch the news. It will be better than we can do. However, since we are embedded with the Oklahoma Delegation, we will be with them all day. You will get to meet them and see what really happens at these conventions. Delegates usually start with a breakfast at 7:30 am and continue until late night. I know when I went to Boston I was exhausted when I came back. You’ll go with them to receptions, caucuses and just hanging around.

We’ve brought digital cameras, digital videos and digital audio recorders. We plan on making a few of the attendees YouTube stars. Dr. Earl Mitchell from Stillwater has been drafted again as a special correspondent. We also will be sharing photos taken by the delegates themselves.

Hopefully we will fulfill Howard Deans vision of bringing the other parts of the convention home. We look forward to the opportunity.

If you want a down and dirty compilation of news out of Denver, check the sidebar of DenverOkie.com, there’s a list of the latest news headline from all the state bloggers, as well as the RootsWire feed. For any normal person, that will be more than enough! (I of course, am not normal and will be trying to go to every site for every last pixel of information.)

Tim and Calvin say they are making their photos and reports available to Oklahoma media. I hope they mean new/digital as well as old/dead-tree media, or I’ll really have to give them a netroots/open-source whup-ass tutorial, if they don’t get one in Denver first (which I suspect they might).

This list is by no means definitive! It’s just a starting point. If you have other links to offer, please post in comments.

Update: How could I forget C-Span!?!

Another Twitter collective: DNCjournalists

Boy, I’m wiped out. It was a strange day.

I went with my friend and co-revolutionary James to promote the GI Rights Hotline outside the big hoopla send-off for the poor National Guard troops who are being deployed to Iraq. But we had to make stops for sign supplies, then got caught in bigtime traffic — there must have been 10,000 attending at the Noble Center at OU. Anyway, we were late, had to park in a field, but we did get maybe half an hour of holding our signs. I’ll post or link to the pictures James took once he gets them off his phone.

Meanwhile, in route, we had major discussions about the organizations we work on together, which is good, but also rather draining to me since I’m so backlogged with all that organizing work and feeling somewhat negative about how some things are going.

Finally, get home, and while fixing a dinner of leftovers that my mother is giving me major grief over, try to get caught up with the news, which is horrible, with major losses on S-CHIP, and privacy, and the soon to be new AG pretty much condoning the president to not only torture, but just not obey any law he doesn’t agree with (which he’s doing anyway, but jeez, they’re not even pretending to be lawful anymore.

Insane, but I’m too tired and disgusted to be coherent here, though I did respond quite nastily to a fundraiser letter the Democratic Party sent me today, with the audacity to headline it “Elections Matter”. I shouldn’t have even been on that mailing list, and have no idea how I got on it, since I’m not a Dem, but I was allowing it to continue just to see what they were up to. Well I unsubscribed today (and read some comments on Daily Kos from real Dems who did exactly what I did).

I also sent Chris Dodd a thank you note, since he stood up and put a hold on the telecommunications amnesty nonsense. Though still more bad news when it turns out Harry Reid is going to go around that somehow. He likes those checks from AT&T, I’m sure.

Man, this once-great country is so screwed.

I’m going to bed early. Maybe I’ll wake up and it’ll be Nov. 1970-whatever and Nixon is being prosecuted in federal court, and Gerald Ford has kicked out all the sorry Nixonian asses like Cheney and Rumsfeld into the dustbin of American history where they fade in ignoble shame. Cuz that’s how far back you’d have to go to really begin to fix the disaster this government, and the media that covers it, has become.

Digby noted on Friday (during my news blackout while attending the annual Greens meeting) that not one Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee showed up for the hearing to review the confirmation of Karen Hughes to handle public relations for the State Department.

As usual, the Democrats have their heads up their asses at exactly the wrong moment, and miss a golden opportunity to actually communicate something substantial to the American public.

The absence of the Democrats is even more glaring considering just today the New York Times reported that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald called Karen Hughes before the grand jury to testify as to her involvement in the leak-case. Of course, this begs the obvious question: Karen Hughes, did you have a role in leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent?

And, also as usual, the online/grassroots are doing all the heavy lifting. I am continually amazed at how much frustration, neglect and abuse progressive Democrats can take.

Think Progress has a list of questions the Democrats might have asked if they could have gotten it up to attend the meeting. I assume they were too busy with their preparations to lionize John Roberts and didn’t have the time.

Digby, despite his (?) great insight and wicked-good rants, is one of those ever-faithful-against-all-reason Democrats. I just don’t know what it will take for those folks to see the light.

As for Paul S. Sarbanes (MD), Christopher J. Dodd (CT), John F. Kerry (MA), Russell D. Feingold (WI), Barbara Boxer (CA), Bill Nelson (FL), and Barack Obama (IL), I hope they enjoyed their Friday afternoon.

By the way, did I mention that on Friday, I was in Tulsa at the Green Party annual meeting?

My Dad’s a pretty mainstream, “middle of the road” Democrat, but he has upon occasion gotten passionate about politics. He still talks about the amazing Keynote Address Mario Cuomo gave at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I just found it on a site called American Rhetoric, where great oratory is archived, in text, audio and in some cases, video. Aren’t the Internets great?

Complete index to and partial text and audio database of the 100 most significant American political speeches of the 20th century, according to 137 leading scholars of American public address, as compiled by Stephen E. Lucas (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Martin J. Medhurst (Baylor University). Find out who made the cut and experience the power of rhetorical eloquence in this provocative list of “who’s who” in American public address.

They also have great movie speeches and a collection called “Rhetoric of 9-11.”

BTW, I think Cuomo would have made a great SC justice; Dad wishes he had been president.