Ghosts of Joe Slovo

This was originally posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters and at Project Vote's diary on DailyKos.

Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the journal Social Policy, has authored a comprehensive look at the recent history of partisan attacks on the voting process itself and the unfolding attempts to roll back all of the voting rights gains of the past 50 years that have gained speed and urgency under the Bush Administration.

Pointing out that modern voter suppression attempts and larger projects to reshape the entire electorate to favor conservatives no longer rely on the open fear and intimidation that characterized past practices from American history, Rosenfeld opens his in-depth survey with this observation,

“Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the 21st century he is apt to be a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers, proposed legislation and talking points about “voter fraud” and protecting the sanctity of the vote.”

The entire article, which Social Policy has placed outside their subscriber wall (pdf), is worth reading in its entirety.

From the article, here’s the overall thesis:

The newest barriers include state laws that target various phases of the voting process. Registration by individuals has been made more rigorous. Mass registration drives face new deadlines and increased potential fines. Citizens must present new identification to register and to vote, and in some states newly registered voters face increased prospects that partisan challengers will question their credentials before voting. Civil rights groups have noted that all of these new laws and procedures disproportionately fall on people of color, poor people, senior citizens and the disabled.

The Department of Justice, which for decades fought to ensure all eligible citizens could vote, has encouraged states to take these steps in the opposite direction. Political appointees who advocate for stringent requirements before ballots are cast and votes are counted now drive much of the Voting Section’s actions. As a result, the Justice Department has been pushing states to purge voter lists, and to adopt newly restrictive voter ID and provisional ballot laws – actions all that are known to cause delays if not confusion at the polls. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Voting Section has not enforced other federal laws, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients a chance to register to vote. Similarly, the Bush Justice Department has filed few cases on behalf of minority voters.

The Department’s political appointees have also pressured federal prosecutors to pursue “voter fraud” cases against the Bush administration’s perceived opponents, such as groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which conducts mass registration drives among populations that tend to vote Democratic. Two former federal prosecutors have said they believe that they lost their U.S. attorney posts for failing to pursue those cases. The proponents of this renewed impetus to police voters are almost all from a powerful and well-connected wing of the Republican Party that believes steps are needed to protect elections from what they call “voter fraud,” or allegations that Democrats – or their allies - are fabricating voter registrations en masse, and voting more than once to win. It is “an article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas said in a May 17, 2007 Houston Chronicle report. The report continued, “He [Masset] doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3% to the Republican vote.”

Rosenfeld’s piece adds deeper context to the Art Levine piece we highlighted yesterday. Taken together, these two articles show the depth and breadth of recent partisan attempts to shape the electorate and the resulting corruption of independent non-partisan agencies and departments including the Department of Justice itself. They further show the mechanics of those attempts and how they centered largely on ACORN, a national organization fighting for the rights of low- and moderate-income families. (ACORN is also one of Project Vote’s field partners in our Voter Participation Program.)

I mentioned the other day that the ACORN PAC might be making an endorsement this week. Well, they did.

On Wednesday night, ACORN Votes, the ACORN PAC, endorsed Barack Obama for President.

ACORN President Maude Hurd had this to say,

“Last night, Sen. Obama received more than the two-thirds majority needed from our elected national leadership to secure the endorsement. Over the past months, we have worked with all leading candidates. ACORN’s members have deep appreciation and respect for Senators Clinton and Edwards and their work on behalf of our communities. What it came down to was that Senator Obama is the candidate who best understands and can effect change on the issues ACORN cares about like stopping foreclosures, enacting fair and comprehensive immigration reform, and building stronger and safer communities across America.”

ACORN's membership is probably about 35% Latino and 65% African-American. I don't think this will have much effect in Texas, since Texas ACORN's presence is concentrated in a few areas. But this could have a major impact on African-American turnout in Ohio, where ACORN has a major presence and a demonstrated track record in moving state-wide issues and conducting statewide voter contact programs. ACORN ran the field for the 2006 Ohio Minimum Wage ballot measure and reached between 250K and 350K largely African-American voters.

I would expect that this means that ACORN members will hit the streets for Obama immediately in Ohio (and Texas, but more in Ohio). Down the line this could mean more boots on the ground in places like Pennsylvania as well.

Interesting.

Kick ass and take names.

Word on the street is that ACORN, which has massive field capacity amongst low and moderate income voters and communities of color in Ohio and Pennsylvania, might be making a Presidential endorsement this week, Wednesday at the earliest. 

The organization's membership has been divided amongst the Big Three on the Democratic side, reflecting how voters voting in Democratic primaries have broken down nationally. But with Edwards out and the fight down to two, with only a few big states remaining, it looks like there is mounting support to pick a candidate. The winning candidate needs two-thirds support of the voting membership and no one's willing to go on record as to who the membership is supporting.

My own guess is Obama, but Clinton has always played well with ACORN's membership and NY ACORN members are especially fierce in their support. They could move the rest of the voting leadership or gather enough votes to block any endorsement at all.

This is particularly important for the endorsee in Ohio because of ACORN's demostrated ability to reach voters in majority minority districts, last seen in 2006's election when they ran the field for the minimum wage ballot initiative and reached well over 250,000 voters with multiple contacts over a 6 week period.

We'll see what happens...

Kick ass and take names.

As you faithful readers may know, the work I do in my day job supports voter participation programs in low and moderate income communities across the country. This year we're going to do the biggest non-partisan voter registration drive in the history of the United States. That's right. The biggest. Ever. In the history of the US. And it is going to be done largely among blacks and Latinos with some working class whites thrown in for good measure. Then we're going to follow that up with a voter mobilization (also called Get Out The Vote) effort that, while it won't be the biggest ever in the history of the US, will be the biggest ever in the history of my organization.

To put all this in perspective, let me give you some numbers.

(There is an internal debate about whether or not we should be explicit about how big the program is in communication that goes beyond our doors. Some argue that we don't want to tip off the bad guys as to where we're doing the work and by how much, because it will help their targeting. I understand that. But I argue that the bad guys look at the same math we do and understand exactly where the most important turf is and, further, that if they really are going to target us like they did in 2004 and 2006 - that Attorneygate thing was for real, yo - all they have to do is call a County Clerk and ask if we've been turning in cards yet. Once they know that, they will understand the scope of our work.) 

Anyway, back to the numbers. Largest drive ever = 1.2 million voter registration applications. Largest GOTV program for us ever = 2 million voters.

As you can imagine, this costs money. We're talking multiple millions, more than 10, less than 20, just for the VR part.

So I've been spending large chunks of my time creating proposals to various foundations and richie rich's so we can get the moola to bring more progressive voters into the equation and, hopefully, force the candidates to fall in line with progressive policy objectives. Which we call "winning".

Now, I expect that institutions that just give away money without expecting you to pay it back can make a range of demands on their prospective grantees, chiefly around the kind, nature, and amount of paper they want from you before they give you your own paper swag, generally cut into small pieces, died green, and stamped with various numbers.

So I'm used to dealing with lots and lots of arcane requests for information and clarification and whatnot.

But there's this one foundation that just goes beyond the pale. Usually a foundation reads your initial proposal, asks some points of clarification and then does their own internal process on the sucker.

Not these guys.

I've gotten back the initial draft no fewer than three times, each time with a minimum of 25 new questions or comments to address. Each revision takes at least 25-30 hours of work to deal with. After this process is done it will go to outside readers who will then make comments, to which I will be expected to reply.

Now, I have to say that we ARE asking them for a significant chunk of change. The kind of money that if someone offered it to me on the street, I'd wonder if I was being asked to kill someone or I was secretly being taped for a reality TV show. But, this amount of money isn't even close to the largest single donation that we've gotten for the program and doesn't even make up 1% of the total program cost. Yet they are clearly taking up WAAAAAAAAY more than 1% of my fundraising time.

There have been times in this process where I have been seriously considering just laying it on the line and calling them arrogant pricks who think they have a right to ask for this level of engagement because they are giving so much money, when in reality they don't know crap about this work and should be able to tell from our track record that we know that of which we speak (seriously, it's a very good track record - we have accounted for 37% of all voter registration applications from voter registration drives in the US since 2004).

But I've learned that people who are giving you money don't respond so well to this kind of frankness. So I bite my tongue. And post to LJ.

Okay, gotta get crackin' on that 3rd revision.

Kick ass and bray like a donkey dragging a one-ton brick up a mountain.

Been gone for a while. This is going to be very stream of consciousness.

*Los Angeles smells GREAT after it rains. Seriously. But, we're in a drought, so this is something I've experienced, like, twice.

*We did the Bay Area for part of the Holidays. I love the Bay and I totally appreciate getting to jog in the redwoods. Totally did not appreciate the 5-day sore throat this gave me. Also, if you get a chance to go to a party in the Berkeley hills at a house with a panoramic view from Mt. Tam to the San Mateo Bridge during a winter sunset then you should go, even if it is just for the sunset. If the party is full of family members, good wine, and great food, then so much the better.

*Tyche and her family are good together for about 2.5 days, after that I suggest shin guards and one of those weird looking soft helmet things that soccer players use to prevent concussions. On a related note, there are few things as surpsingly disappointing as a banal "Jesus Loves You" Christmas Day homily. And I say that as an a person with no particular religious affiliation.

*New Orleans continues to be a mix of devestation and slow return. Comparing this time last year to this year, the amount of rebuilding and population growth is palpable. There are still massive problems - infrastructure, political, justice system, health care system, housing - but the change is hopeful. The culture that makes New Orleans New Orleans still shines through, though it will take awhile before it becomes as robust as it was.

*Case in point: New Year's at Tipitina's, a NOLA institution. Featuring Galactic, a NOLA funk band that is one of the few contemporary bands that can kick ass the way The Meters and JB and Parliament/Funkadelic did. Which is where Tyche and I along with my brother and his fiance ended up. Got there at about 9:45 and stayed until about 3AM. Galactic was even better live than on their CD's. But it was the entire scene, an alchemical mixture of drunken frat boys/sorority sisters in town for the various bowl games, recent "brain gain" young people there to rebuild, old school NOLA burnouts, southern fried hippies (think Asheville and Athens), and the usual number of funk-stoners that made it an utterly NOLA gathering. Well, that and the music. New Or-Lee-Annes knows how to party. Seriously.

*And as I stood there, about halfway back in the room, taking in the entire scene, the people, the music, the mixed scents of sweat, mixed drinks, spilled beer, tobacco, and marijuana all at New Year's on the cusp of 2008, I thought, "This is history in the making. People in this town are going to remember the years after the storm as something. It will be an era, a time spoken of as "a time when". And my brother is right in the middle of it and here I am right in the middle of this. This is going to be a thing."

*2008 is going to be a thing, too.

*The general election is going to be close, unless Bloomberg launches a 3rd party bid. Then it's the Democrats in a blow-out. Having said that, this year it is the Democrats' race to lose.

*About two years ago I wrote a few essays/longwinded blog comments about the coming crack-up of the GOP coalition between the Main Streeters and the Wall Streeters. Main Streeters were your Christianists and aspects of the small business community, Wall Streeters were your corporate owning class types. The latter use the former as foot soldiers to elect people like W who speak about values and proceed to rape the country and embark on pre-emptive wars. But this year, the Main Streeters finally have their own genuine candidate in Mike Huckabee. I think the crack-up is upon us. This is one of the reasons why I think this election is the Democrats to lose.

*Of course that means that who the Democratic nominee is becomes even more important than it was in 2004. There is an opportunity to get a functioning progressive into the White House and we need to take that opportunity. My choice is Edwards, clearly the most progressive and most populist of the Democratic contenders.

*Obama is good too, but it worries me that he chooses to make it difficult for citizen's organizations like ACORN and labor unions to get his campaign's attention and that he uses rhetoric and literature that calls groups like us "special interests" as if we played in the same sandbox with energy companies and Big Pharma. I wonder how open he would be to groups like us once he's in the White House. And believe me, we are going to be a big reason that core progressive voters show up at the polls this year.

That's all for now.

Kick ass and take names.

Sometimes you get to surprise yourself.

For a few years now I've been toiling away in a small part of a large operation dedicated to facilitating and encouraging the electoral participation of underrepresented populations, with an emphasis on black folks, Latinos, low-income families, and young people. A large part of that work is registering people to vote, or more accurately, helping them register to vote, since technically they aren't registered until the County says they are registered.

We've done pretty well. Actually, we are the largest national voter registration organization in the United States (which isn't saying much because most other countries don't need this kind of work as they have policies in place that ensure near-universal registration of all their eligible population). Over the past two election cycles we've submitted over 37% of all the voter registration applications submitted by nationalvoter registration drives. And I've seen a statistice that about 12% of voters get registred through VR drives, so we've got about 37% of whatvever of that 12% was done by national drives. In raw terms, that's about 1.7 million VR applications.

In order to do this effectively, you have to go where the unregistered people are, especially from your own targeted constituencies. So you have to know approximately where these folks are and how many of them are there. Otherwise you waste time and money, both of which are precious for anyone, but especially so for an organization of poor people.

That's where I come in. One of the biggest tasks my tiny little piece of this much larger operation is responsible for is projecting the unregistered eligible populations in various counties and electoral jurisdictions. While this isn't rocket science, it does take some thought and concentration to deal with the data sets. Well, it turns out that in toiling away at this aspect of my work for the past 3 years, I've actually become good at it. An expert even. In fact, there are only a couple other people in the progressive non-profit civic engagement/voter participation community who have my level of sophistication.

Of course that really means nothing. Or meant nothing until I spent 30 minutes on the phone with an actual demographer and talked through the methodology of my projections. Turns out I'm way more accurate than I ever anticipated I was. So my numbers are good and the projections we add to them in order to understand potential registrants by the registration deadlines in most states aren't crazy weird either.

In other words, I'm one of the top experts in determining unregistered voting age populations by race, ethnicity, income, etc. in the entire country.

It is definately weird to walk out of a meeting and suddenly realize this.

Anybody else out there an expert in something they had no idea they had even developed skills in?

Kick ass and register to vote.

From Wade Rathke's Chief Organizer blog giving the insider's perspective on how the questions for the event today were put together.

Here's an except:

 There will be 7 questions that run the gamut of ACORN’s interests in low- and moderate-income communities around the country.

1. Maximum Eligible Participation: getting all qualified and eligible citizens for any federal program to fully participate in the program.

2. Protecting Our Assets: stopping predatory lending and moving forward on better financial services.

3. Citizenship: helping immigrants become citizens.

4. Rebuilding American Cities: the call for a Marshall plan and a community impact assessment for all neighborhoods confronting developers with public support.

5. Improving Income, Wages, and Working Conditions: show us the money!

6. Katrina and Rebuilding New Orleans: this is more than a symbol to ACORN, it’s personal!

7. Protecting the Right to Vote: we have had enough of voter suppression and want a fully entitled citizenship.

Each member has a one-page scorecard and a small stub of a pencil prepared for them, so that they can rank each candidate and his or her response and keep a running straw poll of their thinking to input to fellow members not attending and the leadership across the country. The scoring is tough and runs from “excellent” to “failed.” We are tired and won’t take it no more!

Kick ass and make an informed choice.

ACORN Presidential Forum from Philadelphia will feature ACORN leaders asking Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich questions about the issues that affect low and moderate income Americans and about supportuing the work that ACORN members engage in every day.

The fun starts at 1PM EDT/10AM PDT and will be simulcast on the web as well as blogged by several national and Philadelphia-area blogs. There is also a blog anyone can join run by ACORN set up specifically for this event. You can also find short descriptions of the bloggers who will be in atttendance and who will be posting about the event here.

Candidates themselves will be the last up in the event, after introductions and explanations of the most important issues to ACORN members. Each candidate will go one-on-one with a group of ACORN leaders who will ask direct questions and expect direct answers. Each candidate will get a minimum of 35 minutes.

The whole thing starts in half an hour. See you there.

Kick ass and make an informed choice.

On July 2, ACORN will sponsor a Presidential Candidates Forum for the Democratic candidates. It will take place in a Philadelphia church on the north side of town, largely African-American, largely poor.

So far Hilary Clinton and John Edwards have confirmed their attendance and Dennis Kucinich is a tentative yes.

The format will include a short speech from incoming Philly Mayor Michael Nutter, an explanation of the top issues as identified by ACORN's low- and moderate-income membership, and then questions asked directly of the candidates by ACORN members. Each candidate will be asked 45 minutes worth of questions. The answers will be used by ACORN members to inform their decision-making process around whether or not to make endorsements in the primaries and if so, for whom, as well as for the edification of the public at large.

Every candidate was invited, those appearing made it work for their campaigns. Of the candidates who could not attend, Bill Richardson agreed to be interviewed by ACORN's Political Action Committee leaders last week in DC.

Of interest for everybody out in the internets, the Forum will be webcast live and will also be live blogged by over a dozen guest bloggers.

Details:

Monday July 2, 2007
Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philly
Lunch starts Noon EDT
Program starts 1PM EDT
Program ends 5PM EDT

Clinton - 2:30PM
Edwards - 3:40PM
Kucinich - 4:15PM

Simulcast can be found here: http://www.acorn.org/candidatesforum

Bloggers include:
MyDD
ESCHATON (Atrios)
Future Majority
Booman Tribune
and a host of Philly-area blogs.

And ACORN will be running a blog for the event as well.

So if you want to see where these folks are on issues that matter to Main Street as opposed to Wall Street, then tune in!

Kick ass and ponder your choices.

Normally when I'm talking about rights and politics and things I just rant at you good people.

Today I'm linking to a story from the McClatchy Papers Washignton Bureau (they own the Sac Bee, the Fresno Bee, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Charlotte Observer and a host of other mid-sized papers) about the complete and utter politicization of the Department of Justice under Bush and how it has become nothing more than an adjunct of the Republican party in its quest to suppress progressive voting blocs and institutionalize a GOP majority.

Here's a couple of fun quotes:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort torestrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year asPresident Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives byDemocratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespreadelection fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federalvoter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

I mean, it doesn't get any clearer than that. It should be noted for the record that Project Vote and ACORN were both thoroughly investigated as part of this effort and the failure of US Attorneys in NM and WA to find any actual systematic violations of the law or conspiracies to illegally subvert the elections led to their dismissal. Rove and Gonzalez felt like their folks were being insufficiently aggressive. But since neither Project Vote nor ACORN commits voter fraud, there wasn't anything to find.

The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations ofwidespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and othersteps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.

Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, aformer Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access andVoter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases,and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.

On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan,Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.

Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.

"As more information becomes available about theadministration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said.

B-I-N-G-O!

The article goes on to actually list all the instances of improper behavior, but you get the picture. Read the article, by Greg Gordon, for whom my team compiled an ass-load of information for him to puruse, and you'll get a sense of what this whole scandal is really about.

Kick ass and take names.

WORK, VOTER FRAUD, VOTER SUPPRESSION AND THE GOP'S ACORN JONES
Man, work has been kicking my ass while I'm there, but luckily I've been able to escape bringing it home for a while.

My group, the Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD) has been doing a lot of support work for ACORN and Project Vote's Elections Adminstration program, chiefly around the information coming out about the firing of the 8 US Attorneys. Turns out that at least two were fired for not pursuing "voter fraud" vigorously enough. In other words, they didn't bring indictments against groups engaged in massive ballot stuffing and voter registration drive irregularities.

You know why? Because it doesn't it exist, that's why. Interestingly enough, though, the Department of Justice had their eyes out for both Project Vote and ACORN and even Karl Rove was pushing the NM Attorney to root out "fraud" at the insistence of the local GOP leadership that wanted the US Attorney there to investigate .... wait for it ... ACORN!

See, in 2004, ACORN submitted over 35,000 voter registration applications in New Mexico, well above the margin of victory in the state. Some of those applications were forged by people trying to defraud the organization and get paid for work they didn't do, so all of a sudden the GOP is all "oh my god they are trying to subvert the system and they must be stopped!", which is really an attempt to intimidate voters from ACORN's constituency of low-income folks and folks of color. But they claim "voter fraud".

Well, back in March, Project Vote released a study by Professor Lorraine Minnite from Barnard who concluded that there simply isn't any organized voter fraud occuring in the US and that the bulk of cases of people voting illegally comes from absentee ballots (which are more likely to be cast by older, whiter, wealthier people - people who are more likely to be Republicans). The number of people who have been convicted in the past 5 years for some kind of voting irregularity? 86. The number of votes cast since 2002 in Federal elections? Over 250 million. So there were 86 cases out of a possible 250 million. Which, I guess if you are the GOP, is a clear indication of rampant voter fraud.

Or maybe you are just using that hysteria to pass a series of laws that suppress the turnout from constituencies that you don't want to show up at the polls. Like, say, voter ID requirements, which the Eagleton Center for Politics at Rutgers has just shown depresses turnout among African-Americans by 6% and Asian-Americans by 9%. But we need to protect the system's integrity! From what? So fucking transparent.

Anyway, we've been helping PV and ACORN to make this case for the past 2 months through a series of press releasese, op-eds, and blog posting on the major liberal blogs.

WEIRD PHONE SURVEYS
Two days ago as I was winding down work, I took a call from a phone suveyer and decided to go with it, not knowing it was going to be a 20 minute call! It was all about sports. Professional sports leagues. What was my favorite (MLS), which did I think was the "most professional", whose athletes did I "most respect"? Who were the most overpaid (MLB)? (As much as possible I tried to pick Major League Soccer, but it just wasn't one of my choices. And neither was Major League Lacrosse or the W-League (womens' soccer) or even the Arena Football League - if I was them I'd be pissed.)

Anyway, at a couple of points the questions got really funny: "What percent of your head hair would you say is gray?" Umm, what? (I said 10%.) And then they started asking me about hair care products and which I was most likely to use. They also asked my how much alcohol I drink in a typical week and what my favorite beer is. Favorite beer? I LOVE beer. I'm supposed to choose? But I did. I picked Newcastle because you just can't go wrong with Newcastle. It is never the wrong choice.

They also asked my how much sports I watch on TV per week, but not which sports they are. They did NOT ask me how much sports I watch on the internet, which is where I actually do most of my sports watching since you have to have cable to watch soccer in America.

I couldn't beleive how long this damn survey took and I was particularly amused by their decision to try to find out which league's players are the most respected (or not). At a certain point I just don't give a shit about millionaire athletes and their petty battles and I don't know how to differentiate between the "respect" I have for a millionaire baskeball player vs a millionaire baseball player. Now, the young kids on the Development Contracts with Major League Soccer, who make $12,000-$18,000 a year and live 5 people to a house, like they do over at DC United, all so they can pursue their dream of making it in Major League Soccer - a league no one in this country actually cares about - THOSE kids have my respect. Hell, even a journeyman D-League player in Bakersfield or Grand Rapids or someplace like that gets some respect from me. But A-Rod? Or Barry Zito? Umm, no.

THE BECKHAM EFFECT
One last thing about sports. I recently acquired season tickets to the LA Galaxy, which plays in the league no one cares about (see above) on the theory that if I have a chance to see one of the best players in the world and the best-know player in the world, and soccer is my favorite sport, and I have the means to make it happen, then I should go ahead and do it. Even though I think the other LA team, Chivas USA, is a lot more fun to watch and has better fans.

Now the thing is about MLS - you have to really like this league and this game to follow it and you have to go way out of your way to do it. You can't just turn on ABC and see the Game of the Week. YOu must dig and scramble and dig some more and then you have to deal with other soccer fans who won't give MLS the time of day because they like only "the best" soccer - so they watch English or Spanish or German futbol exclusively. I call them Eurosnobs. Anyway, that gives you an idea of the typical MLS fan.

Until now, I guess. And you can thank David Beckham for this. World-class talent and celebrity brought to a minor league league. As if Shaquille O'Neal decided to finish his career in Italy or something. Anyway, you get a lot of new MLS fans buying season tickets and attending games, but not having a lot of knowledge.

So the guy next to me at the Galaxy season opener is one of these guys (oh lucky me for an entire season). His favorite team in Chelski (Chelsea in the EPL - owned by a Russian billionaire and the winner of the past two league championships, but sitting second this year) and his soccer intelligence is pretty good. He understands what's going on on the field.

But. But he leans over to me at one point and asks me how many substitutions they have in an MLS game. Umm. That's like asking how many strikes you get in baseball. It's the same everywhere the game is played professionally or in a FIFA-sanctioned league. It's 3. It's one of the 17 rules of the game.

Then later he expresses admiration for this tall powerful forward for FC Dallas who scores a goal against the Gals. "Is he a rookie?"

Umm, no. It's Kenny Cooper and he's been in the league for 2 years and before that he was in the Manchester United youth program AND HE JUST MADE HIS INTERNATIONAL DEBUT FOR THE US MENS NATIONAL TEAM 3 MONTHS AGO, SCORING A GOAL, EVEN! What kind of US soccer fan who knows enough about soccer to follow Chelsea DOESN'T KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT HIS OWN NATIONAL TEAM?

Aaargh! Fuck you David Beckham for surrounding me with imbeciles while I watch live professional soccer, one of my very favorite things to do.

That is all.

Kick balls and learn about the damn sport in your own country, already!

Every year ACORN does a national staff meeting in New Orleans, called Year End/Year Begin or YEYB.

This was by far the largest YEYB in the organizations 36 year history. There are some 750 people here from a host of entities that all make up the ACORN family.

Some highlights so far include:
-The expansion of the reach of the organization to include offices in Buenos Aries, Tijuana, Ottawa, and Lagos, Nigeria (which is an entirely volunteer-run group with no staff, but with a 3-year plan to get to 7 paid staff. Grand total of this 3-year budget? $25,000. That's all you need to know about the economies of developing countries right there.

-Presentation by Justin Reuben, the Organizing Director for MoveOn.org, who was completely flabbergasted by the reach and scope of the organization, likening his original understanding of who and what ACORN is to the 3 blind men describing the elephant. Gave a fascinating description of how MoveOn's Call For Change worked, among other things.

-Presentation from John Podesta, ED of the Center for American Progress, who was the Domestic Policy Advisor to Pres. Clinton for a few years. Talked about how to keep the Dems honest now that they have the majority in Congress and told the crowd how amazing ACORN is, which always goes over well in this session.

-Learning that ACORN was the largest voter registration organization in the United States in 2006 (547,000 registrations) and ran the largest non-party field program in the country in support of the minimum wage initiatives in Missouri and Ohio (targeting 490,000 voters).

-Learing that if you look at all the entities together (ACORN, Project Vote, SEIU Local s 880 and 100, ACORN Housing, WalMart Workers Association, and a host of others) took in $83 million. I remember when $10 million was a major accomplishment.

For the first time in my ACORN career I really feel like the growth and reach of the organization has outstripped my ability to take it all in. I didn't even know we were in Lagos until yesterday.

On the Political Operations front, we also won 4 minimum wage ballot initiatives (CO, AZ, MO, OH) and the media is crediting the MO campaign with electing Claire McCaskill and the MT campaign, which we didn't have anything to do with beyond technical assistance, with electing Jon Tester. Even the right-wing National Review gave those campaigns the credit.

And on the personal front, I have to say that the Political Operations powerpoint presentation was the best, most kick-ass presentation of the meeting so far. Much credit goes to my staff for putting it together, but I did all the sound and picked the music. Had 700 people clapping their hands and stomping their feet and it got a standing ovation. I guess 10 days of 12 hours a day of work for 7 kick-ass minutes was worth it. I dread the fact that next year I have to top it.

Kick ass and take names.

I said in my predictions post that massive support for the minimum wage in MO would help put Clair McCaskill over the top in the Senate race there.

Apparently the Associate Press agreed with me.

Here's the article:

McCaskill victory aided by minimum wage ballot measure

DAVID A. LIEB
Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Democrat Claire McCaskill was helped to victory over Republican Sen. Jim Talent by hundreds of door-to-door canvassers targeting dense Democratic districts in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas.

But they weren't working directly for McCaskill. The canvassers were paid by a group supporting a minimum wage increase on Missouri's ballot.
McCaskill's 2 percentage point victory over Republican Sen. Jim Talent in Tuesday's election was aided by a variety issues, including opposition to the war in Iraq, general discontent with Washington and her support for a ballot measure protecting stem cell research in the state constitution.
But the greatest impact on the Senate race may have come from minimum wage ballot measure, which passed easily in every Missouri county and garnered an astounding 76 percent support statewide.

Aid from the minimum wage measure came in two forms: helping drive up the voter turnout in urban Democratic areas and perhaps helping persuade some typically Republican-leaning rural voters to pick McCaskill over Talent.

"At the end of the day, it probably helped her more than the much more ballyhooed stem cell initiative," said Marvin Overby, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

McCaskill's stem cell research ad featuring ailing actor Michael J. Fox was a hit on the national talk show circuit and helped cement the perception that the Senate race and stem cell initiative were intertwined. Talent opposed the measure, saying it would allow cloning and destruction of early human life.
Indeed, McCaskill's victory margin was similar to the statewide approval rate of the stem cell ballot initiative.

But McCaskill seldom mentioned the stem cell initiative as she traveled rural Missouri in her recreational vehicle. Rather, it was the minimum wage ballot measure that she hyped at almost every stop.

Rallying with nearly 200 supporters at a St. Joseph union hall five days before the election, McCaskill highlighted the importance of the ballot measure to her success.

"We pulled together and got minimum wage on the ballot. That not only is going to help the workers of this state, it is going to help us next Tuesday" on Election Day, McCaskill said to the applause of the crowd. The measurer's sponsoring group, Give Missourians a Raise, focused its campaign efforts on urban Democrats, especially those "drop-off" voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election but - absent strong encouragement - were unlikely to vote in this year's election, said spokeswoman Sara Howard.

The group ran no TV ads, and it's only radio and newspaper ads were in predominantly black media in St. Louis and Kansas City, she said. Give Missourians a Raise spent more than $470,000 on paid canvassers who made multiple visits to densely populated Democratic precincts in the cities.
It paid about 680 canvassers on Election Day alone and averaged around 400 paid door-knockers daily during the final week of the campaign, Howard said.

None of that effort was financed by McCaskill's campaign. But she surely benefited.

Voter turnout was up this year in St. Louis and Jackson counties, compared with the non-presidential 2002 election year in which Talent defeated Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan. And McCaskill grabbed a slightly larger percentage of the vote there than Carnahan had.

The result in St. Louis County, for example, was that McCaskill outpolled Talent by about 46,000 votes, whereas Carnahan led Talent there by a mere 15,000 votes in 2002.

"The fact that the minimum wage was on the ballot was something we believe had a direct impact on the high voter turnout levels we're seeing in St.
Louis and Kansas City," Howard said.

In rural areas, the ballot measure may not have driven up turnout but instead added to a sense among some voters that change was needed in Congress, which hadn't raised the federal minimum wage since 1997. "It really helped Democratic candidates - and specifically Claire McCaskill - differentiate themselves from Republicans in rural Missouri," said Democratic Party spokesman Jack Cardetti.

While McCaskill embraced the minimum wage ballot measure, Talent refused to take an official position. But when asked about the topic at a stop in rural California, Mo., Talent explained that he has supported proposed minimum wage increases only when they were linked to tax relief for businesses, something the ballot measure did not do.

An Associated Press exit poll of 2,389 Missouri voters showed 93 percent of McCaskill's supporters voted for the minimum wage increase. A majority of Talent supporters also voted for the minimum wage increase, but by a much lower 57 percent. The poll had a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In a close race, every little edge helps. And that may be precisely what the minimum wage ballot measure provided to McCaskill.

Need I point out that ACORN spearheaded the effort to get this on the ballot and then put over 600 people on the streets targeting 180,000 voters in a massive Get Out The Vote effort?

Kick ass and take names.

A few days ago I talked about the Wall Street Journal's ACORN fetish and their growing shrillness in their desperation to kneecap a movement for economic justice by taking out the leader of the movment to raise the minimum wage. The editorial that I posted was not only a hysterical screed, but it was also full of false statements and distortions. I questioned their fact-checking and their motivation for writing it in the first place.

It seems they must have remembers some journalistic ethics because they printed ACORN's response to the editorial. This response points out the erros and puts it all in context. Here it is (oh and I love how they won't capitalize ACORN's name, even though it is an acronym like AFL-CIO):

Acorn Clarifies Issues on Voter Registration
November 9, 2006; Page A15
Acorn, as a community organization, is dedicated to getting more power for
low and moderate income families, raising wage standards and winning more
accountability from financial institutions. Your Nov. 3 editorial "The Acorn
Indictments" omitted a number of facts while providing a distorted view of
our successful work to encourage voter registration and participation. In
regard to your accusations regarding our 2004 voter registration drive in
Ohio: Acorn has never even been accused of the charges listed in the
editorial by any authority. (You also mistakenly credit Acorn with
initiating the lawsuit that overturned Missouri's voter ID law.)

For Acorn's more than 225,000 member families, voter registration is a key
part of our work to win a voice and material improvement for our
communities. This year alone, Acorn has helped more than 530,000 low income
and minority citizens to apply to become voters. We conduct careful training
and enforce high standards and quality control procedures to make sure that
all voter registration cards were handled properly.

In Kansas City, our quality control team caught a handful of employees
submitting questionable cards in order to make it appear they were doing
more work than they really were. Acorn fired them, brought their names to
the authorities, and provided evidence for the investigation that resulted
in four workers being indicted for submitting a total of seven improper
cards. Nowhere in this voter registration case, or any other of which we are
aware, was there any indication that someone was trying to get an extra
vote.

While you imply that Acorn has secret partisan motivations, it cites as a
voting- issues expert Thor Hearne, who was general counsel for the
Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004. While he attributes sinister motives to the
fact that Acorn turned in numerous voter registration applications in Ohio,
this was work that we were proud to do. We think boards of elections should
have sufficient public resources to process the application of any American
citizen who wishes to participate in the democratic process.

This year Acorn's members are proudly working with other community groups,
unions and religious leaders to pass minimum wage increases on the ballot in
Arizona, Ohio, Missouri and Colorado. We can't help but wonder if your
editorial's rancor was truly driven by a handful of bad registration cards
that never made it on any voting roll or by the fact that, because of our
work, hundreds of thousands of minority and low-income citizens may now
exercise their right to vote.

Maude Hurd
Acorn President
Boston

Kick ass and take names.

Ah, the Wall Street Journal, how you warm the cockels of my heart. To know that by the tone and frequency of your increasingly hysterical editorials against a group show how very effective they are becoming, not to mention how terrified you are of their success. It does a boy good to read.

Here's the latest jeremiad against ACORN in the mouthpiece of the owning class. I should note, for the record, that the charges from 2004 noted in this article have never been vindicated and in fact, have exonerated ACORN in every instance. Further the nonsense about the crack being used as payment was a charge that was never leveled against ACORN in the first place, but rather against the NAACP (but you know what they say about all those brown people looking that same...).

Don't they fact-check anymore? But, of course, that just points out the fact that this isn't a campaign based on facts with the goal of "cleaning up elections" but a campaign to defame an organization viewed as a threat and disrupt tis operations. Oh and one more thing. If only ACORN were as union-backed as they say. If only. Many an ACORN Head Organizer dreams of the possibilities that a steady stream of union financial support would bring to their operation.

As I promised, here the screed, based on the idictments that I blogged about yesterday:

The Acorn Indictments
November 3, 2006; Page A10
So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn,
the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been
indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration
forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter
ID laws?

We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn
voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in
Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio,
Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice
Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing
such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments
were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney's office said in
a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."

Let's hope so. Acorn officials bill themselves as nonpartisan community
organizers merely interested in giving a voice to minorities and the poor.
In reality, Acorn is a union-backed, multimillion-dollar outfit that uses
intimidation and other tactics to push for higher minimum wage mandates and
to trash Wal-Mart and other non-union companies.

Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes
a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock
troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party. As part of the Fannie
Mae reform bill, House Democrats pushed an "affordable housing trust fund"
designed to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits to subsidize Acorn, among
other groups. A version of this trust fund actually passed the Republican
House and will surely be on the agenda again next year.

Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In
Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange
for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and
pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey.
During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004
election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn's
practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the
submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months
earlier.

"You have to wonder what's the point of that, if not to overwhelm the system
and get phony registrations on the voter rolls," says Thor Hearne of the
American Center for Voting Rights, who also testified at the hearing. "These
were Democratic officials saying that they felt their election system in
Ohio was under assault by these kinds of efforts to game the system."

Given this history, it's not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter
identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the
polls. In Missouri last month, the state Supreme Court held that a photo ID
requirement to vote was overly burdensome and a violation of the state
constitution. Acorn was behind the original suit challenging the statute,
and it has brought similar challenges in several other states, including
Ohio.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that blacks today are almost twice
as likely as they were in 2004 to say they have little or no confidence in
the voting system. Such a finding would seem like a powerful argument for
voter ID laws, which consistently poll well among people of all races and
incomes and would increase confidence in the voting process. Of course,
voter ID laws would also cut down on fraud, which, judging from the latest
indictments, would put a real crimp in Acorn's style.


Kick ass and take names.

This was left in the comment section of my last 7 Days update posting by Mike Doyle the viedographer who shot the Jessica piece that ran on the Thursday.

He's got more updates about her and about the project in general including the tidbid about how well the project is doing on You Tube.

Read and join the conversation.

Here's Mike:

I spoke with Jessica (whom I interviewed for 7 DAYS) a few days ago andshe IS interviewing, although not with that firm (they're too faroutside of Chicagoland, as it turns out, for her to get to and stillget her kids around where they need to be in the city). I have no doubtshe'll be successful in her job search before the end of the year. Lesshappy news, Erin, whom I also interviewed, quit her job to go look fora job with benefits...but that may mean leaving her hometown AND schoolbehind to move out of state.

I invite anyone who hasn't seentheir stories and the stories of the other folks we interviewed to cometake a look at the video blog at www.sevendaysatminimumwage.org. We originally expected to end the project after the initial week, but dueto its success it's been been extended through Election Day, November7. The interviews are pretty stark and honest, and they've been viewedby more than 30,000 people since the project began on October 23 (theycan also be seen on YouTube under the user name, "7daysatminimumwage").

ACORNand AFL-CIO launched the blog as a way to get contemporary audiences tojoin in the national debate over fair wages.  We hoped, naively or not,that Paul and Susan, Jessica, Jeffrey, and the other poverty-wageworkers who agreed to tell their stories to America, would becomeInternet celebrities in the fight for social justice. That's actuallystarting to happen.  A few days ago, part one of Jessica's harrowinginterview, in which she describes raising four kids while getting adegree and begging her employer for full-time hours and benefits,became YouTube's top video in the News & Blogs category (the realheartbreak is in part two, though, if you're brave enough to watch it).

We'vealso had more than 60 bloggers across the country (just like Ghosts ofJoe Slovo) take up the cause and write about or link to the 7 DAYSblog, gotten coverage from Air America, National Public Radio, and,with Roseanne Barr, a national Associated Press article. Last Sunday,we were honored to have celebrated labor-rights journalist BarbaraEhrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, as theguest for an hour-long webchat.

Now we want to know whateveryone else thinks about the project and the fairness of minimum wagein general. Personally, I don't think an hour of human labor shouldcost the same as a large latte (you know, the drink we probably all hadon our way to work this morning?)  Imagine having to work an hour atyour job just to pay for that coffee--or being forced to raise a familyon that kind of income because the government said you weren't worthbeing paid anything more.  Millions of people face just that dilemmaevery morning, every day, and it just pisses me off that they have tobe in that position.

I invite you all to come visit the blogsite and tell us what you think about the $5.15 federal minimum wage,however you want to do that. Post a comment under one of the videos andtell us your opinion or your story.  Or pick up a video camera like Idid and interview a friend or neighbor working for poverty wages andpost the video on YouTube or your own blog and tell us about it. And asfar as YouTube goes, the comments some of our participants havereceived there have run the gamut from supportive to downright hateful(so we've been taking our blows, too). If you feel like entering thedebate their, check out the comments under Jessica's videos and see ifyou agree with some of them (I bet you won't, some of them are justplain obnoxious).

For those of us who worked on 7 DAYS, wenever considered the project a simple campaign tactic, or a partisanappeal or political story.  We wanted 7 DAYS to be a humanisticproject. From the beginning, we tried to engage the blogosphere fromthe heart. We empathize with the people who told us their stories notbecause we feel sorry for them, but because we ARE them. Me, and you,and every American of any wallet size working to make ends meet--noneof us is any different than a minimum-wage worker, and circumstancecould deliver any of us into a minimum-wage income in an instant.

Last week, 30,000 people heard that message.  Some were convinced.  Some weren't.  Were you?

Let us know!

End of speech ;-)

Kick ass and take names.

As I've noted before, you can tell a lot about how well you are doing by the kinds of enemies you are accumulating. I have long maintained that in the world of social and economic justice the gold standard enemy is the Wall Street Journal. No one defends corporate obscenity and its enabling ideology of free-market fundamentalism quite as well or as vocierously with as big a megaphone as the editorial page of the WSJ. As Descartes almost noted, "I have been visciously attacked by a WSJ editorial, therefore I am."

But you know, for all their wailing and gnashing of teeth, the folks over at Dow Jones actually know how to put together a decent paper and pretty much the only one that can do any amount of investiation of corporate shenanigans. Which is why they have prestige and why it counts so much when groups like ACORN get kneecapped by them.

On the other hand, there is The Club For Growth, a corporate-financed PAC that aims to pull the GOP to the right, since, as it has been obvious for the past decade, the Republicans have been engaged in a dangerous flirtation with socialism, expanded civil rights, promotion of peaceful and democratic solutions to international conflicts, and policies that generally serve to increase the amount of money the poorest people have in their pockets. I mean, if the GOP isn't on the left, then who is?

But into the breech steps the Club who has made it a point of political strategy to run free-market fundies against the few remaining moderates in the GOP during Republican primary elections. You know, to save the party from drifting into an embrace of godless Communism.

So the Club has now joined the wing-nut feeding frenzy regarding ACORN and the allegations of "massive voter fraud" the organization has been engaged in. They even put a nice little link on their blog to the most histrionic of the allegations and a reference to a fun little hatchet-job against ACORN from 3 years ago. (Is that the best you can do? I know for a fact that a corporate-shill think tank produced a 30+ page report on ACORN this summer. Why so stingy with the bandwidth?)

So awesome! "I am attacked by The Club for Growth, therefore I scare the pants off of rich white men in suits.

For the record, here is the statement from ACORN regarding the yesterday's indictment of four terminated voter registration workers employed by the group in Kansas City.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  November 1, 2006

Kansas City, MO – Leaders of the community group ACORN today applauded the FBI for the steps it is taking to investigate individuals suspected in several cases of possible voter registration fraud that the group reported to authorities during a recent ACORN voter registration drive in the Kansas City area.

The individuals under investigation were temporary workers, hired--and later fired—by Kansas City ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to help in its large-scale voter registration drive, which helps thousands of Kansas City residents register to vote. 

ACORN took the initiative on October 11 to contact the Kansas City Board of Elections and the Jackson County Prosecutor when the organization’s standard review process identified suspicious voter registration applications. ACORN provided to the Board and the prosecutor a letter with the name and contact information of the former employees who had collected the suspicious application. ACORN then facilitated the subsequent FBI inquiry by providing internal records documenting ACORN’s suspicion and other information as requested.. ACORN will continue to provide its full support and cooperation in the investigation.

 “When we caught this misconduct, we reporter it to the authorities. Now we want to see these folks  prosecuted to the full extent of the law, because they have defrauded our organization, and, worse, detracted from our mission of ensuring that citizens in our community participate in the democratic process,” said Claudia Harris, Chairperson of  Kansas City ACORN

“Like the FBI, ACORN considers any interference in the voting process to be a very serious matter,” Harris continued. “Across the state our attorneys today reached a settlement with the St. Louis Board of Elections to issue a retraction of the intimidating letter they sent out to thousands of voters we registered. Vigilance is needed to make sure that Scott Leindecker’s St. Louis Board of Elections does not engage in any other dirty tricks to suppress the African American vote.”

ACORN’s voter registration drives are committed to one objective:  Registration of eligible low-income and minority citizens who wish to vote and have their votes counted. In the past year, ACORN has helped tens of thousands of Missouri residents register to vote. As part of ACORN’s voter registration program, ACORN has a comprehensive quality control that reviews all application for completeness and accuracy and calls applicants to verify their information. It was this process that identified the individuals who were referred to the Board and Prosecutors.

Kick ass and take names.

I posted 5 of the 7 days of videos from 7 Days @ Minimum Wage site, which you can find here, here, here, here, and here. Not to mention from the & Days website itself, if you prefer things to be all in one place.

While I think that attacking the inequality in American economic society requires a systemic approach, it is always nice to see someone who works hard catch a break.

So here's an update about Jessica, the woman from day 4 who had the 14 minute interview and made the videographer cry.

This is from the Daily Dose updates that you can find on the 7 Days site. This is from this past Sunday.

No better news has come to our Minimum Wage Campaign than this: Early this morning, less than an hour after we posted the story of Jessica on our 7 Days@ Minimum Wage VideoBlog, a prospective employer contacted Mike Doyle, the producer of the piece mike@chicagocarless.com and offered the long-suffering mother of four a better job. Mike referred the offer to Jessica (whose full name is being withheld to protect her from reprisal at work) and we’re all keeping our fingers crossed. To learn why we’re so supportive of this remarkable woman, visit www.sevendaysatminimumwage.org and watch her wrenching story, 14 minutes in length and unedited.

Nice.

Kick ass and take names.

This article from the Pittsburg Post-Gazette in PA could have been written by ACORN's Communications Department, but would hvea been rejected for being to hagiographic. Sometimes the press is more willing that you might imagine to put your work in a good light.

Here are some exerpts:

"Ms. Johnson, 47, has a husky voice that cuts out on her sometimes, andshe winced at being singled out for a story. Nobody at ACORN is moreimportant than anybody else, she said. But when people appear in theirdoorways and stare at her, she plows right in, ebullient with spiel,one part practiced, one part win-'em-over.

"Our goals are going to be met," she said. "We're going to do this thing with everybody's help."

She came to community organizing with the persistence of someone whocan't bear losing ground. A Homewood native with six children betweenthe ages of 8 and 19, she attended Schenley High School and earned herGED in 1977. A licensed manicurist, she worked in hotel housekeepingbefore taking the job at McDonald's.

"I believe there's a born leader in everyone," she said. "This is thefirst job I've ever really loved, that I felt God sent to me. And Ithink Homewood is a beautiful place because it believed in me. I wantto show my kids my strength."

One of her favorite questions to people she meets is, "If Ed Rendell was standing at your door, what would you tell him?" The answer,invariably, is, "Do something about all the guns." "

And then continuing on that same day:

"The same afternoon, she summoned a stoic and wary Lawrence Horton to his doorway. He stood rod-straight and listened to the woman in the red ball cap try to convince him Homewood's issues can be resolved if he gets involved.

"I hear what you're saying," he said softly. "I don't know the answer, though."

"Mister Larry, I work for you," she said. "Do you believe there's power in numbers?"

He granted her a shrug. "What do you want me to do?"

"We do the footwork together," she said. "It's not good for us to stay in our houses. We gotta come out."

"I know," he said, nodding.

"We take the first step by voting."

He gave her his number and took an ACORN pamphlet.

"OK," she said, "me and you are going to set up another visit, OK? We've got to stay connected. And if you know anyone who's not registered to vote, tell 'em they gotta be in line.""

The whole thing is pretty good and made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Kick ass and take names.

Folks,

This is a cross-posting from my diaries at MyDD and DailyKos, so it talks about ACORN in way I rarely do on this journal. I apologize for the length, but I think it very clearly illustrates how voter suppression works in US elections.


With the election in Missouri proving to play a pivotal roll in which party controlls Congress and polling indicating a very tight race between GOP Talent and Dem McCaskill, the GOP has resorted to well-known dirty tricks to suppress the vote of groups they see as supporting their opponents.

The biggest target of their dirty tricks machine has been ACORN, a group that organizes and fights for the rights of poor people in the Show-Me State as well as in 110 cities across the United States. The GOP is scared because ACORN, which placed the initiative on the ballot that would raise MO's minimum wage and index it to inflation, is targeting 600,000 voters in metro St. Louis and Kansas City for GOTV in support of the minimum wage. Republicans are worried that these voters will voter in larger numbers than normal because of the chance to vote themselves a raise and subsequently cast ballots for other candidates that support their economic justice agenda. Notably there are very few of these candidates on the GOP side of the line.

The GOP has engaged in a systemic and coordinated attack on ACORN's efforts and reputation using false allegations of voter fraud to justify serious voter suppression measures. These actions could have the effect of reducing core progressive turnout in key regions of the state. But ACORN is fighting back.

In 2006, ACORN submitted more than 70,000 voter registration applications collected from Missouri citizens in under-represented, mainly African-American neighborhoods; the organization is campaigning for a statewide ballot initiative to rai