It's time

It's time to abolish voter registration by party.

It's time for a viable alternative to the electoral college.

It's time for "Liberal" to stop being a bad word.

It's time that candidates of any party stopped being ashamed of their intelligence, their education, their experience.

It's time Democratic candidates stood up for something besides "I'm not that guy."

It's time for real campaign reform.

It's time for liberals to get as active as conservatives. In schools, churches, communities, and, yeah, even workplaces.

It's time to put an end to divisive media. (As Jon Stewart told Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire" last month -- "You're hurting America. Stop hurting America. You're part of their strategy -- your partisan attacks.")

Calling yesterday a failure of the democratic process is the easy way out. NOTHING is going to be easy in the coming years. Buck up.

Yeah, you can have today to mourn and whine and complain. But tomorrow, dammit, we all have to roll out of bed and cobble together the pieces of our dashed hopes and forge something new. Because 40 million other Americans are feeling just as crappy as you are right now. And if all of us give up, then everybody loses.

We've got work to do.

Because he doesn't blog

My husband's words, from this morning's email to me:

"I think what stuns me the most is the popular vote. I knew it would be close in the electoral
college, and likely for Bush, but I just can't believe that more people like this guy now, after
all that he's done, than did four years ago.

I feel like a stranger in my own country.

Though, I suppose the other 50 some million do too."

A few organizations to consider

http://www.indyvoter.org/

http://www.rpcc.org/home.shtml

http://www.hrc.org/ (courtesy of kebbo)

Any others you recommend?

A glimmer of hope

The future of the Democratic party?

Barak Obama at the 2004 Democratic Convention:
“If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil
liberties. It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one. Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

These are the kinds of words we should meditate on every morning and evening. The man who said them, Barack Obama, yesterday won his bid for a Senate seat representing Illinois. We need more like him!!