The Inspiration of Perspiration.

This is going to be an incredible year.

I spent two dollars making this video hitting the state Republican Party on the yacht loophole, and now there's anecdotal evidence that we got the CRP to turn off their phones, two days before their annual convention!

I got vm and then was transferred to an extension that had no vm. But I'm sending them an email. They can't get rid of me that easily!

Great idea, dday. We need to band together all over the country to fight these corrupt, incompetent politicians who are giving away our tax dollars to their cronies.

Two bucks, and a few hours of online organizing. And the Republican Party in California turned off their phones.

And really I'm the least successful one out there. At Blue Indiana Thomas is launching an effort to get John McCain kicked off the state primary ballot because he didn't get the required amount of signatures:

Now, I'm originally from the 4th District, so curiosity led me to check out who had made it (and by how much) in my old stomping ground. To my surprise, I noticed that John McCain -- the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination -- was just a little short in a few districts, including my precious 4th, despite the fact that Attorney General Steve Carter had already turned in their petitions. I made a few phone calls, and one by one I found out that the McCain camp had got the job done across the state.

Except in the 4th District.

In the 4th District, they are short.

By my latest count, they turned in 496 signatures for the 4th, and the latest IED report for this morning shows them with only 491.

So this afternoon, I filed a challenge with the Secretary of State's office to keep John McCain off of the ballot. You can check it out here. (I'll have a .pdf version up when I get back to Bloomington this evening.)

And these two online efforts pale in comparison to this incredible offline organizing effort by black college students to resist voter disenfranchisement.

Early voting starts today in Texas. In Waller County, a primarily rural county about 60 miles outside Houston, the county made the decision to offer only one early voting location: at the County Courthouse in Hempstead, TX, the county seat.

Prairie View A&M students organized to protest the decision, because they felt it hindered their ability to vote. For background, Prairie View A&M is one of Texas' historically Black universities. It has a very different demographic feel than the rest of the county. There has been a long history of dispute over what the students feel is disenfranchisement. There was a lot of outrage in 2006, when students felt they were unfairly denied the right to vote when their registrations somehow did not get processed [...]

1000 students, along with an additional 1000 friends and supporters, are this morning walking the 7.3 miles between Prairie View and Hempstead in order to vote today. According to the piece I saw on the news (there's no video up, so I can't link to it), the students plan to all vote today. There are only 2 machines available at the courthouse for early voting, so they hope to tie them up all day and into the night.

Here's video:



Incredible. And you're going to see organizing efforts like this all the way through to November.

As Sara Robinson explains (and I can't recommend that link enough), we are poised for a historical moment. Michelle Obama expressed her pride about what's happening right now because it's something different and new. People are engaged in their politics again, and they're using all kinds of new organizing strategies to turn that engagement into positive action. I hope it doesn't end up hitting a brick wall. But there's a feeling of unstoppable force going on right now. When you step away from the candidate wars it's really impressive what's happening out there.