Month: July 2008

I was recently invited to the Facebook group ‘Millennium Student Initiative @ MyMSI.org‘, the first step of what looks to be a very promising attempt to unite area campuses and harness student activism on a wide scale.  Their mission?

Millennium Student Initiative (MSI) is a national student-led campaign that aims to increase global consciousness and citizenship among students by raising $1.5 million for a Millennium Village. Millennium Villages are the flagship initiative for Millennium Promise, an organization that aims to combine scientific and local knowledge to simultaneously combat a range of issues, including hunger, disease, inadequate education, the lack of safe drinking water and the absence of essential infrastructure — to assist communities on their way to sustainable self-development.

This seems like a very worthwhile endeavor for several reasons.  First, it was created and led entirely by Brandeisians, several of them good friends of mine.  I applaud my schoolmates for taking the initiative to lead such a far-reaching project, and they certainly deserve the support of the entire Brandeis community.  Also, their goal is long term economic development, creating the kind of change necessary not just to help poor people but to lift them out of poverty and to open new markets in the global economy.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it represents a concerted effort to connect activists across campuses, a promising development that will set the groundwork for projects of even greater scale in the future if done correctly.  The idea of uniting students from different universities is one that has become very interesting to me.  It offers a level of participation and media attention for our causes that is impossible to achieve if we confine ourselves to the Brandeis campus.  Sahar and I have discussed several projects with the intent of furthering cross-campus political interaction, so there will hopefully be more to come when the school year starts.  Until then, it’d be great to hear any ideas people have in this direction.

A great first step would be to create a successful Millennium Student Initiative, so if you’re not one of the 500+ people who have joined on Facebook, I strongly encourage you to do so here.  For more information on the specific strategies MSI intends to employ, contact Kaamila Mohamed (kaamila@mymsi.org) or Daniel Acheampong (daniel@mymsi.org).  The group already has a fledgling website up, and I think we can expect to hear much more from them in the upcoming year.  Kudos for the strong start guys, and I look forward to helping.

Hey all. So I realize I haven’t posted much lately. That’s because my body decided to punish me for all the sleep I was missing over the last week or so. Too bad.

Point is, I’m slowly rejoining humanity / blogging. Deal with it.

There seems to be a big divide here between people here for themselves and those here for organizations.

There also seems to be a (related?) divide between the idealistic grassroots and cynical operatives. And many “big name bloggers” seem to be operatives. I was talking to one the other day, and we had a very interesting exchange:

Him: You know, our first success as the netroots was not electing Howard Dean as chair of the DNC, but it was in fact Ben Chandler (a blue dog). People seem to think the netroots is ideological, but we’re not.

Me: Then what is the netroots if not ideological?

HIm: Partisan..

Continue reading “Thoughts on NN so far”

I’ve packed my bags, said my goodbyes, and took off. That’s right, I’m sitting in an atlanta airport right now,on my way to Austin, Texas, and the Netroots Nation convention. Woot.

So if you see anything on the agenda you’d like me to check out, or have a qestion you want to ask me, or whatever, feel free to drop me a line / leave a comment.

Check this website for the next few days as I relatemy adventuresto oyu, the Brandeis community, using the magical powers of the world-wide-series-of-tubes

Some bad news and some good news from the good folks at Blue Mass Group.

Bad news: Apparently the Massachusetts ballot initiative banning greyhound/dog racing was challenged in court by the owner of one the racetracks here in MA.

Good news: The Mass. State Supreme Court threw out his legal objections to the initiative, so it can go forward on the ballot.

David at BMG summarizes:

All in all, a big win for the proponents of banning dog racing. The question will appear on the ballot. If it passes, the most that could happen is that Carney & Co. win a regulatory takings case, pursuant to which they would recover from the state the diminution in the value of their property caused by the law. And, especially in light of the SJC’s language emphasizing that dog racing “is a heavily regulated industry that only exists by virtue of legislatively created narrow exceptions to common-law and statutory bans,” there is no guarantee that they would win that case.

Huh? To further simplify: the racetrack owner sued, in part, claiming that getting rid of racing licenses was like getting rid of his private property, so he’s entitled to compensation. The Court slapped him down. And then they let the initiative to go ballot.

To conclude: Yay!

Got some crucial info in the mail. The Mass. State Senate is about to vote on bills regarding Election Day Registration and the National Popular Vote. This is pretty exciting.

Election Day Registration is pretty much what it sounds like. You get to register to vote on Election Day. This is a good idea for several reasons.It’s great for students. I could have voted in the 2007 elections if only we had Election Day Registration (EDR from now on), for one thing. Overall, EDR helps counteract people’s confusion over where they’re registered, where to vote from, etc.

In any case, it’s silly to have an arbitrary cut-off date for when people can register to vote for the next election.

The National Popular Vote initiative says that MA will award it’s electors to the winner of the general election popular vote – but only if 270 electoral votes worth of states agree to do so as well. So it’s a way to have the winner of the popular vote win the election, but without a constitutional amendment. You can read more about the merits of the NPV by reading Hendrik Hertzberg on the matter. In fact, people in general would be served by reading Hendrik Hertzberg.

So call your/our Senator, you know the drill.
For Brandeis’ State Senator:

STATE SENATOR SUSAN C. FARGO

State House
Room 504
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: (617) 722-1572
Party Affiliation – DEMOCRAT
State House E-Mail Address: Susan.Fargo@state.ma.us

Call! Call now! (Well, at the time of writing it’s 11:20 PM. In which case I mean “Call during a reasonable time!”)
Continue reading “Election Reform in Massachusetts? We can do more than hope.”

I know this is a bit different than what I normally write about, but this is my blog, and I get to do what I want! I wrote this on Sunday, by the way.

I just finished talking to my good friend Sahar Oz. Sahar is the former teen coordinator of the Jewish Federation of Rochester (since then he’s gone on to bigger and better things. We miss him!). He’s also of that elite class of people known as “people Sahar Massachi looks up to”.

Calling him a role model is but a banal and crude trivialization of the place he holds in my constellation of personal mentors and heroes.

His dad also died the other day.

Lights off in my apartment, cell phone clutched to my ear, I restlessly paced my apartment today, hearing his anguished voice spill out stories of his father. His father who, despite being the very picture of health, the sort of person who takes 20 mile bike rides, hikes, and so forth, passing away due to a minor heart attack.

Shocking. Painful. And there was nothing I could do but listen.

Naturally, I have to start thinking of my own father. I am jealous of Sahar’s relationship with his dad. It seemed to be such a close, loving one. Don’t get me wrong, I love my dad and he loves me. But it’s for us t0 be emotionally intimate. I don’t know why. We both want to be closer.

I think a lot of it is the language barrier. More and more, either his English is getting worse or I can tolerate it less. Maybe both.

He’s also getting a bit deafer, so he can’t hear me well and often I don’t speak loudly enough for him.

I think neither I nor he nor anyone else realizes how much this little thing affects me to the core.

People build mythologies of their parents as superheroes, and are inevitably disappointed when they turn out to be merely human. Yet, my parents are super. I can’t believe how well a job they’ve done. When they talk about unconditional love, *they mean it*.

So my conception of my parents as heroes may have faded, but it’s still there. They really are quite amazing. Which is why physical weakness on my dad’s part is so scary.

Fuck, I barely know my dad at all, ok? He never talks about his past. He’s home less than my mother is – as he has to, you know, work – so by the time he got home, I’d always be doing my homework.

Hell, how much do I know about my mother?

I’ve always thought this: I really wish I knew how to spend more time with my parents in a non-awkward, fun way.

Maybe I should start thinking this: Let me start cooking up those fun ways, rather than wait for them to fall out of the sky.

You know, I really got to know Sahar Oz (Soz, as I call him) through a trip to Poland. Turns out that during that trip, he made sure to call his father and discuss all that he’d seen. Every night. Despite a nightly allotment of 6 hours of sleep a day.

Maybe that’s what family ties are all about? Reaching towards your kin in times of need, rather than internalizing your problems, or going to friends you met 6 months ago when you first got to campus.

I never once cried in Poland. Surrounded by desolation, echoes of hate and death, a legacy of ashes. Never cried once. When I talked to Soz about it, he said not to worry. “One day in the future, maybe a week, maybe a month,” he said, “it’ll all come rushing back to you. On that day, you’ll finally let it all out.”

That day still hasn’t come. I think I’ve cried just once since then. Just once, and then once again today. Once again today, for as I heard Soz’s voice break up over and over again, in his determined recital of anecdotes, mementos, symbols, trivia and metaphors that constitute the memories of his father, he doesn’t know it, but I was crying with him.

You’ll notice from our site revamp that our new mission statement includes this nugget –

It is our intention to both explore the meaning of social justice and hold both students and faculty to their commitment to that set of values.

With that in mind – what does Social Justice mean to you?

Hey all. We’re doing some behind-the-scenes tweaks to the site, and in that process we’ve also revamped the About us page.

We’ve also changed our mission statement and so forth.

Check it out.

photo by Kamarin Lee

So apparently this happened a while ago, but we missed out on reporting it. Students Crossing Boundaries, the group that took on Jimmy Carter’s challenge and traveled (pretty much exclusively) to the Palestinian Territories, released their report.

You can read it here.

This is an emotionally charged issue. For me especially.

Despite that, I encourage everyone to read the report. You don’t have to agree with it. However, I think it’s incumbent on all of us to give props to the self-organizing, intrepid group of Brandeis students who set up this journey and who took the time to write their honest, heartfelt, and sometimes painful accounts.

Welcome to another edition of “Brandeis people in the news.”

On the same week that Brandeis Professor Peniel Joseph is on PBS Newshour, talking about historic role of the vice-presidency (and pointing out that Al Gore was the best VP ever) , we have Brandeis rising sophomore Nathan J. Robinson writing in the Huffington Post: “What it’s like to watch FOX News for 24 Straight Hours”.

Just out of his freshman year of college, and already writing for the HuffPost? Kudos. Kudos to both.

My favorite bits?

As I slowly rouse myself, the first words I hear are of a Blonde FOX Lady saying this:

“It’s hard to talk about climate change without talking about compact fluorescent lightbulbs, soon to be forced on you by the government. But could they KILL you?”

It was not shaping up to be a good day.

…

The worst thing about FOX is not its bias, but the “panic mode” that it seems to live in. Everything is a catastrophe. Immigrants will get you. Lightbulbs will get you. Wildfires will get you. Jesse Jackson will cut your nuts off.

Hahaha.

Update –

Congrats to David Pepose on writing an article that made it to the front page of the New York Sun.

On June 9th, überprogressive Congressman Dennis Kucinich submitted 35 separate articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives calling for the removal of George W. Bush from office (follow the link to read them). From Bush’s well-publicized offenses (Article III, Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War) to his less widely reported crimes (Article XXX, Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare; Article XX, Imprisoning Children), there is an airtight case to be made that Bush has been guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and that American lives have been lost because of it.  However, Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said that impeachment is off the table, and Kucinich’s articles are now languishing in the Judiciary Committee.  I called my representative, the excellent Rosa DeLauro, to see if there was any chance impeachment hearings would actually take place.

Her response came in the mail yesterday, and it killed any lingering hopes I had that the House would hold Bush accountable for his crimes.  DeLauro acknowledges the illegality and incompetence of the administration’s dealings with Iraq and interrogation programs.  She then outlines Kucinich’s case and the current status of the articles.  However, when it comes time to take a position on them, she hedges:

Although this Administration’s term is coming to an end, you can be sure that I will continue to moniter the president’s policies and actions.  I will use every opportunity in the coming months to encourage real oversight of the federal government and to hold accountable any member of the Bush administration who has engaged in wrongdoing.

We will soon have a new president and administration and it is my hope that this new administration will work with Congress to enact real reform and find solutions to the issues we are currently facing as a nation.

What this amounts to is that while Rep. DeLauro might take up the impeachment cause if it actually reaches the House floor, she will not make any special effort to shepherd it through the Judiciary through co-sponsoring it or publicly supporting it.  She is content to merely let the clock run out on the Bush term and to hope the next president does a better job.

I am of two minds on this.  I believe it is imperative that Congress not create a precedent of failed oversight that could lead to further violations by future administrations.  However, I am enough of a pragmatist to realize the political risks of pursuing impeachment.  Unfortunately, the Republican attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office was so petty and politically motivated that I fear ‘impeachment’ had become synonymous with ‘power grab’ in the minds of many people, and an attempt to remove him from office would serve only to tarnish the Democratic brand in what is otherwise a potential year of realignment.

Ultimately, while I would love to see impeachment proceedings held, I’ve become resigned to the fact that too may representatives share DeLauro’s point of view for it to happen.  While the tendency among the netroots has occasionally been to demonize anti-impeachment Congresspeople, I believe there are far more important measures of performance.  It would be very hard to find a significant vote where Rosa DeLauro has broken with the progressive community, and I feel very fortunate to have her as my representative.  Yes, I disagree with her on this issue, but she and I are still on the same side against the Bush agenda, and I would be willing to sacrifice even the chance of holding Bush accountable in exchange for more representatives like her.