Category: Uncategorized

Did you know that Brandeis introduced a new recycling program this year?  It’s a part of Brandeis’ efforts to become a more environmentally sustainable campus.  If you didn’t know, it’s called “Single Stream Recycling” and it’s designed to both increase recycling rates and decrease costs for the university.  In this new process, all sorting is done at the recycling facility.  For you this means that you no longer have to sort paper, metal, plastic, and glass.  You can now place all recyclable materials together.

As a reminder, these are the materials you can place in any of the blue bins on campus:

All Papers

Cardboard

Plastics Numbered 1-7

Glass

Metal

Please do NOT place the following materials in the recycling bins:

Styrofoam

Unnumbered Plastic

To Go Containers

Food & Liquids

Please spread the word about the new Single Stream Recycling system and remember to recycle whenever possible!

Despite the best efforts of SODA and DFA, the campus public safety officers are now carrying handguns. Our good friend, and fellow blogger Phil, says “With Brandeis Police having guns, it makes guns a part of our campus life,” Lacombe said. “I like to think of Brandeis as a safe zone where we can keep certain things away from our community, but now guns are a part of it.”

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This was exactly why I involved myself with SODA. Guns are a tool of violence that have been introduced into the Brandeis community; and the decision was made without sufficient community input. Ultimately SODA lost, but that does not mean that the work is over. After it became clear that we were fighting a losing battle; I proposed that we hold a few trainings on knowing your rights. How many of us actually know what we are allowed to do when stopped by a cop? Now that the campus police are armed, it is absolutely critical that every student knows what their rights are when they are approached by an authority figure holding a weapon.

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While I know many of us will be busy campaigning for Obama this fall, I think that it is important that we still have a strong focus on the social justice issues closest to home. That’s why I intend to make ‘rights trainings’ one of my goals as a member of the Student Union Senate. We cannot let the administration and campus safety abuse their powers; and it is the responsibility of the Student Union to keep them in check.

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If anyone else is interested in this project let me know.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Brandeis. I hope you had an awesome summer. I know I did. But not so awesome that we forgot to write for Innermost Parts! I encourage you to browse our summer archives.
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We have a lot of iniatives, announcements, etc to announce soon and I hope you’re pumped for a new semester.
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But for now, I have one question: How was your summer? And don’t just say “good” or whatever. Tell everyone in style.
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Did you do something to do with Social Justice this summer? Why don’t you tell us about it? Did you clothe the poor? Travel across the world to learn at the feet of tibetan monks? Maybe you had a special epiphany during the summer you’d like to share? Well, for the next few weeks, I’m pleased to announce that we here at Innermost Parts will be eagerly awaiting to read accounts of your (physical, emotional, personal, etc) journeys. Leave a comment to this post with your story or email us and we’ll post the best/most moving stories to the front page. I can’t wait to hear what kickass stuff you guys were up to.

– Wind energy is great, but our third-world quality electric grid can’t make good use of it.
– “is dying
– Gershom Gorenberg is awesome:

Travel is so broadening. It shows you other nations’ narrow-mindedness, so that when you get home you can see your own more clearly.”

– The internet is horribly insecure
– Sage. I need to pick classes still. eww.

Watching the Democratic National Convention with some DFA folks.

This is a night of kickass speeches.

Highlights:
-John Kerry wasn’t wearing a flag pin. Terrist!
-John Kerry calling McCain a flip-flopper.
-Big Dog Clnton talking about how all of America are all from the town called hope.
-Clinton tieing obama into his legacy. (There was a narrative back in the day that Bill was feeling an affinity between obama’s stroy and his own. They said he would be enthusiastically in the tank for obama ifhillary weren’t running. looks like we’re turning ful circle.)
-John Kerry referring to McCain’s “years on this earth”
-Katie Couric referring to ‘Vice president Biden” , and later ‘and here is joe biden” while nancy pelosi walked onstage.
.Biden: “I saw how Barack Obama touched people.” whoops.
And now the #1 best moment so far –
Brandeis Professor Peniel Joseph speaking on PBS. Lev and I were flipping out for a while after that.
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Update:
Thought -Joe biden refers to the tyranny of foreign oil.. Doesnt he mean the grip of all oil.
New thoughts: biden is like the first persn tonight to really focus on national security, despite it being foreign policy night tonight.
double update: holy shit obama just frenched jill biden. (well not really but that was a full on frontal kiss there. whoops.)

…to catch Ben Brandzel.
Today!!
LIve!
Spingold!
7:45!

Key take-away point: “Online Organizing should allow you to create more personal connections, not less”

I asked him about internet organizing on a campus or very local setting. His response? Something along the lines of ‘yes, email etc is very efficient and use it, but if you’re within walking distance of your community, then go meet them in person.”

Interesting.

Other interesting thought: As the internet allows organizations to become less top-down and hierarchical, the rank-and-file is empowered, yes, but it’s also very helpful for the people at the top. Middlemen are more accountable, if someone in the hierarchy is messing up, the head honchos of the organization can now find out.

Last Semester, I had a problem. I wanted to go to SEA or ARC or BLC meeting, but I kept forgetting when the meetings were.I also missed several events because I kept confusing Thursday and Tuesday, or if they were improperly advertised. Silly? Maybe, but I was operating on little sleep and so on,

Well, no more. I’m happy to introduce the Brandeis Activist Calendar, a service provided by InnermostParts.org. If you’re the leader or communications director or so on of a progressive activist club, email me at sahar ((at) innermostparts.org) and I’ll give you access to the calendar so you can add your events and meetings. update: in case it wasn’t clear – the calendar is shown as the “Upcoming Events” widget on the sidebar of Innermost Parts

This will be a great advertising opportunity for clubs and also a valuable resource for all students so I hope everyone takes advantage of this opportunity.

P.S. The coolest thing about google calendar is how easy it is to share. So you can export it to iCal format (for use on other calendar apps) with this link. You can also get the calendar as an rss feed.
Lastly, it’s really easy to share google calendars with other google account users, so send me an email and we’ll “share” the Brandeis Acitivist calendar with you.

I’m at Hyde Park, the ancestral home of the Roosevelt Family. Don’t have much time to write, but I’d like to pass on some messaging tips:

“No one ever lost a race because their message was too strong.”

Your message is your core argument and strategic communication.

Your message is not a slogan. “Change you can believe in” is not a message.

A message isn’t a list of issues. “I will fix healthcare and the environment and also give tax cuts” isn’t a message.

The first test of messaging:

It must be Credible, Concise, Relevant, and Compelling. Note: Credible implies that you shouldn’t really cite facts and figures. If you say “foreign workers are paid 12 cents an hour and that’s bad,” someone could be like “oh really? Where did you get that statistic. Gosh’ and derail your argument whereas if you say “The workers making our clothing are being exploited unfairly”, that’s pretty credible (most everyone knows it’s true and it also gets your point across.

The second test of messaging:

It must take the form of Problem -> Solution -> Action.

Messaging takes time. If you come up with your message in 5 minutes you probably haven’t thought it through much.

“Obama will us his running mate! Text Vp to 62262”

Welcome the brave new world of youth politics. With texting costs ridiculously high in the US, however, one might wonder why would Obama spend the money to send millions of text messages for seems to be a sort of campaigning gimmick. Let’s explore.

You might know that the Student Union is sponsoring a large voter registration drive this upcoming semester. You might also know that Loki and I have both signed up to direct this whole effort. We’ll have different clubs competing to see who can register the most people, possibly a large scoreboard showing which clubs are ahead, maybe flash the names of the latest student to register, etc.

If you go out registering voters, on campus, off campus, in Ohio, wherever, please don’t forget to get their cell phone numbers and email addresses, if possible. Now, intuitively this makes sense, right? If you get someone’s contact info then you can email/text them on election day to remind them to actually go out and vote. Well, Garrett M. Graff, a former Webmaster for Howard Dean, just wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times explaining the world of text-the-vote:

But announcing Mr. Obama’s running mate by text message has little to do with proclaiming the selection and everything to do with getting out the vote on Election Day in November. The move should add thousands — and more likely tens or hundreds of thousands — of cellphone numbers to what is already one of the most detailed political databases ever created.

A study conducted during the 2006 elections showed that text-message reminders helped increase turnout among new voters by four percentage points, at a cost of only $1.56 per vote — much cheaper than the $20 or $30 per vote that the offline work of door-to-door canvassing or phone banking costs.

Let’s take a look at this study, shall we? Believe it or not, texting is really cheap. Here’s the relevant passage:

Canvassing is more effective than text messaging on a person-by-person basis, but the contact rate during canvassing is much lower than that for text messaging. When considering the treatment-on-treated effect, text messaging is twice as effective as three physical mailings (Gerber and Green 2000), and about as effective as a professional, quality phone call made in the week before Election Day.

So texting is cheap and effective, but not as effective or cheap as face-to-face contact. Then again, texting can reach a lot of people faster than canvassing can.

In general, one thing to realize is that cell phone numbers are very valuable to campaigns. Cell phones can’t be robocalled or polled. The Yellow Pages and Election Boards don’t have them. In order to get on a cell phone texting list, you have to opt in by texting to a specific number yourself.
Continue reading “idk, my bff jill?”

This is part two of a series that aims to take a look at the fall 2002 state of the union address by then-president Ben Brandzel. Hopefully, by going through each section and comparing it to the situation today, we can have a more nuanced look at the present situation at Brandeis, as well as learn from the past hopefully.

What I’m trying to do is go through this speech and summarize each section, after which comes some analysis. We’re doing sections 6-10 now, and then going back to section 4 and concluding thoughts in the upcoming part three post.

To read part one, click here.
To read a copy of the speech, click here.

To read the annotation and analysis, click “read the rest…”

Continue reading “Looking back six years ago (part two)”

In the first day of my 8th grade social studies class, our teacher, Mr. Durkee, put up a poster of Michael Jordan in the act of making a slam dunk. We couldn’t tell whether Mr. Jordan was going up or falling down, Mr. Durkee told us, just by looking at the picture. We had to understand history in order to predict the future or whatever.

Now, first of all, that piece of advice did not need to take up three days of class time. Secondly, if you looked at his shoelaces, you could tell that Michael was clearly on the descent of his jump.

That said, there’s value in that perspective. To that end, let’s take a magical history tour and review the Fall 2002 State of the Union address, given by noted Brandeis Alumn and all-around kickass person, Ben Brandzel.

The Fall 2002 State of the Union address is hosted on the Student Union Website. I’m going to be referring to it quite a lot, so make sure you keep it open in another tab or something.

Why are we focusing on this address in particular? Simple. This speech has been floating around the Brandeis Progressive Community for ages now. It should have a bigger audience. Also, if you’ll follow me below the fold, I think you’ll agree with me that ther eare many parallels between the time of that speech and right now. Let’s see what has changed (or hasn’t) in the course of six years…

Hey, I just realized something. Fall 2002 was when I started 8th grade. So this speech was given at around the same time as I was in Durkee’s class. Weird.

This is Part ONE of the analysis of the speech.

Continue reading “Looking back six years ago (part 1)”

It’s been quite a long time since I made good on my promise to confront the Senior Senator from Michigan with homemade signs and a heartfelt plea. It was perhaps the first time I’ve met with someone of such power, and certainly the first time I did so alone.

Mr. Levin met with a bunch of people – probably adminstrators and suchlike – in a room on the third floor of the Shapiro Campus Center. A room, mind you, with a fully glass wall facing into the hallway. I had the bright idea of writing “Sen. Levin please protect the constitution” and “stop the FISA sellout” and so on on huge pieces of paper (procured from the student union office) and plastering them right against that glass wall, so that he could read them.

Let be clear on how bootleg the whole arrangement was. Once I got his attention, I pulled out a marker and wrote another message on the backs of one of those earlier messages and posted *that* on the glass wall. No real planning, no real coordination.

Well, it turns out that due to lighting and so on he couldn’t actually *read* anything I was saying but I guess I captured his attention long enough to be invited inside to state my case.

So here I am, with little sleep and preparedness and so on, trying to argue with a US Senator to get him to vote a certain way on a pretty important bill. I don’t remember the whole conversation (it was pretty brief and I was probably incoherent with terror) but I do remember one exchange that went something like this:

Carl Levin: You really feel deeply about this issue?

Me: Yes I do, and several of my friends feel the same way. We hope that you’ll not only vote against this bill but also join Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold’s filibuster against it. We’re tired of spineless Democrats in Congress.
Carl Levin: Spineless? Do you really think we’re spineless? Like on what?
Me: (Flabberghasted and at a loss for what do say) Well there’s the War. SCHIP. Everything really.
Carl Levin: Hm.. Well in any case I doubt it’ll come to a filibuster
Me: Um… yes it will.
Carl Levin: Well thank you very much young lad out you go.

And that was that. Turns out that Carl Levin not only voted the right way on the FISA bill of February but also on the bill of July (which eventually did get passed into law). So that’s hopeful.

So what can we learn from this encounter?

Continue reading “Carl Levin – A Retrospective”

There has been some progress from Beacon Hill (the State Capitol) on the Election Reform front since Adam last reported on it. Good! The lowdown is this: the State Leg adjourned before they could take either proposal all the way to being signed by the Governor, which is bad. The good thing is that each piece of legislation moved forward.

The National Popular Vote bill was ratified by the State Senate, and, having been previously approved by the house, must be sent to the Governors desk (by a separate vote, since MA is strange like that) when both chambers get back into session. The National Popular Vote bill, you’d recall, would give all of MA’s electoral college vote to the winner of the national popular vote, but only if enough states also passed the bill so that  >270 electoral college votes would be covered by this pact.

The Election Day Registration legislation was also approved by the Senate. Now it must move to the State House. Some members of the House are opposing it on fiscal grounds. They think that letting more people vote would cost too much. These people don’t have their priorities straight.

All in all, good news everyone.

I would like to open this post with a quote from Governor Bill Richardson:

“I’m not a scientist.”

Well, I’m not a physical scientist, anyway. I am a social scientist, and as a social scientist, I believe that all of human history is a record of the tension between desire for individualism and simultaneous desire for society, for the collective. That tension has been at the heart of American politics since the Puritans, and remains one of the main sources of conflict between Liberals/Progressives and Conservatives today. This tension even exists within the progressive vision. Our most fundamental Progressive ideals are centered around an effort to create and maintain a delicate balance between the collective– without which individualism cannot thrive– and the individual– without which the collective has no meaning.

A new scientific study on the evolution of cancer shows that those two desires are at war on a microscopic yet fateful scale within the body of a cancer patient.

Continue reading “Evolution, Cancer, and Society”

Checking my email today, after deleting a letter from Hillary asking me to help pay off her campaign debt, one from the ACLU of Texas asking me to yell at Governor Perry, and one from Sahar nagging me to write a blog post, I opened a message from Young People For altering me that I had been nominated for a fellowship. Young People For (or YP4) is a leadership program designed to motivate and empower the newest generation of progressive leaders to make change in their communities and further a progressive vision for America. To quote Bill Richardson, “I love change!” and to quote Mitt Romney, “Gosh I love America!” so I decided to click on the link and find out what exactly a YP4 fellowship would entail.

The program kicks off with a week-long summit in DC where I would get to connect with fellow progressive activists from across the country and talk strategy with some big-shot progressive leaders. Sounds good. So I clicked on the video of last years’ summit.  At first I thought I was watching one of those John McCain ads in which he tries to make fun of Barack Obama’s “hope and change” mantra. The video featured clips of speakers proclaiming to hundreds of students that this is their moment, they have the power, they are the ones they have been waiting for. It was completely over-the-top. One starry-eyed student took a microphone and gushed that what he had gotten out of the conference was “hope” and that he was going to “take that hope back home” and spread it. One girl screamed “democracy! justice! change! WEEEEW!” Another repeated the over-quoted-on-high school-graduation-day phrase “What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared with what lies within us” as if she had just come up with it herself. And on and on. Suddenly I realized a visceral feeling of disgust was taking over me. What the hell is wrong with you? I scolded myself. This is inspiring! This is people getting excited about improving their world, about helping others, about politics! You’re supposed to love stuff like that! But I couldn’t help it– I was completely turned off.

In 2004 I watched the Democratic National Convention at home in Fort Worth, Texas and was overjoyed when Howard Dean declared that “never again” would liberals be ashamed of their values. I literally cried when John Edwards said “hope is on the way.” I watched Barack Obama’s key-note address over and over and over. And when John Kerry proclaimed that “for America the hope is there, the sun is rising, our best days are still to come,”… well I think the fact that I can still quote that from memory speaks for itself. Had YP4 contacted me back then I would have jumped at the opportunity. What was different now? At first I thought I was agreeing with Goethe: “I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.” But that wasn’t really it. After all, the YP4 summit did seem to “invigorate activity” in its participants; they took what they learned in DC and brought it back to their campuses and communities, didn’t they? Then I remembered the student who said that what he would take from the conference and bring back was “hope.” “Hope”? Seriously?? And I put my finger on the element that I hated so much not just in the YP4 conference but in the modern progressive movement in general.

To quote Karl Marx (because its convenient but also perhaps to establish my credentials as a real left-wing believer in change despite my attacks on the progressive movement in this post), I believe the students at the YP4 conference and other events and organizations like it are just “theoretical bubble-blowers.” Speakers at the events preach to the choir, the participants try and out-do each other in self-congratulation about how great the movement is, they come up with intellectual progressive proposals for intellectual progressives to read, and any talk of strategy and action is theoretical and relies on the assumption that students will have an army of activists on their campuses just waiting to be organized as soon as the YP4 student returns from the Mountain with the Knowledge. And what are these progressives being trained to train other progressives for, anyway? To hold meetings of progressives where they can discuss the movement? To write policy proposals read by other progressives? To spread “hope”?

With this realization I became depressed. A certain question bothered me: For all my claims that I would have just loved to be alive during the excitement and activism of the 1960s would I really just have been as disgusted with the self-congratulation and futility of, say, Abbie Hoffman (with all due respect!) “levitating the Penon” as I am with the self-congratulation and “theoretical bubble-blowing” of today’s progressive youth movement?

Yes and no. I would have been thrilled with CORE and SNCC and sit-ins and boycotts and Freedom Riders and registering black voters and “the torch is passed” and “I have a dream.” These were actions that actually shook the world. And I would have cheered when Mario Savio jumped on the car and cried that “there comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part . . . You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels . . . And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!” That movement (the 1964 Free Speech Movement) over-turned a university decision to outlaw political activism on campus and set the percent for student movements across the country. And I would have been thrilled in 1971 when the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched on Washington, flooded the halls of congress,testified before the Senate, and showed the nation that it was time to “bring their brothers home.” Now, Abbie Hoffman declaring that he would, through mind-power, levitate the Penon 300 ft. and that the “evil spirits” would rise out from under it– this I would have been disgusted with. Ridding the Penon of evil spirits couldn’t change American foreign policy anymore than “hope” or a bunch of progressives repeating inspirational quotations to each other can get us universal health care.

So, is our modern YP4 hope-and-change fest Abbie’s levitation of the penon? This obviously stretched but not completely unfair analogy got me thinking: the people levitating the Penon wanted to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” But today’s students don’t seem to want that. What do they want? They want jobs. They want connections and resumes. Look at the YP4 summit– its completely centered around the promise of networking. The students connect with other student activists and potential employers. And I’m sure it doesn’t escape the thoughts of the YP4 fellows that their participation in such a program will look nice on their resumes.

In this way, the YP4 program and others like it are actually very smart; they play to what students today want. We are wasting our time if we focus all our efforts trying to get students to show up to an event modeled after the New Left of the 1960s. But the problem is not entirely that the same enthusiasm isn’t there– its just directed in a different way. Like the YP4 summit, if we can just harness what students want (networking, resume building, internships, jobs. . . in addition to having fun and making a difference) we can have a better shot at almost recreating the energy of the 1960s, even if the events have to be a little less creative and “far out.”

To those who say that this job-centered idea is just perpetuating “the system,” think about this: the New Left failed when its participants wanted back in the system anyway. You cant put “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out” on a resume and you cant get a job in Levitation of Important Government Buildings. So the students of the New Left dismissed their beliefs and actions as a “youthful fling” and became doctors and accountants just like their parents. However, today’s progressive movement is sustainable because it opens career paths. You can put your participation in progressive conferences and student think-tanks on your resume, and get a job in community organizing or with an organization like YP4 or People for the American Way. This makes our movement more boring than the movements of the 1960s, but at least it holds the potential to be more sustainable.

So let some other kid take my place as a YP4 fellow. I’ve outgrown my need for gimmicky inspirational and self-congratulatory “bubble-blowing.” But it certainly has a place somewhere. There might be a 16 year old girl stuck in Fort Worth, Texas (or some other red state) desperately needing to meet other people who share her excitement for progressive ideas. For my part, I will try and convert the bubble-blowing that I scoff at so much in to deeds that have an impact on the right people. But from now on I’ll go forward with this new idea about what students today want and “hope” that this will be more successful!

Apply for a Young People For fellowship:
Here

1967 Penon levitation button!:

Mario Savio on “the machine”:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FPG1WfcJRo&feature=related[/youtube]

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.

[Please extend a warm welcome to my good friend Liza. -Sahar]

Children continue to be tortured in Massachusetts. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of Brandeis Students Against the Judge Rotenberg Center visiting your dorm room, the JRC is a school in Canton for people with mental disabilities. Students here are hooked to electronic devices at all times and given painful two-second skin shocks as a way of behaviorist conditioning, for infractions as small as speaking out of turn or falling asleep in class. Aversive treatment is not only inhumane, it is ineffective: students revert to former behavior once negative stimuli are removed. A statewide campaign of psychologists and disability rights activists has worked to stop this cruelty for decades.

Here’s a brief update on the efforts in the State House and at Brandeis to shut it down.

Senator Brian Joyce, a disability rights advocate who co-authored anti-JRC legislation currently in study (a.k.a. not going anywhere), put an amendment in the state budget that would regulate, but not ban, aversive shock treatment. Amendment EHS 874 is essentially the same as the “compromise” bill, S 1123, with one key difference: it permits the use of shocks for minor behaviors, only if all other forms of treatment are proven to not work. Therefore this legislation is far from perfect, but would still add a crucial level of psychologist oversight. You can read it here: http://www.mass.gov/legis/09budget/senate/amendments/ehs2.htm

The conference committee is running behind schedule, and will decide by the end of July whether or not this amendment will go to the House floor. It already passed in the Senate, a significant half-way victory. Please take a second to call Representative DeLeo, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, asking him to take action against cruelty to the disabled. Here is an optional script:

Representative Robert DeLeo: 617-722-2990

“Hello, my name is_________ and I’m from Brandeis University. I am calling to urge Representative DeLeo to support Budget Amendment EHS 874, restricting the use of cruel aversive treatment. The electric shocks used at the Judge Rotenberg Center are inhumane and unsafe, as demonstrated by the recent prank incident in which a student was wrongly shocked 77 times in three hours. This amendment offers a reasonable compromise, allowing aversive treatment in extreme cases but preventing future disasters. Please support disability rights in Massachusetts. Thank you.”

Here is another reason why Rep. DeLeo is important to this issue. While lobbying at the State House, David Emer and I had the pleasure of meeting with Representative Barbara L’Italien, a leading anti-JRC figure in the State House. She insisted that little progress can be made on this issue as long as Salvatore DiMasi remains the Speaker of the House. He is a close ally of Representative Jeffrey Sanchez, whose nephew is actually a JRC student (fyi: This was a hit at the January hearing in which Sanchez’s brother screamed, “I do not have a son: I have a retarded boy,” among other abhorrent statements). However, Representative DeLeo is a top contender to be the next Speaker. Therefore, even if legislation does not pass this time, our calls to DeLeo are still crucial to the future of disability rights.

For more information about JRC, read this Mother Jones article: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html

or this Boston Globe article describing a single telling incident: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/12/18/prank_led_school_to_treat_two_with_shock/

As a society, we’re very afraid, aren’t we? If you listen to our “leaders” (since when did elected representatives turn into leaders, I wonder), we should be cowering in our beds.

Fear of Gays, fear of Blacks, fear of Browns, fear of Athiests, fear of Arabs, fear of terrorists, fear of immigrants, fear of inner cities, fear of drugs, fear of the future, fear of “the other”.

Fear of the poor has replaced compassion for the poor.

Progressives believe in freedoms. Like, for example, freedom from fear:

The “civil libertarian” and “liberal” views on rights, the NSA, PATRIOT act, etc, are identical.

Same with economic libertarians and “conservatives”. (They call themselves conservatives, but they’re actually reactionaries – they want to drag the US back to the Coolidge / Harding days, rather than real conservatives, who instead simply want to consolidate and improve what we’ve got)

Economically, what distinguishes libertarians from right-wing fat cats? And why are libertarians so obsessed with “freedom from government” rather than freedom from corporate power?

When I talk to libertarians, they often trot out anecdotes about zoning laws, licensing laws for florists, etc for examples of government abusing its power to help firms seek rent. This is petty-bourgeois territory. Liberals are against that too. Where libertarians and liberals break is not over obvious/basic examples of corruption, but rather on the big stuff. Social Security. Single Payer Health Care.

I’d argue that Social Security is a proven success story and Universal Health Care is not only a moral issue but pretty strikingly better policy than what we have now.

Of course that’s a rather broad generalization of a diverse economic philosophy. I was just thinking to myself, though. Libertarians who embrace sane economic policy are pretty much liberals.

That’s not to say we can’t work together, though. I have a lot of respect for people so passionate about defending against the Imperial State. Two fists in the face of Empire! Right on.