My wife is running for State Rep. Early on, she was given a pamphlet on how a bill becomes law. It started with a representative already knowing his or her position on a specific issue. It has been said that anyone who likes either laws, or sausage should watch them being made. While it might [...]

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten into some very interesting discussions about the Democratic Platform, what it is, how it gets created, and what should happen this year. The DNC has created a great page about this at http://www.democrats.org/platform/index.html. From there, I copied and pasted the 2000 platform into this website. It is a [...]

Carl Bernstein calls on Republicans to stop Bush. He compares Bush’s situation today to that of Nixon thirty years ago. The Bush administration has been aware of the systematic torture of detainees in Iraq: Since January, Bush and Rumsfeld have been aware of credible complaints of systematic torture. In March, Taguba’s report reached Rumsfeld. Yet [...]

Initial comments about the Personal Democracy Forum

I wanted Dean, but Dean’s staff isolated him from all of us calling for strategy, policy, balanced budget mathematics, and big tent electoral reform. So, I, and the other 15-20% of the moderate Republicans fed up with the impeachable offenses of the Bush-Cheney regime, had to settle for Edwards, good conservative Southern Democrat that he is. But his staff had the same problems, and he was not able to expand the message or the tent fast enough. Now we have Senator John Kerry. Boffo haircut, French accent, Jewish sidelines, questionable Viet-Nam record, and the same crummy staff and narrow perspective with a rotten disjointed incoherent largely off-center irritatingly down in the weeds collection of mis-fit sound bites. You get the idea.

My wife (http://kimhynes.smartcampaigns.com) was one of the first people that Governor Dean endorsed, part of the Dean Dozen. This has gotten her some great press and increased donations. There has been a discussion over on DailyKos (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/5/14/71847/9442) about why Gov. Dean chose the people he did. I can’t speak for the Governor, but it seems [...]

Over the past few weeks I’ve been busy working to encourage greater democracy by working on my wife’s campaign for State Rep in Connecticut, and I haven’t sat down and written many thoughts about how we do this work. It is a quiet and rainy day, so I thought this might be a good day [...]

Stories are shaped by the technologies used to tell them. New technologies enable new stories. John Kerry needs to take advantage of the best of the new technologies to tell an exciting new story. Bush is clearly left telling the ancient apocalypse end of time story. Most of us want to believe in a future [...]

According to CNN, the Pentagon denied a report that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was resulted from “a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq,” as Seymour Hersh says [...]

Today, when so much focus in the news is on pain and fear and scarcity, let’s talk about abundance. Why? What does abundance have to do with politics? Because if we are to have a greater democracy, we need an attitude of abundance. We need to incorporate into our political system the idea that there [...]