OK, really now, it’s time for the bumper sticker to come off.

To put things in gentle perspective, I saw a Mondale-Ferraro bumper sticker on the back of a beat-up Chevy a few months ago.

It was a small reminder for me of what a long path it’s been since we were organizing around the effort to prevent George W. Bush from being re-elected: Revising our collection of resources for progressive activism in Hawaii, I had to take down the link to the web site for Hawai’i for Democracy, which started out as the web site for Hawai’i for Dean.

The web site for Hawai’i for Democracy isn’t there any more. It’s been replaced by one of those generic placeholders that sells credit cards and insurance.

Who can say what kind of activist networks we’ll be looking at and linking to five years from now?

In 2005, fundamentalist Christians were outgraged at the inauguration of George W. Bush as President. No, they weren’t upset at George W. Bush himself, who was the president most friendly to religious fundamentalism (as long as it was Christian) in memory. But they were mightily upset at the U.S. Secret Service, which issued a letter shortly before Bush’s second inauguration that prohibited crosses from the inaugural parade route.

The Christian Defense Coalition and Earned Media (to become the Christian News Wire) protested with vehemence when the Secret Service emerged with the following declaration:

…the prohibition on structures includes props, folding chairs, bicycles, displays such as puppets, paper mache objects, coffins, crates, crosses, theaters, cages and statues….

How dare the U.S. Government specifically prohibit crosses from a political event, asked the Christian Defense Coalition’s Patrick Mahoney, who said the Secret Service’s memo “trampled the First Amendment and crushed religious freedom in the public square. Simply put, it is religious bigotry and censorship. It is even more troubling when one realizes that it is only Christian symbols that have been excluded from the inauguration parade.” Mahoney continued: “This amounts to religious and viewpoint discrimination. It is very troubling for federal law enforcement to suggest the somehow a cross presents a greater danger to national security than other religious symbols.”

The same fundamentalist Christian groups should be getting upset again, considering that despite the threat of a lawsuit against the Secret Service last time around, the Secret Service has gone ahead and issued exactly the same language again. As the Secret Service permit letters go out to DC demonstrators, I’m looking for some sort of incensed declaration from Christian activists soon.

I believe the Christian Defense Coalition and the Christian News Wire are right to be upset with such language, because it does single out crosses for prohibition and does so unnecessarily. If the problem is that crosses tend to be big and made of wood, then why not just prohibit big wood things? If the prohibition is against crosses, why is there no prohibition of large menorahs or crescents? The Secret Service is a government agency, and it creates the appearance of using its power to, as Patrick Mahoney points out, single out one religious group for exclusion.

The problem with the position of the Christian Defense Coalition and the Christian News Wire is not its substance, but rather its context. Both groups have a history of trying to get the government to do exactly that which they complain about. The Christian Defense Coalition worked to have schools include religious language at the beginning of every school day, excluding polytheism, animism and atheist viewpoints. Mahoney and the CDC also tried to use the federal courts to force Christian prayers into public school athletics, and they declare American law to be uniquely Christian. The Christian News Wire has repeatedly called for Christian, and only Christian, religious displays to be erected in government space… and has complained noisily when atheists reacting to a government-sponsored Christian nativity display successfully demanded space for an atheist statement as well. Their position? How dare the atheists be given space? Government space is only for Christians! No, the Christian Defense Coalition and Christian News Wire should not be mistaken as crusaders for freedom. They’re only interested in the freedom of Christians to negate the freedom of others.

On the other hand, there are some pretty interesting reactions to the 2005 Secret Service kerfuffle at the American Constitution Society and in the “freethinking” Randi forum. Defense for Christians’ right of self-expression there is mixed at best.

Do we have to be a nation of bigots, supporting freedom for me but not for thee? How about a little freedom for me and thee?

Back in 2004, the right wing Republicans had a blowout victory. Their win, and their arrogance after their win, set the stage for their defeats in 2006 and 2008.

Many Americans are content to let the story end there. Especially those who want to believe that a President Obama will restore their vision of a united United States of America, with some elements of progressive ideas mixed in with a great deal of the Bush legacy, will now be content to sit back and bask.

Others will not be doing so. The 2008 presidential campaign showed that there are many Americans who are upset by the slightest hint of anything progressive. It isn’t just that they don’t like Barack Obama - personal animosity can be overcome. It’s that they regard Social Security as unacceptably socialist. It’s that they regard any withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, even after eight years of war there, as a cut-and-run surrender. It’s that they believe that subjecting Guantanamo prisoners to a genuine system of justice will unleash havoc on Earth.

On the progressive side, there is also a growing feeling of discontent with the mushy vision of Obama centrism. The idea that there’s no such thing as red states and blue states in America just doesn’t match up with the reality we see as we travel across America. To say that the people in Wyoming and Wisconsin, South Carolina and Oregon all share a common vision strikes us as an absurd denial of real political conflict.

The fact is that regional divisions in American politics have not been overcome by the 2008 presidential election, just as they were not by the 2004 presidential election or the 2000 election. The divisions remain, and their long roots are continuing to expand the cracks in our nation.

This year, Sarah Palin was mocked for her association with the Alaska secessionist movement. However, of all Palin’s associations, this one had the most sense to it. In 2004, I wrote about the arguments for secession - really, for the formal division of the USA. This map is what I came up with as a first draft proposal.

I’m glad that Barack Obama won this year’s election, but the truth is that I’m not satisfied with his plans for America. Obama’s passion for unity behind his leadership has caused him to embrace some ideas that are reprehensible to me. The newness of Obama, and the cute charm of his family, will keep such grumblings quiet for a while, but even Camelot fell to the forces of division.

Might it not be better to accept the divisions that exist, and to allow the huge scale of broad American vision to be broken up into separate nations that could more closely represent the will of their citizens? The truth is that I’m not convinced that breaking the USA into separate nations is a very good idea at all, but part of me is attracted to it.

I’ve created this new map this year as a thought experiment about what a divided USA might look like. In creating the blue nations and red nations, I’ve relied upon maps of the 2004 and 2008 election results by county, considering not just the state-wide Electoral College votes, but the local differences within each state as well.

The largest physical nation on this map is the red Homeland States of America, but this area is missing many of the largest cities, and is made up of a lot of very sparsely-populated land. I’ve tried to avoid having nations that are not contiguous in some kind of sense, though, with the new red nations of Chesapeake and Mackinac, a shared waterway is what defines the small nationality. The blue nation of Montana is landlocked, but it has a border with Canada so that it is not completely surrounded by Republican red. Hawaii and Alaska are not shown on this map, but as with the 2004 map, they are imagined as independent nations, Hawaii blue and Alaska red.

Robert Gibbs appears to be Barack Obama’s choice to become the next White House Press Secretary. Gibbs was the top spokesman of the Obama for President 2008 campaign, and worked with the Obama campaign in 2004 as well. In that sense, the choice of Gibbs makes sense.

However, Robert Gibbs has a an aspect that most Democrats may not be familiar with - attacking Howard Dean. Back in 2004, Gibbs worked for the Kerry campaign, and then for the ironically titled 527 group Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values.

In 2004, it was against the law for a 527 organization to coordinate with any presidential campaign. Yet, Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values had links to the presidential campaigns of both Richard Gephardt and John Kerry. Is evading campaign finance law a progressive value?

During his time at Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values, Robert Gibbs led in the creation of the video you see below - a video that criticizes Howard Dean as unready to be President because he doesn’t have military experience. The video’s only graphic image is of the face of Osama Bin Laden, looming closer and closer. In front of that face dance phrases like dangerous world, destroy us and dangers ahead.

Barack Obama doesn’t have military experience, but conveniently, Robert Gibbs has not seen fit to criticize that.

Barack Obama’s choice for White House Press Secretary has a history of using the very same politics of fear that Obama has claimed to oppose.

It’s time for Democrats to think about that - and think about it now.

Earlier this year I looked at statistics of bumper sticker, button and t-shirt sales from the 4th week of May 2008 and compared them to our sales statistics from the 4th week of May in 2004. What I found indicated that the two elections were very different. In May 2004, about 10% of our election sales were in support of John Kerry, while about 90% of our election sales were in opposition to George W. Bush. In May of 2008, on the other hand, about 96% our election sales were in support of Barack Obama, with only 4% of sales in opposition to John McCain. My conclusion at the time was that the election of 2008 seemed to be much more driven by support of Barack Obama than by opposition to John McCain.

I’ve just finished looking at our sales statistics from October 1 to October 15, 2008, and they show the same pattern, broadly speaking. During the past two weeks, 85.4% of our 2008 presidential election-related sales have been of items in support of Barack Obama. Just 14.6% of our our election 2008 sales have been anti-McCain or anti-Palin sales. That’s a smaller gap than what we saw in the spring, but it’s still a huge gap.

I’m pretty confident that this difference represents something real; over just the past two weeks, we’ve sold many thousands of items, making the mass of sales large enough to swamp out the oddities of random buyers. To the extent that our website would introduce bias, it would be in the anti-McCain direction, since over the past few months our editorial position has been much more anti-McCain than pro-Obama. Our own sales stats lead me to believe that on the Democratic side of the equation (we simply won’t sell items that support the Republican agenda), the election seems to be motivated mainly by support for Barack Obama. Messages of opposition to John McCain are secondary.

In abstract, I like the idea behind Steal Back Your Vote, the collaborative project by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast to pre-emptively protect the votes of people across the United States. Why wouldn’t I want to prevent a nefarious scheme to prevent voters from casting the ballots they’re entitled to cast?

Then, I take a look at the actual web site, which seems to be little but an attempt to promote the sale of Kennedy and Palast’s political comic book, and give the authors some personal publicity as well. The front page is filled with information about the comic book, but no actual information about how I can, well, steal back my vote. That’s not very effective voter education, and so I start to wonder if voter education is really the point.

The point seems to be to establish the idea that Republicans are stealing Americans’ votes - even before they’ve voted. There’s some evidence to suggest that this is happening, in some form, in some states, with Republican Secretaries of State attempting to get some voters placed in categories of official inactivity that will make it difficult for them to vote on Election Day.

I don’t deny that this is a genuine problem, but I do question the use of language that refers to these activities as “stealing votes”. There’s no theft involved - merely the exploitation of voters who are too busy to check that their voter registration is in good standing, and has not been challenged.

There are good, valid reasons for laws to challenge particular voter registrations. There need to be procedures through which it can be ensured that fake voters are not being invented in order to manipulate the vote. In spite of Democratic Party denials, that has been a serious problem in the past, just as voter suppression has been a serious problem.

More fundamentally, I’m concerned that conspiracy theories about voter suppression efforts serve as an excuse for Democrats who don’t want to come to grips with the fact that there are enough Americans who believe in right wing ideology to elect Republican politicians. It’s easier to blame America’s problems on stolen elections than on corrupted voters. The Democratic Party has become so hungry for swing voters that it is unwilling to speak the truth that many American voters don’t give two hoots about traditional American civic values such as liberty, equality and justice.

It’s this unwillingness to speak frankly about the flaws in right wing ideology, more than voter suppression, that led to the presidential election defeats of 2000 and 2004. In both elections, the Democrats pandered to right wing ideology, rather than confronting it, and in doing so, the Democrats strengthened the Republicans’ hand.

Yes, there were problems with the election in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. However, if Al Gore hadn’t chosen Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2000, and John Kerry and John Edwards’s war waffling were not made the weak voice against George W. Bush in 2004, the elections would not have been close enough to steal.

In 2008, the Democrats have had a similar problem. With Barack Obama standing with Wall Street on the fat cat bailout, working to help George W. Bush spy on Americans with the FISA Amendments Act, joining in the chant of drill, baby, drill, and calling for an expansion of Bush’s megachurch kickback scheme (faith-based initiatives), the Democrats lost a huge amount of ground, and what should have been a landslide turned into a neck-and-neck contest.

Even with Barack Obama pulling ahead a few points in national and swing state polls, there’s a lot of concern among Democrats that the presidential election may be too close to call in the end. That’s why you have political operatives like Kennedy and Palast hyperventilating about stolen votes once again. They’re playing a game that wouldn’t have to be played if the Democrats worried more about persuading voters than pandering to them.

I was just looking at a collection of favorite bumper stickers I had put together back in 2004. Most of the bumper stickers were focused on opposition to George W. Bush. The anti-Bush bug had occupied most of my mind.

The days of anti-Bush activism are numbered, and I find that my mind is more issue-focused than personality-focused. I don’t buy the idea that any one person is to blame for the mess America is in - after all, most America has continued to follow George W. Bush’s ideology, even when George W. Bush has become personally unpopular.

Take war, for example. Anti-war sentiment had a few months of consideration, but it’s since been dropped. The Democrats in Congress aren’t really anti-war, after all, and so most citizens have followed their lead and put their anti-war activism in the closet.

It’s become particularly popular to ape Barack Obama and proclaim non-pacifism: I’m not against all wars - just the dumb ones.

Well, let me step off the bandwagon and ask the question: What war is not dumb? When is it really intelligent to send off huge numbers of people off to kill and destroy the homes of huge numbers of other people?

Every now and then, in rare circumstances, it’s necessary to commit violent acts of self-defense. That doesn’t make the violence something honorable or otherwise praiseworthy. It just makes it a terrible thing that sometime has to be done. But when does that violence have to be committed? Almost never.

Yes, I’m a pacifist. That doesn’t mean that if flesh-eating Martians invade the Earth and try to eat my children, I won’t defend them. It means that even as I defend my kids from the flesh-eating Martians, I won’t love the violence, and I won’t celebrate it, and I won’t continue it the violence after it’s necessary.

Besides, the flesh-eating Martians are just theoretical. They don’t really exist.

A pacifist is someone with the kooky idea that hurting and killing people is a bad thing. With that idea, one of the bumper stickers I’ve added to my updated 2008 collection of favorite bumper stickers is the one you see below: An
oval bumper sticker declaring oneself to be a pacifist - simply but colorfully. Pacifism is not a popular idea these days, but popularity has been a poor indicator of what makes an idea worth considering.

Pacifist oval sticker

When Nancy Pelosi appeared at the Netroots Nation conference today, people questioned her decision as Speaker of the House to let the H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act, come to the floor. Speaker Pelosi’s answers were anything but respectful to the intelligence and attention span of those who were listening.

Hotline reports part of her answer before the entire Netroots Nation:

“Was it a bill that I would have written? Definitely not. Was it infinitely better than the Senate bill? I believe so.”

Infinitely better? Infinitely? I don’t think Nancy Pelosi knows what “infinitely” means. If the House bill was really infinitely better than an earlier Senate bill, then clearly she would have wanted to have written it (which she didn’t) and voted for it (which she did). The bill is finitely different from the prior Senate bill and finitely similar, but such finite characteristics are beneath her explanation.

Pelosi is the latest politician to mouth the words to the effect that “this wasn’t a bill I would have written” (see Hoyer, Steny and Obama, Barack). If she really, sincerely means this then Nancy Pelosi, like Barack Obama and Steny Hoyer, should be willing to provide the following information:

1. How would you have drafted the FISA Amendments Act? What are the ways in which the FISA Amendments Act, in your judgment, is far from perfect? What are the specific provisions that would be present and absent in a bill that actually is all you want?

2. As the leader of the House of Representatives, what specific legislative actions do you intend to engage in to bring about the specific changes you identify as necessary?

That information is not forthcoming.

Did you notice the passivity of Pelosi’s characterization of H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act? Why, it’s almost as if she were not the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the most powerful member of that body. It’s almost as if she stood by like a little kid, powerless to do anything. Elsewhere in her remarks today, the passivity about the FISA Amendments Act continued: “We had no options,” Pelosi complained. No options? The House of Representatives is a deliberative legislative body. It always has options. They include: 1) amending the bill, 2) rejecting the bill, 3) writing a different and better bill. But no, the Pelosi story is one of passive victimhood. Is Speaker Pelosi really such a hapless, helpless schmuck, or does she just want you to think so?

The helpless tone and passive voice are repeated and multiplied in a separate interview today with TPM Muckraker’s David Kurtz:

David Kurtz, TPM Media: On the FISA vote, was that an election year expediency to get that passed and get that off the table?

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: No. No. Well, I think we have to protect the American people. We have to protect the American people, and intelligence is a way to do that. We didn’t have to have this bill. But the only alternative that was there, because of the actions of Democrats in the Senate, and I’ll be very clear with all the respect I have for them, they put us in this situation where we only had a choice between the Senate bill, which was completely out of the question, and the alternative that we were putting forth in the House. The bill that we voted for, that overwhelmingly the Democrats I think 100% supported protected the American people in a way that protected and defended the Constitution as well. The Senate didn’t go for it.

Kurtz: If it was a bill we didn’t have to have, then why…

Pelosi: Well we did have to have it. We had to have a bill, because everything had expired. Two reasons we had to have a bill. First of all, I don’t have to tell you that the technology has changed since 1978, and there needed to be a modernization of the FISA bill, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. There had to be a modernization that recognized all the new technologies. So we had to have a bill that recognized that and all the other legislation had expired. So what we wanted to do was to have a bill that protects the American people, insist that include all of the technologies, because what the administration wanted to do was say, “Well, it’ll include e-mail and… the rest of
things we have authority to surveill.” Bring it all under FISA because they wanted a lot of electronic communication to be outside of FISA.

So understand the bad intentions of the White House when it comes to this surveillance. Again, as with everything it was an excuse for them to use to expand the authority of the president, which they said he had inherently from the Constitution, but we wanted to remove all doubt: The FISA law is the sole authority to do that. So we had to have a bill.

And there are those that say, “Well, stall it until next year and under a new administration” — you still need 60 votes to bring up a new bill next year in the Senate even though you have a new president. And mind you 17 of our Democrats voted with the Republicans to give THEM 60 votes. So I put this at the feet of the Senate, and then we have to support it and they walk away from it!

Kurtz: Do you know if the president attached a signing statement to the FISA bill?

Pelosi: I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know, but you know what? 107 days until the election, what is it until the inauguration? He’ll be gone soon.

Let’s boil down the bluster to Pelosi’s core contentions:

1. It’s not my fault, it’s the Senate’s fault. Weird thing, but H.R. 6304 was passed by the House first. The Senate voted on the bill after the House did. This makes Speaker Pelosi a science fiction character who is somehow able to use the powers of her office to reverse the flow of causality. Shazaam!

2. We had no choice! See above comments. Legislative bodies have bushels of choices. Capable legislative leaders frame those choices rather than be framed in by a supposed lack of them. What Nancy Pelosi is really telling you here is that she’s an incompetent leader.

3. We had to give Bush a law to do this, because otherwise he was breaking the law to do it. How about impeaching him for breaking the law? Oh, right. Pelosi took that off the table.

4. We had to let the president spy on you without warrants or restriction for periods of 67 days because now we have cell phones. #?^$ !?($$*!?

5. Revoking American freedoms is necessary to protect the American people.. Because now, more than ever, American freedom will kill you. See Bush, George. Also see Franklin, Ben.

6. Don’t worry, we’ll fix everything later, maybe after the next election. See 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006. If you still believe this line after oh so many broken “just wait till next time” promises from the Democrats, see this beautiful bridge I have to sell you.

Excuse me for one moment. I have this wall I have to beat my head against.

…

Hm, no. It still doesn’t make sense.

We’ve been selling progressive bumper stickers, buttons, and such for some time now — well through the last presidential election cycle. As a lark, I decided to take a look at sales statistics reaching back to the 2004 presidential election, then compare them to stats from our sales regarding the 2008 presidential race.

Four years ago last week, May 25-31 2004, here’s how many anti-Bush and pro-Kerry bumper stickers, buttons and such we sold:

For the same period this year, May 25-31 2008, here’s how many anti-McCain and pro-Obama bumper stickers, buttons and such we sold:

The difference is striking. In the last week of May 2004, people appear to have been overwhelmingly motivated by their opposition to the presidency of George W. Bush, and only tepidly motivated by their support of John Kerry. This was true even though John Kerry had been the clear Democratic presidential nominee for months. In the last week of May 2008, people appear to have been overwhelmingly motivated by their support for the candidacy of Barack Obama, and much less strongly by their opposition to John McCain. This was true even though Barack Obama had not yet secured the presidential nomination.

The election of 2004 was about a dangerous man we needed to stop. The election of 2008 is about a more positive future within our grasp.

The Hillary Clinton for President campaign in Ohio must be doing a lot of forehead slapping tonight. Just when they really needed the support of a lot of people in Ohio, along comes Thomas Buffenbarger.

Tom Buffenbarger is a powerful man, and a big Clinton supporter. He is not, however, the wisest of speakers. Hillary Clinton’s campaign nonetheless invited Buffenbarger onto the stage at a political rally in Youngstown, Ohio yesterday to speak before Hillary Clinton, as a kind of introduction.

Buffenbarger did not speak so much for Hillary Clinton as he spoke against Barack Obama. For ten long minutes, Buffenbarger barraged the audience with a tirade about how Barack Obama is nothing but a “silver tongued orator” and a “trained thespian” who “cocks his head back, lifts his nose up” and “pretends he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee” but is really just a “shadow boxer”.

Buffenbarger’s most vicious anger was reserved for Barack Obama’s supporters however, who he accused of being “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies”.

At this nasty attack against Democratic voters, the crowd of Clinton supporters became angry with Buffenbarger. The Baltimore Sun reports that “Buffenbarger’s attack when on so long that the audience tried to boo him off the stage.” CBS News described the crowd as “increasingly hostile” toward Buffenbarger.

It’s no wonder. That group of politically active Democrats no doubt recognized where Thomas Buffenbarger had picked up that like about “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies” - from the same Republican Party dirty tricks operatives who swift boated John Kerry in 2004. Back when Howard Dean appeared to have the nomination in his hands, the Republicans attacked with an ad that told Howard Dean to take his latte sipping, sushi eating, new york times reading liberal values back to Vermont where they belong.

In response, Democrats adopted this clumsy insult on as a badge of honor. Yeah, they said. We’re latte sipping, sushi eating liberals. What the heck is so wrong with that?

It’s typical of Republican right wing narrow mindedness to attack fellow Americans just because they drink coffee or drive a hybrid car, or, heaven-forbid, wear sandals in the summer time.

But to have a Democrat engage in that kind of attack, as Tom Buffenbarger did? That’s even worse. What was Buffenbarger thinking? Was he calculating that Hillary Clinton will win the presidential election with a Joseph Lieberman strategy of ignoring the Democratic Party base and seeking to appeal to Republicans who hate Priuses, and can’t stand the thought of any coffee that has cream or sugar in it?

It’s pushback time. Democrats like Tom Buffenbarger who think that they can bully us around with a bunch of pseudo-macho culture war insults need to be reminded just which side of the aisle they’re supposed to be sitting on. If Mr. Buffenbarger really hates hybrid cars, and wants to install some kind of coffee test of patriotism, then he ought to go work for Mike Huckabee’s campaign.

That’s why I designed this bumper sticker. Yeah, we may drink latte every now and then. Yeah, we may drive hybrid cars. So what? What the heck is wrong with drinking coffee and caring about the environment? We’re Democrats - latte-drinking, Prius-driving Democrats for Obama…

and Thomas Buffenbarger just lost Hillary Clinton our support.

An essential part of the effort to fight global warming is the expansion of opportunities for Americans to produce their own clean energy from sources such as wind and solar panels, and to profit from that clean energy generation by sharing the energy with other households. This expansion of localized clean energy generation is made possible by net metering and up-to-date interconnection standards. Unfortunately, only 39 states actually have established statewide standards enabling individual clean energy producers to contribute to the larger grid.

The Network for New Energy Choices grades these 39 states on the quality of their public policies on net metering and interconnection. The results of the group’s 2007 report card shows that blue states outperform red states on both net metering and interconnection.

- Of the five states that got a grade of A on net metering policies, four were blue states that voted for John Kerry in 2004. Only one of these high-achieving states, Colorado, was a 2004 red state.

- Four states were given failing grades on their net metering policies. Three of these four failing states were 2004 red states.

- Only one blue state has failed to develop statewide policies on net metering. However, eleven red states have failed to develop these policies.

- No states got a grade of A on interconnection policies, but six states were given failing grades for their policies. Four of these failing states were red states. Only two blue states were placed in this failing category.

- Only two blue states lack interconnection policies, whereas fourteen red states lack these policies.

(Source: Freeing The Grid, from the Network for New Energy Choices, December, 2007)

Riddle me this: The 2008 presidential election is the first time in over two generations that both major political parties have a wide open field, without a sitting incumbent or a current Vice President dominating the process. The opportunities for ordinary Americans to involve themselves in the process of choosing the next President of the United States are unprecedented.

Yet, looking out on the road today, a week before the first vote of the 2008 presidential election season, I have yet to see a single bumper sticker promoting a presidential candidate - Republican or Democrat.

Four years ago, by this point in the presidential election season, cars were thick with bumper stickers promoting different presidential candidates.

Why not now?

If you hold progressive values, it’s important for you to do more than think progressive thoughts, or drink tea from a box with progressive quotations on it, or talk to your progressive friends about progressive ideas. It’s important for you to get out and take action, to vote in a progressive manner. The re-election of 2004 taught us something. It taught us that even when the anti-constitutional, ill-considered, conspiratorially secretive and unhinged nature of a presidency is unveiled, a lot of Americans will continue to support it, even to their own detriment, if that’s what they’re told to do. You’re an independent thinker. You realize the problems with what’s been going on in America. But sadly, you can’t rely on other people seeing what you see. That’s why you can’t just sit in your chair and wait for others to do what’s needed to solve our problems. You have to become part of the solution yourself. You have to act in a way that will result in the changes you want to see in this world, to paraphrase Mohandas K. Gandhi. That means among other things voting your hopes, your ideals and your principles. If you want to see a progressive world, you can start by casting progressive votes.