Friday, January 25, 2008
Rabbi Les Scores Points For Voter Confidence Committee
Voter Confidence Committee member Rabbi Les Scharnberg scored big this week with an OpEd in the Arcata Eye, plus a great front page quote in Tuesday's Eureka-Times Standard's coverage of the NAACP event honoring MLK on Monday:Rabbi Lester Scharnberg said the dream of the freedom to vote has become a nightmare, especially as voters are putting faith into vote-counting machines.
Les's speech during the event had such great impact that he was invited to make a presentation to both the local NAACP board of directors, and also the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. Way to go Les!
"Now the threats to individual freedoms are more subtle," he said. "We're being asked to put our trust into a machine. They no longer allow us to count the votes hand by hand. Look closely at the dream of those who died to have your vote counted."
The VCC also got ink this week in this T-S letter to the editor by new VCC member Bob Olofson. An unrelated (and somewhat bizarre) LTTE by Donna-Lee Phillips also questions the use of electronic voting machines.
The VCC is putting finishing touches on a poll watching program for the Feb. 5 primary. I hope to have more details announced about that by the end of the day.
Meanwhile, one more media reference from this week, found in the North Coast Journal's lengthy report on Bill Clinton's recent visit to Eureka:McKinleyville resident David Berman seemed to be in charge, conferring with the Secret Service agent and with Lauren Levinson, a young campaign worker from the Hillary for President Sacramento office sporting a bright green Team Hillary scarf. (Berman is not to be confused with the Eureka elections activist of the same name.)
In the first day or two after Clinton's visit, a few people asked me if I was at the event or involved in any way. I had no idea why I was being asked this, but now the Journal article makes it clear. Too bad for this other Berman because the article lays a bit of blame at his feet for the hundreds or more people who were left in the cold, unable get into the event or even find an available bathroom as they waited. Worse still for Berman, the Journal reports:David Berman, who was running the show, declined to answer questions on the record after the event. (On the day of the event, he had told a reporter that it is considered extremely bad form for an advance man to appear in a story.)
Bad form indeed. Still, this was a compliment to me, as far as I can see, and the second such one in the Journal in recent weeks. Recall Marcy Burstiner's December 6 comment:I like having the Eureka Reporter around. It gives jobs to my current and former students. And it prints any opinion out there. For those who see it as a bullhorn for Arkley, they ignore how it prints columns by Amy Goodman, Dave Berman and others.
That's two articles in two months that refer to me even though the articles had nothing to do with me and weren't quoting me. It is very flattering, really.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/rabbi-les-scores-points-for-voter.html
Labels: Arcata Eye, Bill Clinton, Bob Olofson, Eureka Times-Standard, Humboldt Human Rights Commission, Marcy Burstiner, NAACP, North Coast Journal, Rabbi Les Scharnberg, Voter Confidence Committee
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Media Notes
A few days ago I wrote about meeting Marcy Burstiner, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University, who also writes the Media Maven column for the North Coast Journal. I noted that she was expecting some big news about the Eureka Reporter to be announced on Sunday. Sure enough, here is the announcement:Please come and see The Eureka Reporter's new ePaper.
Elsewhere in the paper, Publisher Judi Pollace revealed that the Reporter will stop publishing on Mondays and Tuesdays when 2008 arrives, remaining a free publication five days per week. Burstiner's Media Maven column this week is called "Pray for the Reporter!" Some excerpts:
The ePaper is a free, exact replica of The Eureka Reporter. Readers can log onto any computer with Internet access and view all the text, photos and advertisements exactly as they are printed in the daily paper.Please take a moment to register to access the ePaper.For those who like to bash the Reporter, consider Humboldt County without it. When a newspaper goes from publishing seven days a week to five, that's a sign of hard financial times. There are others. Its reporters are disappearing and more articles in the paper now carry no byline than stories that do carry a byline. (Generally that means that what you think is an article is just a printed press release.)
I got name-dropped in the North Coast Journal by the Media Maven, in the same sentence as Amy Goodman no less (even though she is a left gatekeeper). I'll take that as a feather in the cap, right next to the Journal's January 2006 comment that my previous blog GuvWurld was "gaining some stature in the larger blogosphere."
(snip)
But don't write off the paper yet. It eliminated paper publishing on Mondays and Tuesdays, but it recently added a fourth member to its editorial board: Peter Hannaford, a key adviser to Governor Ronald Reagan and a former partner to former Reagan adviser and lobbyist extraordinaire Micheal Deaver.
It makes for some interesting dynamics on the paper. The way editorials used to work involved a majority vote from the members of the three-person team. That led, at least once, to managing editor Glenn Franco Simmons writing a separate column opposing the paper's stand. If they still use the voice vote, I'd like to see how they get out of a split.
I like having the Eureka Reporter around. It gives jobs to my current and former students. And it prints any opinion out there. For those who see it as a bullhorn for Arkley, they ignore how it prints columns by Amy Goodman, Dave Berman and others. It gives a forum for the 911 Truth folks — those pushing to reopen the investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Centers — who can't get their voices into the North Coast Journal or Times-Standard. My stand isn't whether I support the opinions or not. What I support is the forum for expression. (emphasis added)
As for the ePaper, it is labeled as Beta which means kinks are still being worked out and perhaps some features have yet to be added. My first experience was that I needed to increase magnification so much to read the text that the portion of the text displayed was a fraction of an article. It took me a while to figure out that if I click and drag the image of the paper I can move it around to reveal parts not visible when zoomed in enough to read. It looks kind of snazzy but I'm not sure I like it any better than the regular Reporter site.
Back to Burstiner again. The credits listed above are taken directly from her Media Maven column and omit her role as faculty adviser to the Humboldt State University student newspaper, The Lumberjack. One thing this paper has been steadily following is a faculty-driven "no confidence" campaign directed at University President Rollin C. Richmond. When I met Burstiner last week she encouraged me to submit letters to the Lumberjack and so I saw this all too obvious connection. This week's paper contains a letter I wrote, reprinted in full below (the paper's website is woefully outdated):The Lumberjack, December 5, 2007, Vol. 91 No. 14, Page 22
Voter confidence should count
Dave Berman
Letter to the editor
Dear Lumberjack Editor:
All this talk about a no confidence vote on President Richmond reminds me that many HSU students may be unaware of another no confidence vote that made news here a few years ago.
On July 20, 2005 the Arcata City Council adopted the Voter Confidence Resolution (VCR). This is a statement outlining election conditions around the country, primarily the fact that election results have become unverifiable. From this, the VCR concludes that there is "no basis for confidence" in the results reported. We are instead forced to "trust" the government using secret vote counting machines that produce results we must accept with blind faith.
Votes on a ballot are tangible and should be countable and recountable, indefinitely, reliably producing the same results over and over. Government legitimacy is derived, according to the Declaration of Independence, from the Consent of the Governed. Elections that can't be recounted and results that can't be questioned mean that our Consent is being assumed and taken for granted, rather than sought and freely given.
The Voter Confidence Committee of Humboldt County is committed to improving local election conditions to create transparency, security, and verifiable accuracy as a basis for confidence in the results. We aim to do this by persuading the County Supervisors and Registrar of Voters to get rid of our secret electronic vote counting systems and instead use voters to hand-count paper ballots in the precincts on election night.
This is one of many recommendations in our "Report on Election Conditions in Humboldt County," based on an intensive eight month study of the situation. Readers can find this report, as well as the VCR and many other materials related to our campaign for hand-counting in Humboldt, at www.VoterConfidenceCommittee.org.
If you are registered to vote in Humboldt, please use the sign up form on our site to let us know you are willing to join in the counting. It is important we show the skeptical local government there are in fact enough of us to get the job done. We estimate it will only take about 1% of registered voters.
Dave Berman is the co-founder of the Voter Confidence Committee
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2007/12/media-notes.html
Labels: ePaper, Eureka Reporter, GuvWurld, Judi Pollace, Lumberjack, Marcy Burstiner, Report on Election Conditions, Rollin Richmond, The Journal, Voter Confidence Committee, Voter Confidence Resolution
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Alex Jones Interviews Naomi Wolf, Blows Her Mind
On Thursday I posted a bunch of links to interviews, lectures and articles by author Naomi Wolf, whose book End of America I've been writing and talking about a lot. Last night I came across an interview Wolf gave on Thursday to radio talk host Alex Jones. Neither of them had to convince the other of anything, and it was amazing to hear them sharing information the other didn't know. There was mutual admiration and respect and Wolf will give Jones a longer interview in the near future.
Meanwhile, the historical echoes and direct connections between the Bush family and the Nazis grow ever more concrete as Jones talks about visiting the National Archive, the official treasure trove of our nation's forgotten memories. If you didn't click on any of the links I provided the other day, listen to this interview. And if you did click any of them the other day, still listen to this interview.
This Jones/Wolf interview came to my attention via this thread at Democratic Underground. Commenter tom_paine responded, seemingly in frustration, that "99% of the American People see nothing" even as this info becomes increasingly abundant and clear. It was obvious to me he was exaggerating, prompting my reply:There are way more of us who are awake than we give ourselves credit for. It is not really a quantifiable figure. We each have a sense of it, and I suspect that for most of us it can even vary over time, influenced by circumstances. So for example, someone feeling cut off from like-minded people wanting change, or someone who is burned out from activism that hasn't produced change, or someone who goes to a new community and experiences an intense disconnect with people; any of these situations could understandably tilt a person a little towards the pessimistic side.
On the other hand, today Peter B. Collins did his syndicated talk radio show live in my town (.mp3 archive). I work with a group called the Voter Confidence Committee and we had a table in the lobby of the theater. Two of us were guests on the show for the whole final hour. Afterwards, I drove to the community center in the next town and the Peace and Justice Center was having its annual holiday dinner. It was held for the first time this year in an enormous gymnasium, having outgrown the venue of the past several years. I'm buzzing so hard from the good vibes of today. That might tilt me a little towards the optimistic, but I won't claim there is 99% of us who are awake and ready for the revolution.
For whatever it is worth, I think we have passed the turning point and the numbers are on our side. Our challenge, all of us in this country, is to learn to be better community organizers. Think global, act local. This is how we build the peaceful revolution.
At the Redwood Peace and Justice Center dinner later in the evening, I also at long last met Marcy Burstiner, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University who also writes the Media Maven column for the North Coast Journal. Her column began last year on my suggestion that local election coverage be compared across various local media, as viewed through the dozens of articles assembled in my scrapbook. She never talked to me prior to writing her first column and for reasons that no longer matter I never contacted her about the issues I had with that column.
Much later, and actually quite recently, I did begin to correspond with her by e-mail and felt frustrated that she declined or refused to make the connection between election conditions that inherently guarantee uncertain results and the irresponsibility (corrupt complicity, really) of media that print such outcomes as if they are fact. When we were introduced last night, the first thing she said to me was that she liked my OpEd in Thursday's Eureka Reporter. Tom Pinto had introduced us and the three of us talked for several minutes after that. I wasn't totally surprised when Marcy said she believes our elections are a "sham." But I also didn't get the opportunity I was looking for to ask her to reconcile this with the dilemma above. A little more ruthless honesty is in order here.
One really interesting thing that Marcy brought up last night was her expectation that something major was about to happen with the Eureka Reporter this Sunday, tomorrow. Each of us agreed there had recently been some unsettling signs for the paper, including eliminating distribution to some outlying areas, changing the paper used for printing, and the addition of a new editorial page editor named Peter Hannaford.
I shared something then that I haven't blogged before. I told Tom and Marcy that when Stephanie West from the Reporter called me to confirm I wrote the OpEd that ran on Thursday, she said that the decision to print it was now up to Peter Hannaford. I asked if he was the one responsible for the sharp change in tone in the paper's recent editorials. Yes, said Stephanie. I then said that I was compelled to offer her the feedback that his writing is juvenile and lowers the level of discourse this community is accustomed to as a result of having so many print publications. Here are three (one, two, three) examples.
Something about that third example really stuck in my head. I was astounded at the absurdity of referring to the "MoveOn.org-Code Pink wing of the Democratic Party." I am not a member of either group, having abandoned MoveOn long ago when it was obviously not effective at creating the real change I seek. If you ask any member of either group whether they feel they are having an influence on the Democrats, I am certain a vast majority will express frustration that the answer is clearly no. This frustration is certainly the prevailing attitude across the country, not just in these two groups. There is no evidence to indicate the Democrats have become beholden to these two groups in any way, especially given the repeated commitment to funding war profiteering, big pharma, etc. So in essence, there is no such thing as the "MoveOn.org-Code Ping wing of the Democratic party", just as there is no such thing as Islamofascism.
So what is this all about? I've been over it a few times. Harken back to this GuvWurld blog post, We Are Being Set Up: The Manchurian Nation (which also landed in my book, We Do Not Consent (free .pdf)). This talks about how Homeland Security and media propaganda combine to brand protest as treason, and dissenters as terrorists. In End of America, Wolf lists this as step nine of ten taken by all dictatorial regimes closing down open societies. How transparent and obvious has this become in America today? This YouTube video of CNN footage from Wednesday night features talking head Campbell Brown referring to MoveOn.org as "American insurgents."
I mentioned on Thursday that I am currently reading Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This YouTube video is author Naomi Klein interviewed by Keith Olbermann on Thursday night. Her thesis:"So there's three kinds of shocks in the Shock Doctrine. The shock of a crisis, then an economic shock therapy program, and then, if people don't behave, a third shock, which is the shock of torture."
Like Wolf, Klein talks about understanding oft-repeated patterns, showing multiple examples of this three shock sequence. Both women believe these patterns are predictive. I say they are right, but the things being "predicted" are as much in the present as in the future.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2007/12/alex-jones-interviews-naomi-wolf-blows.html
Labels: Alex Jones, End of America, Eureka Reporter, Keith Olbermann, Manchuran Nation, Marcy Burstiner, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Peter Hannaford, Shock Doctrine, Stephanie West, Tom Pinto
