Fri 12/6: Do-it-ourselves-democracy – Making our voices heard in this impeachment battle.

Map of impending impeachment rallies across the country (impeach.org)

Action #1 – The “Friends and Family Plan” meets the “Power of Five” 

Make sure your contacts in GOP-run states know the power of their phone calls to their legislators regarding the impeachment hearings. Then ask them reach out to five fellow local voters to call as well. Share this video below on calling to inspire them.

What do I say?: We have some scripts here. Here’s one from #needtoimpeach and one from 5calls.org. Pick your favorite or make up your own. Ask your contacts to share their own great phrases with five fellow local voters.

All you need are these basic elements and a live person on the other end of the phone. This is more effective than texts, bots, or leaving a message. Be nice. The person answering phone is NOT the legislator. The whole thing will take less than a minute.

  • Your zip code. They need to verify that the person calling can vote for the legislator.
  • The issue: In this case – impeachment. For other calls, say the bill number or the subject clearly.
  • What you want them to do: Vote “yes”, vote “no”, thank them, spank them, or ask a specific question.

Contact for all legislators: hq-salsa.wiredforchange.com 

Action #2 – Sign up to talk to people in GOP states.

Continue reading “Fri 12/6: Do-it-ourselves-democracy – Making our voices heard in this impeachment battle.” →

Fri 12/6: Today’s do-it-ourselves-democracy action – Help get an election security question added to the next debate

Action – Working together, we can bring election security to the national debate stage.

This guest post from Jennifer Tanner of Indivisible DA-33 tells us how to do it! We have until Dec. 13th to get this done. SHARE widely!

Dear Fellow Citizens,

The December debates are being hosted by PBS & Politico. They are soliciting questions for the candidates. Our intent is to come up with one election security question we can share widely and get as many people to submit as possible. The deadline is Dec. 13th. But the sooner we do this, and the more people that participate, the more likely the question will be chosen.

Please post on social media and forward widely to all your networks.

We are asking you to fill it out the question with our script as the language needs to be specific, since we have found this topic is filled with landmines and is easy to distort. We’ve had it reviewed by experts and we spent a lot of time to make sure its correct.

The big win will be to get the conversation out there since this is not being spoken about. Reporters and 10 million people watching the debates will now be aware of the need for election security.

Please cut and paste the following answers into the form at each link – DEADLINE DEC. 13th!:

PBS: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/got-a-question-for-the-2020-democratic-candidates-we-want-to-hear-it

Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/21/submit-a-question-for-the-december-2020-debate-stage-069522

Answer for Question #1: What question(s) should we ask on the debate stage? 

Continue reading “Fri 12/6: Today’s do-it-ourselves-democracy action – Help get an election security question added to the next debate” →

Thurs 12/5: Mark your calendars! Become involved!

Check out community activities near you in Ventura County here!

Action #1: Mark your calendar for tomorrow’s Climate Strike

  • Date: Friday, Dec. 6
  • Time: 2 pm.
  • Location: Ventura County Government Center at the corner of Victoria Ave. & Telephone Rd.

(Facebook link with more info here.) If you’re concerned about the very real existential crisis we are facing, please join us on Dec 6, 2019 at this Second Global Climate Strike, a multigenerational event which will give fellow Ventura County residents another chance to come together to express their passionate concerns about the climate emergency we are facing and, very importantly, to build momentum by giving people somewhere to put that passionate energy after the strike: by having representatives there at ”protest corner” to collect contact data, to sign people up for their organizations’ plans and projects, to take people to the next level in their activism from performative one-time protest to sustained/sustainable, effective real-life action.

Action #2: Go to the movies Friday night!

Continue reading “Thurs 12/5: Mark your calendars! Become involved!” →

Thurs 12/5: Toys we DON’T want Santa to bring. Two actions.

Action #1: Sign a petition to stop Target’s sale of assault-style toy guns.

This all started with a Target ad on the Sunday after Thanksgiving featured a Nerf gun called a “Fortnite AR-E blaster.” The toy gun was shaped like an AR-15, the weapon of choice for mass shootings—including the school shootings at Margery Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, FL and Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT. In these times of horrific gun violence, people are asking our retailers to step up and stop selling toys modeled on AR-15s or other assault-style weapons. This is not inconceivable. Walmart ended sales of realistic assault-styled toys and Target puts itself out as a responsible corporation that helps communities.

MoveOn has a petition to ask Target to end sales of toys styled after assault weapons.

Read more about this issue and sign the petition here.

Action #2: Hey, don’t forget Amazon!

‘Tis the season of inappropriate gifts and Amazon has just withdrawn Holocaust-themed Christmas ornaments and bath towels. Let’s ask them to go a bit further. We can’t replicate their onsite photos so just click this link: “toy guns that look like assault rifles“. What you’ll see will include:

Continue reading “Thurs 12/5: Toys we DON’T want Santa to bring. Two actions.” →

Wed 12/4: To defend Trump against impeachment, the GOP has become the Kremlin’s “useful idiots.” Where do your legislators stand?

Image from wikimedia commons – Gage Skidmore.

Action #1: Ask GOP legislators (or ask friends & family to ask theirs) why they are supporting an anti-democratic dictatorship over a pro-western democracy.

We are entering a Twilight Zone version of the McCarthy era. This time, GOP apologists of a foreign and malign dictatorship are actively attacking American values and democracy to keep possibly the most corrupt president in history from sinking their own political careers. Kremlin-inspired propaganda is aimed at making Ukraine less sympathetic to the American public and to make Trump’s fictitious “concerns” about Ukrainian corruption more believable. It’s no accident that they are pushing this story line. According to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, American concerns about corruption cut across party lines equally.

The GOP is using the Kremlin-supplied innuendo of corruption to perpetrate actual corruption.  Time to make each legislator publicly show where they stand.

On 11/26, we asked you to get friends and relatives with GOP legislators to call and ask them if they swore an oath to the Constitution or to a man. Today, we want them to ask what country they work for. Continue reading “Wed 12/4: To defend Trump against impeachment, the GOP has become the Kremlin’s “useful idiots.” Where do your legislators stand?” →

Mon 12/2: Hey, instead of worrying about who says “Merry Christmas”, how about stopping the war on the poor? Comments due tonight by 11:59 pm, EST

Engraving and quotes from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, 1843.

Write a comment to stop this latest attack on our most vulnerable. Deadline tonight, Dec. 2nd, at 11:59 pm EST.

While the Trump administration continues to transfer cash from the poor and middle-class to the wealthiest Americans and corporation with the 2017 tax scam as well as programs meant to help the poor, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue continues his quest to cut the pie even narrower for those already in food-insecure households. Some people will need to decide whether to be warm or fed. In America. Where there is wealth enough for both many times over.

  • Comment here.
  • Proposal to cut benefits to keep warm here.
  • Other comments here for inspiration. Don’t copy! Identical comments will be culled.

Deeper dive.

Claiming a need to close a loophole to save $2.5 billion dollars, which in actuality is an amount too small to register on bar graphs showing our country’s entire yearly budget, the Trump administration has created a multi-staged war on the poor, especially the food stamp program, which has kept over three million people out of poverty in 2018, including veterans. Continue reading “Mon 12/2: Hey, instead of worrying about who says “Merry Christmas”, how about stopping the war on the poor? Comments due tonight by 11:59 pm, EST” →

Mon 12/2: Emergency meeting tonight to stop unjust evictions to evade new renter protection laws!

Facebook event here. Please arrive by 5:45 to the front of Ventura City Hall!

(From CAUSE:) We’re  reaching out to let you all know about a really important City Council meeting on Monday December 2nd at 6 pm where a Moratorium on Evictions will be on the agenda and up for a vote. 

You may have heard about the most recent VC Reporter article and/or the previous   article talking about the 1313 Buena Vista apartments as well as other tenants being evicted on the Avenue. 

On Monday, November 18th, the Ventura City Council voted unanimously to draft a moratorium on no-fault evictions until the new renter protection laws (AB 1482) go into effect January 1st. It is now imperative that we attend the next meeting when they actually vote on the draft. If passed, this will allow tenants who were given no-fault notices to vacate are able to remain in their homes.

Please arrive by 5:45 to the front of Ventura City Hall and we will once again walk in together to the council chambers at at 6pm. We should all then try to speak during public comment period, which will be at the beginning of the meeting. 

We’re trying to get as many people to show up and give public comment in support of the moratorium.

 

 

Mon- 12/02: Trump has been tearing down the wall between church and state. Say “NO” to Sarah Pitlyk.

Action  – Call your senators (both Dems and GOP!) and tell them to vote “NO” on “NOT QUALIFIED” forced-birther radical  Sarah Pitlyk for U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.

The word is that she’s up for a full vote of the Senate this week.

Planned Parenthood alert:  The bipartisan American Bar Association has unanimously rated Sarah Pitlyk, another extremist Federalist Society member, “not qualified” for this important position, due to her lack of trial experience. She opposes reproductive rights, the Affordable Care Act and the legal right to abortion. She fought to allow businesses and landlords the right to discriminate against women whose private health histories include abortion or birth control. Through her Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, her writings, and legal actions she participated in at forced-birther advocacy firm Thomas Moore Society (TMS), she’s demonstrated that she will impose her own religious beliefs over the lives of women and their families if she gets into a position of power. While the concept of the the Handmaid’s Tale’s Aunt Lydia becoming an judge might make a great Hollywood script, in real life, true-believer Sarah Pitlyk cannot be trusted to apply the law and legal precedents fairly and impartially to everyone who might come before the court.

Update: Oct. 31st – “In a party-line vote on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the nomination of a St. Louis County anti-abortion and religious rights lawyer in line to become St. Louis’ next federal judge.”

Continue reading “Mon- 12/02: Trump has been tearing down the wall between church and state. Say “NO” to Sarah Pitlyk.” →

Thurs 11/28 – Another resistance -Thanksgiving in the shadow of Trump.

Thanksgiving is a complicated American holiday. It’s both a secular feast day centered around gatherings of family and friends and a yearly reinforcement of our wildly inaccurate origin story, a cultural mythology that obfuscates our colonialist history. Its placement on the calendar also makes it the starting bell to our annual flood of extended consumerism, the intensity of which is read like tea leaves by investors and the stock market to determine the economic health of our nation.

Here are some resources we’ve been collecting that might come in handy as you navigate political waters over the gravy boat, and for when and where you decide to spend your post-dinner dollars.

During your family’s dinner, keep your cool and make a difference where you can.

Here is an awesome guide from IndivisibleSF (San Francisco) on how to talk to your friends and family about Trump. Start from deciding if talking is physically dangerous or just uncomfortable. “If you’re just worried that the conversation will be unpleasant, but you’re not worried about it being dangerous to you, we encourage you to speak up. It may not be pleasant, but it is what your country needs from you.”

Then it give solid ideas on how to tackle conversations, from unfunny “jokes” to attacks on “political correctness”, along with a list of great reference materials.

Continue reading “Thurs 11/28 – Another resistance -Thanksgiving in the shadow of Trump.” →

Tues 11/26: GOP legislators…To what do you owe allegiance? Asking for the country we love…

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” (Whistleblower complaint)

Action – Contact your friends and relatives with GOP legislators and ask them if they swore an oath to the Constitution or to a man.

Former Director of the United States Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub, in reference to a clip of Fox News in which host Tucker Carlson’s roots for Russia over Ukraine states, “This clip is just one more exhibit supporting the case that it’s no longer left vs. right but democracy vs. authoritarianism. I think many still underestimate the threat to the republic.”

What does it mean to our democracy when a president abuses his power by using a Russian intelligence myth as a tool to pervert foreign policy into serving his personal interests?

Continue reading “Tues 11/26: GOP legislators…To what do you owe allegiance? Asking for the country we love…” →