Guest Author's blog
Guest Post by Jacquie Gist
For those who may not know, MoveOn is sponsoring vigils nationwide tonight to mark the 1,000th American military death in this dirty war. Actually if you count civilian contractors, which the White House does not, the 1,000th death occured weeks ago. The vigil for our community will be at the Franklin St Post Office at 8pm today. Since we will be joining with thousands of vigils around the country it really does matter if folks show up. For more information, visit action.moveon.org/vigil/ .
Jacquie is a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen.
[We apologize for a technical problem which delayed the posting of this time-sensitive item. -Ed.]
Guest Post by Matt Compton
Bob Dumas, the host of radio-station G105's morning "Showgram" is organizing a "Heterosexual Pride Parade" to be held in Chapel Hill a week from Saturday. Anyhow, he's already gone through the proper legal hoops, and if I heard correctly on the radio this morning, he lacks only a central meeting location in order to attain permission from the Town of Chapel Hill.
Apparently, this is for real. Dumas told his listeners that he was expecting a huge crowd to show up for the event, including "hundreds of students." A listener of the Showgram is even manufacturing apparel for the event, which the disk jockey plugged on the radio program this morning.
Dumas and the Showgram are no strangers to controversy. Just months ago, a Durham minister circulated a petition calling for Dumas' resignation after he heard the disk jockey insult American Idols winner Fantasia Barrino as "ghetto" and "low class."
Guest Post by Terri Buckner
Periodically on OP the issue of voter-owned elections (also known as Clean Elections) has been raised as a solution to the rampant influence of money in politics. Legislation (SB 760) was before the state legislature last year to give local governments the authority to enact their own clean elections, but it never reached a vote so it will have to be reintroduced this year. Next year will bring us a new round of local elections. How might these elections be different if we had voter-owned elections? Would we see different kinds of candidates? Would there be more openness about controversial issues such as town/gown relationships?
Guest Post by George Entenman
I've been thinking a lot about how residents of Orange County can contribute to the efforts of the state and national Democratic Parties, in particular to the Kerry/Edwards and Bowles campaigns.
Should we contribute and work for state and national organizations, or can we work locally?
As far as I can tell, the national Democratic Party is pretty badly organized. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the stories I read in 2002 about how well we are organized were planted by Republicans to lull us into complacency (even though it's hard to believe that our liberal media would go along with that).
I was at local Democratic headquarters on election day in 2002 (I'd been laid off and had the time). I was asked to start phoning people late in the afternoon to encourage them to vote. That was when I rediscovered just how bad the lists are that the state party supplies the local party.
Guest Post by Matt Compton
The facts are pretty clear. Barry Jacobs got outspent by about $41,000 on Tuesday. But I’m not so sure that was the deciding factor in the House 50 race. In fact, there were at least three other things that contributed to Barry’s poor performance everywhere north of Hillsborough, and they in turn, led him to lose the race. These are simple observations. In most cases, I don’t have scientific evidence to back up my perceptions, but I think they are valid nonetheless.
1) The "Push" Poll
I don’t think Barry Jacobs had anything to do with the poll that was conducted by the State Employees Association of North Carolina, but it didn’t help him at all. SEANC made it a point to play hardball in this year’s primary, targeting five races, but for the most part, their efforts did more harm than good. Faison showed good political instincts by responding to the charges early and hitting back hard. Jacobs didn’t have a good answer when he was asked about it, and that left a bad taste in peoples’ mouths.
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