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Mar

18

Ode to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, winner of JFK Profile in Courage Award

Filed Under Elections, Ohio, Politics, Voting, Women | 1 Comment

Before I met current Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner or had ever heard her name, I never gave a dime, or time, to any politician or political candidate.  Not one of either.

Then, I met her at one of the first Meet the Bloggers sessions I’d ever attended, in January 2006 – more than two years ago. (You can get the podcast here.)

Here is my review of that session, and here’s an excerpt – the very first words of that post:

I loved this candidate for Ohio Secretary of State. To me, Jennifer Brunner, the democratic candidate to replace Ken Blackwell (one of the GOP candidates for governor), represents the threshold that should be met by every single solitary individual who wants to run for elected office. Unrealistic? Utopian? Not analogous to other races? I don’t care. If you want my vote for anything, you better be able to approach her smarts, her humility, her confidence, her idealism and her ability to turn passions into realities.

The post goes on and measures now Governor Ted Strickland, Bryan Flannery and Eric Fingerhut (then the Dem gov candidates), and Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett (the Dem US Senate candidates) against what I came to call “The Brunner standard” or threshold.

I am wrong, and I will be wrong in the future.  But there are also times when I commit to what I believe, and my belief that Jennifer Brunner was someone different and worth risking my hopes for a better Ohio SOS was spot-on.  I get razzed for not committing or not committing strongly enough, often enough.

But I hold on to my commitments until I’m ready to let go, because I fear being disappointed or indulging in expectations that won’t get met, and will only expend the energy it takes to be fearful of disappointment when I’m good and ready and find someone or something that’s worth that risk of being disappointed.

Jennifer Brunner was the first person to whom I ever gave a dime to for a political race.  And for whom I threw an absolutely poorly attended house party (but we had great food and really good looking plates). And that donation (along with two others) forced me to resign from the Wide Open experiment with Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

And you know what? I can’t even believe anyone would ever accept being forced to choose. Not in this day and age where transparency is so easily accommodated.

But I digress.

Congratulations to Jennifer for winning the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and if I have the chance, I promise to try to give you a much, much better house party in 2010.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:15 pm March 18th, 2008 in Elections, Ohio, Politics, Voting, Women | 1 Comment 

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Mar

18

Ken Blackwell’s response to Barack Obama’s speech on race

Filed Under Barack Obama, Culture, Government, Marketing, Media, Ohio, Primary, Social Issues, WH2008 | 10 Comments

How could we forget that he’d have something to say!

Barack Obama just gave an eloquent speech, but one that does not address the underlying nature of Senator Obama’s beliefs. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, like Mr. Obama, believes in a state-centered 21st century form of big-government socialism. This 21st century form of socialism is at the heart of the Liberation Theology Rev. Wright preaches from the pulpit. Today, Mr. Obama again made it clear, with all his eloquence, that he still embraces these beliefs that would require dismantling the free-market system that has made our country’s economy the most prosperous in all of human history.

In contrast to Liberation Theology, the Christian orthodoxy teaches about the nature of God, the nature of man, the relationship between the two in this life, and about the hereafter. Liberation Theology, on the other hand, is a belief system about political agendas, socialistic economic policy, and redistribution of wealth. Proponents of Liberation Theology, like Rev. Wright, teach that God commands us to form a government that will supervise our economy to create government-subsidized jobs under central-government planning; guarantee healthcare and education by having government control both; and achieve “economic equality” by redistributing wealth through massive taxes on the affluent and massive government entitlements for the poor. And it advocates replacing governments that do not embrace this socialistic agenda.

Those are the beliefs of Liberation Theology. Those are the offensive root beliefs underlying many of Rev. Wright’s sermons. And though Barack Obama does not embrace Mr. Wright’s offensive language, he does embrace this government-solves-everything-through-socialism worldview.

His speech was magnificent in its elegance and rhetoric, but today Mr. Obama reminded me yet again of his worldview that embraces, among other things, partial-birth abortion, military weakness, and economic socialism. [emphasis mine]

You have got to be kidding me. Blackwell must have had on those multilingual headphones that translate everything he listens to into the Right-wing Agenda Speak. O.M.G.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:43 pm March 18th, 2008 in Barack Obama, Culture, Government, Marketing, Media, Ohio, Primary, Social Issues, WH2008 | 10 Comments 

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Mar

18

Video of Barack Obama’s speech on race, 3/18/08

Filed Under Barack Obama, Culture, Marketing, Media, Politics, Primary, Social Issues, Voting, WH2008 | 16 Comments

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:50 pm March 18th, 2008 in Barack Obama, Culture, Marketing, Media, Politics, Primary, Social Issues, Voting, WH2008 | 16 Comments 

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Mar

18

German Chancellor Merkel to Knesset: “filled with shame over Holocaust”

Filed Under Culture, Foreign Affairs, Government, Jewish, Judaism, Politics | Comments Off

If Germans and Jews can speak this frankly in the presence of one another, there is no reason to think that Barack Obama’s speech today cannot be a similar watershed for Americans.

From Ynetnews.com:

“Standing here before you is a great honor,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Hebrew, as she addressed the Knesset Tuesday afternoon.

“The Shoah fills us Germans with shame. I bow before the victims. I bow before the survivors and before all those who helped them survive,” she said, this time in German.

…

Merkel received a standing ovation from the MKs [members of the Knesset] in attendance at the conclusion of her speech.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the special Knesset session that “the close bonds of friendship between Germany and Israel are not regular relations between two nations.

“They carry the heavy weight of historical memory to which we are obligated. But this is exactly why they (also) contain power, sensitivity and substance that are unparalleled between any two nations in the international arena.”

Five MKs boycotted the session.

More on the historic nature of her visit to the Knesset and the argument over whether to let her speak German there or not.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:11 pm March 18th, 2008 in Culture, Foreign Affairs, Government, Jewish, Judaism, Politics | Comments Off 

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Mar

18

Ohio crime bureau seizes Franklin County BOE voting machines

Filed Under Elections, Law, Ohio, Politics, Primary, Tech, Voting | 3 Comments

From Ars Techica:

At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.

The investigation was launched after Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s Secretary of State and chief election official, found that a candidate’s name was marked as withdrawn on the electronic voting machine that she used during the recent primaries, an irregularity that was also reported by voters in other precincts. The state attorney general is now working with a team of computer forensic consultants to determine if there was any tampering.

Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates that the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines had been manually disabled by county election board programmers last year, making it almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been made to the systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had failed to adhere to routine machine testing standards and had tested only one machine in each precinct rather than all of the machines.

Anyone feel like Daffy Duck saying, “Oh no. Not t’again”?

Now what?

According to WHIOTV, which conducted a television interview with Brunner, the state will consider dumping the faulty touch-screen voting machines and switching to more reliable optical scanners that read votes from conventional paper ballots. Rep. Kevin DeWine, a state legislator and deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, vehemently opposes returning to paper ballots because doing so would likely cost the state an estimated $64 million. His arguments seem dubious in the face of the growing costs associated with cleaning up the messes created by the defective touch-screen voting systems [that were brought in under former Secretary of State and GOP gubernatorial loser Ken Blackwell - my additon and emphasis].

Ah yes, money before integrity and helping boost and ensure voter confidence, especially in an election year that is seeing record turn-out (with way more Democrats than Republicans in the mix) in Ohio.  Love the priorities.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:28 pm March 18th, 2008 in Elections, Law, Ohio, Politics, Primary, Tech, Voting | 3 Comments 

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Mar

18

MyBarackObama.com wins top Pollie award from American Assn. of Political Consultants

Filed Under Announcements, Barack Obama, Marketing, Media, Politics, Tech | Comments Off

You can see all the winners here. I’m pretty unfamiliar with which outfits are in Ohio or are ones I should know, but here are the two I could pick out as being familiar with, both won by Blue State Digital (where Phil de Vellis worked before he made the Hillary Clinton-Apple Vote Different ad):

Websites

National Grassroots/Issue Advocacy/Public Affairs
Gold:
Women’s Campaign Forums
She Should Run
Blue State Digital

Best Use of New Technology
Silver:
MyBarackObama.com
Blue State Digital

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:13 am March 18th, 2008 in Announcements, Barack Obama, Marketing, Media, Politics, Tech | Comments Off 

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Mar

18

[update] Text of Barack Obama speech on race, 3/18/08

Filed Under Announcements, Barack Obama, Politics, Primary, WH2008 | 17 Comments

Nice comment thread at The Moderate Voice where, OMG! I write nice things about Obama. What a shock.

From The Union Leader:

“A More Perfect Union”

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama

Constitution Center

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

As Prepared for Delivery

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time. Read more

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:54 am March 18th, 2008 in Announcements, Barack Obama, Politics, Primary, WH2008 | 17 Comments 

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Mar

18

Spitzer’s replacement and his wife had extra-marital affairs

Filed Under Culture, Politics, Social Issues | 3 Comments

From the New York Daily News:

In a stunning revelation, both [New York Governor David] Paterson, 53, and his wife, Michelle, 46, acknowledged in a joint interview they each had intimate relationships with others during a rocky period in their marriage several years ago.

In the course of several interviews in the past few days, Paterson said he maintained a relationship for two or three years with “a woman other than my wife,” beginning in 1999.

…
“This was a marriage that appeared to be going sour at one point,” Paterson conceded in his first interview Saturday. “But I went to counseling and we decided we wanted to make it work. Michelle is well aware of what went on.”

More here at NPR.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:04 am March 18th, 2008 in Culture, Politics, Social Issues | 3 Comments 

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