Friday, January 31, 2014

Letters to Alabama GOP and Democratic parties

To Alabama GOP
 
From: Rob Shattuck <rdshattuck@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 7:52 AM
Subject: Inquiry re candidacy in 6th Congressional district
To: algop@algop.org
 
Dear Sir:
 
I believe that the country's system of governance is broken and that Congress has become disabled from properly functioning and properly making decisions and passing laws on behalf of the citizens.   This has become a widespread belief of others as well, and many persons are engaged in trying to diagnose the problem and make proposals about what should be done to try to fix it.
 
I believe this situation should be a subject of national and Congressional debate.  I agree with Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's contention that this should be the prime question before the American people at this time, because, unless and until it is addressed by the country, Congress will continue to be impaired in its proper functioning, and Congress will continue to fail to address in a proper way the numerous critical problems confronting the country.
 
I have endeavored to ask announced candidates for the House of Representatives in the 6th Congressional district about what they think about the foregoing.  My letter to the candidates can be found here.
 
I have not received any reply, and I do not think that the announced candidates will give this matter the attention I think it deserves.  As a result I would like to become a candidate myself.
 
I believe the deadline for filing to become a candidate in the Republican Party primary election is February 7th.  I also note that the filing papers call for the declaration "I am a Republican and I endorse and will actively support the principles and policies of the Republican Party."

I would like to have a telephone conversation with the someone from the Republican Party to discuss whether I can be a candidate in the Republican primary election for the 6th Congressional district.  If you would please provide me contact information for someone to talk with in the party organization, I would be thankful. 

Sincerely,
Rob Shattuck
3812 Spring Valley Circle
Birmingham
 
 
 
To Alabama Democratic Party
 
From: Rob Shattuck <rdshattuck@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 8:28 AM
Subject: Inquiry re candidacy in 6th Congressional district

Dear Sir:

I believe that the country's system of governance is broken and that Congress has become disabled from properly functioning and properly making decisions and passing laws on behalf of the citizens. This has become a widespread belief of others as well, and many persons are engaged in trying to diagnose the problem and make proposals about what should be done to try to fix it.

I believe this situation should be a subject of national and Congressional debate. I agree with Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's contention that this should be the prime question before the American people at this time, because, unless and until it is addressed by the country, Congress will continue to be impaired in its proper functioning, and Congress will continue to fail to address in a proper way the numerous critical problems confronting the country.

I have endeavored to ask announced candidates for the House of Representatives in the 6th Congressional district about what they think about the foregoing. My letter to the candidates can be found here.

I have not received any reply, and I do not think that the announced candidates will give this matter the attention I think it deserves. As a result I would like to become a candidate myself.

I do not see on party website a deadline for filing to become a candidate in the Democratic Party primary election. Also, although I am not sure, I think I have voted in Republican primary elections in the past.

I would like to have a telephone conversation with the someone from the Democratic Party to discuss whether I can be a candidate in the Democratic primary election for the 6th Congressional district. If you would please provide me contact information for someone to talk with in the party organization, I would be thankful.

Please be advised that I have sent to the Alabama Republican Party an email similar to this email.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Rob Shattuck
3812 Spring Valley Circle
Birmingham
(205) 967-5586
 
 

Saturday, January 25, 2014

This Town, by Mark Leibovich

Books of The Times

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is (Duh!) Washington

‘This Town,’ by Mark Leibovich

By DAVID M. SHRIBMAN
Published: July 7, 2013   
 

Of all the irritating things about Washington — the phoniness, the showy cars, the utter inability of a metropolitan area of 6.9 million people to produce a single decent slice of pizza or a passable submarine sandwich with oil and not mayonnaise — none is more infuriating than the local insider habit of referring to the place as “this town,” as in “He’s the most important power broker in this town” or, more likely (and worse), “The way to get ahead in this town is to seem not to be trying to get ahead.”


Ralph Alswang
Mark Leibovich

THIS TOWN

Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital
By Mark Leibovich
386 pages. Blue Rider Press. $27.95.

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

So when Mark Leibovich sketches a portrait of the nation’s capital — a phrase used only by people who don’t live there — and calls it “This Town,” you know he’s got a sharp ear, and a sharp eye to accompany it. You also know that he’s got the sharp knives out.
Here it is, Washington in all its splendid, sordid glory: the pols, the pundits, the Porsches. Plus the hangers-on, the strivers, the image makers and the sellouts, all comprising what Mr. Leibovich calls “a political herd that never dies or gets older, only jowlier, richer and more heavily made-up.”
He’s an insider, Mr. Leibovich is, first a reporter at The Washington Post, now the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, yet he seems to wear those special glasses that allow you to X-ray the outside and see what’s really going on. An unusual parlor trick that, particularly in light of the A-list insiders jammed into his acknowledgments, not a single one of whom could have pulled off this book, even though half of them will e-mail me and say they could. (Memo to all of you: Don’t.)
He opens with an account of the 2008 funeral of the NBC Washington bureau chief and “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, and as a quarter-century resident now in happy exile, I suppose I should stick to form and mention, hideously, that we — Tim and I — came to Washington at the same time and were friends, although mostly because I had a wife from Buffalo, and he delighted in teasing her about her bowling. The people at this funeral (and as I recall, this was an invitation-only rite) adhered to what Mr. Leibovich calls “the distinctive code of posture at the fancy-pants funeral: head bowed, conspicuously biting his lips, squinting extra hard for the full telegenic grief effect.”
The book is already generating buzz over Mr. Leibovich’s account of White House efforts to shape a profile in The New York Times of the first friend Valerie Jarrett and the administration’s apparent push to encourage Capitol reporters to disparage the conservative stalwart Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California.
Start to finish, this is a brilliant portrait — pointillist, you might say, or modern realist. So brilliant that once it lands on a front table at the Politics & Prose Bookstore on upper Connecticut Avenue, Mr. Leibovich will never be able to have lunch in This Town again, not that there is a respectable nonexpense-account lunch to be had in those precincts.
That said, this is a different Washington from the one I departed from a decade ago (Pittsburgh: what a relief!) and surely a different one from the era when, among the Washington royalty, only Alsop (and not Reston, Broder, Kraft, Evans or Novak) required a first name, and only because there were two of them (Stewart and Joseph).
The partisanship is worse, in part because the parties are different, with no liberal wing to the Republicans and hardly a conservative wing to the Democrats. And the rhetoric is mean, in part because it is less elegant.
All of which raises a separate point: Many of the Washington monuments most worthy of attention and praise, like the three Davids of capital journalism (Espo of The Associated Press, Rogers of Politico and Wessel of The Wall Street Journal), aren’t featured in this book and would be mortified beyond words if they were. They’re not at celebrity parties but at their battle stations, notebooks in hand. Nor is there a respectful bow, much deserved, to the thousands of unknown, selfless, deeply skilled bureaucrats who, since the Reagan years, have been pilloried but who, since the Franklin D. Roosevelt years, have made the country, or at least parts of its government, work.
In the old days, Washington — then as now a place where “disproportionate numbers of residents lie about reading The Economist” — was pretty much a bar where everyone knew your name, or in the case of John Paul Hammerschmidt, a former congressman from Arkansas, all three of them. Now it’s far less personal — but the personal matters far more.
So do personalities, which is why the book that Mr. Leibovich’s seems patterned after is Lytton Strachey’s 1918 “Eminent Victorians,” a classic of its time and all time, and the book it most resembles is “The Columnist,” Jeffrey Frank’s remorselessly hilarious work of fiction from 2001. As such, it is a wiseguy’s tour d’horizon of an entire city trying out for the role of Washington wise man.
So, striding self-importantly through these pages are the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (“harshly judgmental of fat people”); Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican (“a blister on the leadership of both chambers, or sometimes something more dangerous”); Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York (“lens-happy, even by senatorial standards”); the lobbyist and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour (“looks like a grown version of Spanky from the Little Rascals”); the former House minority leader Richard Gephardt (“whose willingness to reverse long-held positions in the service of paying clients was egregious even by D.C.’s standards”); and the modern super-flack Kurt Bardella (possessed of “a frantic vulnerability and desperation”).
And though much of this volume is a sendup of the capital of kissing up, there are some important insights tucked in among the barbs. Such as this: “Though Barack Obama won the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton won Obama’s first term.” And this: The political culture is full of “people who’ve been around the business forever, who never go away and can’t be killed.” And this one, about Representative Paul D. Ryan, that must have befuddled the publisher’s fact checkers: “Like most members of Congress with half a brain, Ryan had a pretty low opinion of many of his colleagues and had been thinking of how to escape.”
So here’s to all the big mouths, big egos, big shots, big machers and big jerks. In case you’re wondering, Mark Leibovich is on to every one of you, and his portrayal of “This Town” is spot on. Because Mr. Leibovich, perhaps alone among capital insiders, has realized that Washington, once an inside joke, now looks more and more like a bad joke.

David M. Shribman is the executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Pittsburgh Press and a former Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe.


Saturday, January 18, 2014

UnPAC and Rootstrikers

Email from Rick Staggenborg

Re: Rootstriker​s and Demand Progress announce their Pledge to Amend campaign
  
Time is running out for those of us who want a strong amendment to be passed.

As you can see below, building on a small-scale project in 2012 UnPAC has joined with Rootstrikers in launching a campaign to call on Presidential candidates to advocate for an amendment to "overturn Citizens United." Obviously, that is not enough. They are also not targeting the right people, since Presidents have nothing to do with passing amendments. Targeting candidates for Congress would make more sense. We can start to do that now if we choose.

No other organizations working for a constitutional amendment have done anything to make it a campaign issue since Public Citizen called for pledges in 2010. If we continue to ignore this strategy, we risk having a weak amendment passed. If that happens, the Obamacare phenomenon will happen: A lot of people will assume that we won the fight and lose interest in the issue.

Some organizations are banking on a long-term strategy of educating the public about the need for an amendment that will both institute effective campaign finance reform and abolish corporate personhood before trying to force Congress to take a stand. They are risking the loss of the public's attention by waiting to make this a campaign issue.

I hope that local amendment advocacy groups will try to get whatever national organizations they are working with to discuss working with other groups on a pledge strategy that will bring out the issues that are not going to be discussed in a campaign to merely "overturn Citizens United."

Whatever local groups or national organizations decide, each of us can individually ask all the candidates running for Congress this year whether they will support a strong amendment and encourage others to do the same.

Rick

In solidarity for peace and justice,

Rick Staggenborg, MD
Board President, Take Back America for the PeopleFounder, Soldiers For Peace International
http://www.soldiersforpeaceinternational.org/2011/01/asymmetrical-warfare.html

Coos Bay, OR
541-217-8044



Subject: The anti-corruption movement just got a whole lot bigger!
From: unPAC@demandprogress.org
To: staggenborg4senate@hotmail.com
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 22:00:40 +0000


Rick,

During the 2012 election, you joined with thousands of others to confront the corrosive influence of Big Money in our political system. Together, we crowd-funded ads in four states, inspired a nation-wide, corruption-focused art exhibition led by Shepard Fairey and pressured the president to publicly support an amendment to overturn Citizens United.

I am thrilled to announce that with the next election approaching, unPAC is joining forces with Rootstrikers and Demand Progress. To successfully take on the system of corruption in Washington, we all need to work side by side.

Our first campaign together will force presidential candidates during the 2016 election to answer one critical question: How will you, as president, end the system of corruption in Washington?

Will you add your name to encourage the people of New Hampshire to force every presidential candidate to answer this one question?

Candidates flock to New Hampshire early, before anyone knows (or cares) who they represent. By holding the first presidential primary, New Hampshire sets the tone for the national election. Our hope is that the New Hampshire Rebellion will make this issue central to the rest of the country throughout the 2016 election.

Rootstrikers and Demand Progress have been allies since unPAC launched. In case you haven't heard of them yet, I want to tell you just a bit about our new partners. Rootstrikers is organizing people across the nation to fix our democracy, led by Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law Professor and author of Republic, Lost. Demand Progress, co-founded by the late activist and technologist Aaron Swartz, is renowned for winning fights to prevent Internet censorship and is now turning its focus to the fundamental issue of systemic corruption in Washington, D.C.

Together, we will grow the movement across the country, deepen our roots at home and weed out the systems of corruption and injustice that afflict our democracy.

Onward,

Matt and the unPAC Team

PS: If you're in New England, find a NHRebellion event near you here.



Money plays a corrupting role in our political system, and unPAC, Rootstrikers, and Demand Progress have joined forces to build a mass-movement to fight it -- and to return control over our government to the people.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Move To Amend meeting in Tuscaloosa on Thursday

The National Campaign to End Corporate Personhood and Demand Real Democracy!Move to Amend

Hi Rob --
The Move to Amend Coalition is a national multiracial, cross-classed, trans-partisan movement of over 320,000 people and organizations whose goal is amending the U.S. Constitution to fight corporate rule.
Come get acquainted with some of those 320,000 folks in Tuscaloosa to meet, mingle, and mobilize to end corporate personhood. The agenda includes a viewing of the "Legalize Democracy" mini-doc, which provides a wonderful intro to Move to Amend, and a discussion of the potential formation of a Tuscaloosa Move to Amend "affiliate."
This organizational meeting in Tuscaloosa is happening next Thursday, January 16th, at 7:00pm at the:


          Unitarian Universalist Church of Tuscaloosa          
          6400 New Watermelon Road
          35406 Tuscaloosa, AL

          Driving Directions

Bring your ideas, your passion and your commitment to work with others for a nation ruled by the people, not corporations.


Please RSVP with Jim at twoprice@bellsouth.net or at 205-821-4892

I hope to see you there!
Jim Price