There was a dramatic FCC "en bank" hearing about net neutrality yesterday (Feb. 25, 2008) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School.  I didn't get in the room which was filled beyond capacity but I have some comments anyway.  We have a crucial choice: do we want to keep the internet as a free many-to-many medium, or do we want to centralize it in the hands of the Comcasts of the world? The people favor the first choice, but sadly our voice is not always the one which gets heard.

I probably should have stayed up and written a posting on Primary Night itself. I got back home (after a fairly long day in Durham, Dover and briefly Manchester) a not-too-bad hour (11:48pm.) But I went to sleep at my usual hour and woke up to a New Year's Day feeling (only without any football on TV and without a new year to look forward too.)

My election day began with some early morning canvassing, continued with some ballot-clerking at the polling place (which was complicated slightly by the Obama people), followed by more canvassing and phone calling in the afternoon— and I made it to Edwards HQ in Manchester just in time for his speech.  The next day I helped a little with tearing down the local campaign office: my last act as a loyal volunteer was to recycle the printer cartridges.

After W. Mitt Romney failed to show up in Durham, I spent Election Eve campaigning and rallying for John Edwards.  The day closed with a great rally at the Dover Elks Lodge.  --Timothy Horrigan: January 7, 2008

Many of you will be envious when you hear that I was able to be at the 6:15 am "Welcome Rally" for John Edwards in Manchester, NH.   About a dozen of us gathered in deep-frozen Dover, NH and headed over to an old mill building Manchester to give John and Elizabeth (as well as Kate) a warm welcome back to the Granite State.  The event shows a lot of what is good about the state of politics in America and some of what is wrong.

It is great that a candidate like John Edwards can still speak the truth to power and still fight for regular working people while still being taken seriously.  And even though several hundred citizens did risk hypothermia to journey to Manchester in the dark, the event still shows how marginalized the political process has become....

(I still have a great fondness for Kucinich as well.)

On December 27th, 2007 (and also on New Year's Day 2008), I sent out a letter endorsing John Edwards for President to several New Hampshire papers. I am not sure if it will get published anywhere: the papers are all glutted with letters. Foster's Daily Democrat might run the letter, but they ran another letter of mine (about Barack Obama) in late December.

This Islamic nation has one of Asia's strongest and best-trained militaries and it is ruled by a ruthless strongman.  It has nukes, which it has been openly selling to other third world countries.  It has fought several wars in the past half century against the world's largest democracy, which also happens to be one of the USA's largest trading partners.  This country even harbored Osama bin Laden in the past, and there are credible rumors that he is hiding out in this country's remote mountainous north even now.  And now...

The 12 Days of the 2000 Election...

(We can laugh about it now... heck, it seemed funny even then... of course we didn't know just how bad things would get...)

Anyway... [blowing note on pitch pipe]

Mike Huckabee is making push poll calls in NH as well as Iowa... or at least something named "Common Sense on the Issues" is making them on his behalf.  These are positive push polls... if you say you're not voting for Huckabee, you are (if you don't hang up first) eventually subjected to a series of what would seem like positive talking points if you were a rightwinger.  (To a leftist like me, they mostly sounded bad, aside from the fact that he recently renewed his vows to his wife of 30 years.)  The call came from someone or something called "PS 07" @ 703-378-2990.  I don't know why they contacted me, since Timothy Horrigan is a somewhat well-known partisan Democrat.  

Hillary Clinton was justifiably ridiculed by John Edwards for saying she was moving into "General Election" mode even though (as she herself points out in her speech) no votes have been cast yet. But her speech at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH did feature her in General Election mode.  

I live three blocks away from the Whittemore Center, the University of New Hampshire's hockey rink, so I ducked out early from my monthly DFA meetup to see the pre-debate hoopla for myself.

Even though we are fighting a war in Iraq, and even though the candidates are raising an alarm about "illegal aliens" and (with the exception of Huckabee) competing to see who will be the toughest about securing our borders, there was very little being done to prevent a terrorist from walking literally right up to the gate.

I was one of 500 or so citizens who managed to get themselves invited to see a preview of Michael Moore's "Sicko," 12 noon on Friday June 22.   I actually got invited twice — once by the Kucinich campaign (even though the event was ostensibly for "Undecided voters" only) and once by NARAL. Originally, it was supposed to be shown at the Palace Theater, an old vaudeville house in downtown Manchester.  When we arrived at the theater, we were told that the film would in fact be shown at a multiplex on the south side of town, so we all piled onto charter busses and headed out into Strip Mall Hell.  Part of me wondered if Dick Cheney was pulling a scam on us and that us 500 liberals would all end up on planes bound for Guantanamo.  But no, we really did go see the movie.

Why was Paris Hilton behind bars while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney still ran free? Even though she was guilty as hell, this still seemed grossly unfair.  Although it will seem unfair if Scooter Libby actually goes to jail.

This does at least means she will be unable to to invade Iran anytime soon.

Sen. Hillary Clinton came to Hanpton, NH on the Saturday before Tax Day and made two appearances in two very different venues. First, she visited Gary and Lenore Patton's home at brunchtime (although, showing how different she is from her husband, she showed no interest in the wonderful pastries in the Pattons' kitchen) and spoke to about 60 party activists (mostly local officials and/or two party committee members.) Then, she headed over to the local high school gym to address a boisterous gathering of at least 1500 citizens, in the now-traditional "Town Meeting" format with a boxing-ring-like stage in the center of the room.

The main point of both events was to establish that she is in fact electable.

W. Mitt Romney has been buying ad space on rightwing blogs, including GOPBloggers.org --- an unofficial pro-Republic Party blog which makes racist and sexist comments about Democratic Party candidiates.

Bush II's 2007 State of the Union speech came just a couple of weeks after his "21,500 Troops Speech" which called for a "surge" of a little more than 20,000 more troops in Iraq. (This oddly small number was chosen for the simple reason that no more troops were available.)

His Dubyaness decided to divert attention away from the quagmire in Iraq by addressing domestic priorities for the first time in his 6-plus-year reign.

John Edwards town hall in Portsmouth, NH: review by Timothy Horrigan

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