Cleveland rocks!

I've just arrived in Ohio where I'm hoping to help the Hillary Clinton campaign out of business. I'll be helping Barack Obama with the door-to-door canvassing operation until next Tuesday.
Good thing I'm not alone...thousands of out-of-state volunteers have traveled to Ohio to help out the locals. The locals know a lot better how to deal with the snow and temperatures in the 20's though.

I'm taking lots of pictures, but I forgot a cable I need to upload them, so I'll be posting those next week after I get home.

Meanwhile on the home front I'm very pleased with the fact that no Cabarrus County Republican will be running unopposed this election!
You can check who all the candidates are by following this link.

More to come soon!

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The Clinton's are funny?

As you know, and you might be sick of hearing me talk about it by now, I'm an Obama fan.
However, I'm not one of those people who support Obama because they think Hillary is just a "B***".
I respect her, but I think Obama is by far the better candidate.

That being said I wanted to share some humor out of the Clinton campaign with you all. The problem is that none of this was meant to be funny.

First of, a supporters' YouTube video that's meant to counter the many stirring Obama videos that have reached millions of young people by now.
Judge for yourself, but I think it inspires me almost as much as a rusty doorknob does. It has a very high "Up with People" level.



Then we also learned that Bill Clinton argues that Hillary has done excellent in the primaries, considering that she is "operating on a shoestring". She raised $140 million.

I hereby volunteer to drive Bill Clinton around in some areas in Rock Hill, SC, where I was campaigning for Obama during the SC primary. I visited people there that lived in totally dilapidated houses with "port-a-potties" by the side of the road because they didn't have any sewer access. I'll let them explain to Mr. Clinton what a shoestring budget really is.

Calling $140 million for a political campaign a shoestring budget is the kind of Washington-speak we have tolerated too long. It's time for a change of the guard.

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Monday blues: November edition

A very quick and short "Monday blues" feature this week. With all this primary stuff going on I haven't had much time to look for funny videos, but I didn't want to withhold the one I did find.

Note: If you get my posts through certain RSS readers or in your e-mail you might have to go to the website to watch video's.

You might have seen the following music video about Barack Obama. It was made by Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed peas and you'll see several musicians and celebrities participate in it. The reason you might have seen it is that it apparently gets about 1 million views a day on YouTube. You can watch a high quality version of the video by following this link.



The McCain "straight talk" campaign has it's own version of this, but it's just a tad bit less inspiring. Makes you think about the November contest :-)


Have a great week at work!

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Why doesn't it pay to recycle in Cabarrus County?

There was a lot to do recently about a pretty big hike in the fee for garbage pick up as Allied Waste Services added curbside recycling services for County residents that live outside the Concord and Kannapolis city limits.

Allied Waste added the recycling service for the unincorporated portions of the county at the specific request of the Cabarrus County Commission.
I'm one of the customers who now has to pay 43% more for my garbage pick up. While I love finally being able to recycle, I think something is not quite right.

My family of 3 members puts out a full recycling bin once a week, next to a big 95 gallon rolling cart with exactly one garbage bag in it. One of my neighbors down the street, who lives alone, doesn't recycle at all and puts her big rolling cart overflowing with garbage bags (usually the lid can't be closed) on the same curb.
The problem I have is that we both pay the exact same amount for our garbage collection.

Apparently nobody on the County Commission has ever heard of the internationally well known and accepted "the polluter pays principle".
Besides the "good feeling" you get from doing something positive for the environment, why should anyone recycle when it takes a lot more time and effort and your neighbor, who just pollutes away, only has to pay the same amount you do?

In a letter I received from Allied Waste Services, which was sent out after they received numerous complaints from customers about the raise in fees, they say that one of the main reasons they added the curbside recycling was that

"Cabarrus County wishes to encourage more residents to recycle in order to better protect our environment".

Can someone explain to me how you are encouraging residents to recycle by having them pay more and ask them to invest more time and effort at the same time? Basically you're asking people to work harder for something they have to pay more for.

What's even worse is that people who say they can't afford to pay 43% more for their garbage pick up will now start dumping their trash everywhere or just burning it in their yard. Why not tell people they won't have to pay more if they participate in the recycling program? Let the people, who are too lazy to get of their butts and just want to dump all their trash in one pile, pick up the slack for everyone who does care about the environment.

Also, I don't see anyone talking about the fact that all that recycled material is worth money. I'm sure companies pay Allied Waste Services for their cans, paper and glass, because all that stuff is raw material for an industrial process.
So I'm pretty sure that Allied Waste is getting extra money from 2 ends now. We pay more for their services while at the same time providing them with more material they can sell to other companies.
Why not include the proceeds from the collected recyclable material in to consideration when Allied Waste Services rates are determined? One good example for this I found in the State of Washington where they require this.

Once again logic seems missing in Cabarrus County government.

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My trip to Chicago; adventures in Obamaland

This past weekend I flew to Chicago to help a Belgian TV News crew make a report on the Barack Obama campaign. As you might know, Chicago is Obama's hometown and it's here that his political campaign started.
We visited the National Obama Volunteer headquarters and went to the communities where Obama was a community organizer some 25 years ago.

When I landed, the contrast between Charlotte and Chicago couldn't have been any bigger. In Charlotte it had been a balmy 60 degrees, in Chicago it was 30 and there was at least 10 inches of snow on the ground. The skyscrapers were hidden in a dense, low hanging cloud cover and it gave the whole city a weird kind of atmosphere.

After checking in to our downtown hotel we only had to walk a few blocks to reach the National Obama Volunteer Headquarters on W. Adams Street.
From the sidewalk it looked like any normal entrance to a huge office building and there was not one sign mentioning Obama. After making sure we were at the right address we took the elevator to the 10th floor. As soon as the doors opened there was a sight to behold.

The whole 10th floor of this building was filled with hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, almost as far as the eye could see. There were volunteers sitting behind rows of computers and the rest of them were just sitting on ever chair and in every corner they could find making phone calls all over the country, From California to Tennessee. I picked up a list of voters and a calling script as well and made some calls into New Mexico.

The whole operation seemed very professionally organized while at the same time having a fun and personal vibe. There was a childcare corner where little kids were making the well known Obama symbol with finger paints and on the other side of the building was a store selling all the popular Obama merchandise, there was also a buffet style kitchen where everyone could pick up a slice of pizza (there were about a dozen different kinds) and a drink. Speeches of Obama and the latest election news were projected on big screens.

People kept pouring in and out by droves, picked up a list of voters at the big front desk and started making calls.
It was easy to make friends, especially after I mentioned that i was a volunteer with the campaign in SC.
It quickly became clear that the campaign isn't spending much time and energy on Chicago and the state of Illinois, Obama out-polls Hillary by a 2 to 1 margin here, but is using the big pool of volunteers here to make a difference elsewhere in the country.

I was very impressed with the enormity of the operation, these headquarters are open 24 hours, but after a few hours we had to leave the HQ and head for bed, tomorrow was going to be a long and busy day.

The next morning we followed Obama's path he described in his book "Dreams from My father", in which he talks about his work in the late 80's on the south side of Chicago as a community organizer.
If you haven't read the book yet, I highly recommend it, even if you're not a big Obama fan. It's a very human story about the struggles of a multiracial person trying to figure out where he belongs.

We had set up a meeting with the Reverend Dr. Alvin Love of Lilydale First Baptist Church. Dr. Love was one the people who hired Barack Obama in 1985 to start working for a new community organization called "Developing Communities Project" or DCP for short.
The DCP still exists today and Dr. Love is now the President of the organization.
You can find a lot more about Obama's time there in the "Dreams from My father" book and there are also some interesting online articles about it.

Reverend Love turned out to be a very inspiring man. The TV crew had me interview him on camera and I came away with a much better sense of what makes Barack Obama tick and where he gets his drive.
I asked Dr. Love, who still talks to Obama regularly, if the thought that politics had changed Obama at all. His answer was refreshing:

"I don't think politics have changed him, he's only gotten better at what he used to do here and he does it on a much larger scale."

I also asked him if the US are "ready for a black president" and once again the answer was refreshing.

"Let me answer that in 2 parts. I think that the challenges and problems we face in this country by far transcend any question about race and gender and my second answer would be, ready or not, Here he comes!".

My final question was if Dr. love thought that Barack's work here 25 years ago had made a difference.

"Oh there's no doubt, our crime rate is down and back then I didn't even know the name of the pastor of the church 2 blocks down from here. Now we all know each other, talk and meet all the time and fight together for our neighborhood."

It was nice to have confirmed that Obama really is the candidate who brings people together to face the challenges of the future.

After the interview we stayed for the very lively church service, with a lot of gospel signing and great music.

We closed off the day and our stay in Chicago by walking around in "Altgeld Gardens", the first public housing project in the United States, built in 1945. It was especially this area where Obama focused his effort in the 80's.
There were Obama signs everywhere, because the folks that live here know what a difference Barack Obama can make. I'm hoping the rest of the US catches on as well.




If you want to see the Belgian TV news report, you can do so by following this link. Mind you, most of the report is in dutch, so you won't understand a lot of it, but you can at least enjoy the images. You will see the whole news broadcast, but if you fast forward to the 18 minutes and 30 second mark you'll see my report.

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