On “Community Organizers” and their worth…

Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin made history last night, as she addressed the RNC. In her speech, she (of the lifetime NRA membership) aimed barbed verbal ammunition at Barack Obama, though many reports indicated that she would not do so; so much for reciprocating his class-drenched gesture of reminding the press corps that he, too, was the child of a teen mother, and that they should back the muck off of Bristol Palin. I know, I get it– it’s the convention. It’s a pep rally, time to rile up the fans.

Palin displayed exquisite contempt while commenting on Obama’s past work as a “Community Organizer”; and yes, that’s exactly how she pronounced it, as if the words were too strangely shaped for her mouth, as if they should be chaperoned by quotes.

But, community Organizers do extraordinary things. If you don’t believe me, look here, at one of the most revered “Community Organizers”, ever:

gandhi.jpg

From last night’s performance:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.
And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

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DNC Day 4: Strangers in a Strange Land

Our whole time here, while we’ve been blogging, nobody has really asked Ravi or I what we do. I know what I am suggesting is silly. Why should they? We are Sepia Mutiny. We blog. A lot of them read the blog. What else is there other than that we are bloggers here to report? But that is not what we are and there is an important point here so bear with me. Blogging is just a hobby. It was created out of nothing four years ago and my personal objective was to gain access to this convention. Access to “power,” so that we could tell the story from the inside. We are still outsiders here though, both at the fundraising luncheons and in the press room where people keep bitching about how the celebrity press (Couric and Cooper) gets treated better. We are here because we claimed this spot. We wanted it bad enough because we see the potential our community has if they get more involved…and not by simply raising money. A life in politics where money is important isn’t the only way in.

Ravi is about to enter college at Harvard next week and major in applied math. I have degrees in aerospace engineering and geology. We are not bundlers, politicians, or journalists. We aren’t getting paid a dime for any of this and we aren’t asking for a dime for our posts. We are doing what we do because we have something to say and something we believe in. For those of you sitting at home watching the coverage and thinking you have to be rich or an important politician to participate in this process I’d like to point you to an article about the headline speaker tonight. Sometimes you just show up and think on your feet because you believe in yourself and what you want to do:

The Democratic National Convention is akin to a longstanding family reunion. And eight years ago, Barack Obama was not on the guest list… He was drained of money and confidence, fresh from a punishing defeat in a Congressional primary race here. Even the Illinois delegation did not have room at the party’s gathering in Los Angeles for Mr. Obama, then a 39-year-old lawyer, who had annoyed some state Democrats for not waiting his turn to seek a higher office.

Never mind all that. Mr. Obama bought a plane ticket and headed west anyway.

He persuaded a clerk at the car rental agency to overlook the unpaid balance on his credit card, and he made his way to the festivities. He was not a delegate — not even close to being a superdelegate — and without a floor credential he had all the sway of the junior state senator that he was.

“I have no memory of him there,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, recalled in an interview the other day. “It was a disastrous trip for him…”

When party activists gathered in Chicago to nominate Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996, Mr. Obama was making his first run for political office, but he did not have enough clout to get full access to the convention. Instead, he concluded that high-dollar breakfasts and dinners seemed to lock voters out of the system, grousing to a reporter, “The convention’s for sale, right?”… [Link]

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DNC Day 4: How’s business going?

Located on the 16th St. mall

I decided to take it easy today and stay away from the luncheons and the schmoozing. Instead, I paid a visit to Mt. Everest Imports on the 16th Street Mall area of downtown Denver (the extremely crowded area where all the hotels and businesses catering to conventioneers is located). Mt. Everest Imports is owned by a Nepali immigrant named Shyam Shrestha. I asked him how business was going since Mt. Everest did not seem to be selling any Obama gear (unlike every other store of any kind in the whole area). He told me it was going “very well.” The shop was totally empty. I told him my sister-in-law was Nepali and he opened up a little more and said he’d been there for about 10 years and gave me his business card. Still, with all the cheesy Obama memorabilia I’ve seen here I think Shyam would have done well for himself if he’d sell Buddhas with Obama’s head and the Buddha’s body. I’m just saying. Try and visit Shyam store when you are in Denver.

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Twas the night before…

I never went to journalism school and I haven’t taken a writing class since my freshman year of college (as I am sure is more than apparent to long time readers). Thus, I’ve been kind of flustered all day today (on the eve of one of SM’s biggest moments) as to how to prepare for THIS. If you know me then you know I am an obsessive, to the point of ridiculousness, preparer (which has actually served me well for my chosen profession). However, I don’t really know how to prepare for the responsibility we now have and neither does our young new blogger Ravi , who has already started blogging from Denver. He hasn’t even been to college yet! What the hell were they thinking letting us crash these gates?

I sat down tonight and started preparing dossiers (well…ummm…index cards) on some of the people we want to interview. We want SM readers to get some firsthand insight into who the South Asian Americans are that are going to this Convention, some serving as delegates. I’m also reading the book all those political types are reading so I can sound somewhat smart when I get there.

The logistics of the convention alone are a total nightmare. Venues are spread all over Denver. Luckily I lived in Colorado for two years so I remember some of the streets and have a place to crash with a friend. My flight gets in too late and I am going to miss the IALI Cocktail hour where all the South Asian Democrat big-wigs are going to be schmoozing, but Ravi will be there. Last Tuesday I put in a request to interview Joe Biden about his views on Pakistan. After Saturday morning’s big news I’m sure that’s not going to happen.

We just want you all to know that we are excited and we hope that you are excited too. We want to make this as participatory as possible so if you have story ideas or things you want to learn then hit us up and we will do our best to chase them down.

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Sepia Mutiny’s Tumblr and Twitter go Live

We here at Sepia Mutiny are always working (especially our sleep deprived admin Chaitan) behind the scenes to improve the site’s features, interactivity, and addictiveness. Thus, just in time for the Democratic National Convention, we are introducing two new SM features. The first is the new SM “shorts” site on our Tumblr page. This is the place where you can go to find small tidbits like quotes, pictures and videos that we are interested enough to want to blog, but might now have the time to write a full post about. It is in beta testing right now which means we are aware of a few issues (e.g. font colors, permalinks, etc.) that need to be worked out but we are on it. Both Ravi and I will be using this site A LOT while reporting from the convention so please visit it often this week. If I get to meet Fergie in Denver, for example, there will be a picture of us (but not of me touching any bumps) on our Tumblr site accompanied by a brief quote about how the meeting was a step forward for South Asian Americans in politics. Check us out:

The next feature we have added is an SM Twitter page. What’s Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. [Link]

Whenever there is an event of interest to the South Asian American community (and we have a blogger there) we will microblog the event with “tweets.” Anna has been doing this already for a while now. More importantly, if a group of you are headed to an event (independent of each other) SM can “follow” your Twitter pages. Thus, we hope to be able to capture and post a diversity of reactions to the same event via our new Twitter feed. If you are going to be at the DNC or RNC in the next two weeks and want to participate then please create your own Twitter page and then email us (abhi at sepiamutiny dot com). We will “follow” you through SM so other readers can virtually attend through your microblogging.

Lastly, we are finally, seriously, working on a major site re-design. We hope to seamlessly incorporate all these new features and a re-vamped News Tab into a new accessible (yet still mutinous) format.

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Denver or Minneapolis bound? Contact SM

If you are a South Asian American delegate, volunteer, politician, blogger, protester, anarchist, whatever and will be at the Democratic National Convention this week or the Republican National Convention the week after, please get in touch with us as soon as possible. Our blogging team is looking to talk to everyone we can find there in order to bring the full experience of these events to the online community. Please email me at abhi [at] sepia mutiny dot com ASAP.

If you know a friend going to either event and they don’t read/know about SM then please forward this to them. This is our chance to maximize the participation of the South Asian American community and every person that attends these events will have a unique experience that we’d like to share.

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Why Joe Biden? Answer: Pakistan

As everybody and their mother now knows, Obama’s Vice Presidential running mate will be Senator Joesph Biden of Delaware. Very clever of Obama to wait the whole week, gathering the cell phone numbers of thousands of potential supporters wanting to be the “first to know” via text message (well eat it guys because this post is up even before you got your lousy text message…at ~3:30 a.m. EST). His campaign now has the ability to send get-out-the-vote texts to thousands of young and new voters, many of them who don’t even keep land lines and are traditionally hard to reach on election day. Anyways, we here at Sepia Mutiny have of course written about Joe Biden’s predilection for verbal gaffes before (see Donutgate here and here), which is probably his greatest weakness. However, it is no doubt his considerable strengths that led Obama to choose him as the running mate. Here Obama, in his own words, describes what he was looking for:

“Obviously, the most important question is, is this person prepared to be president? Second-most-important question, from my perspective, is: Can this person help me govern? Are they going to be an effective partner in creating the kind of economic opportunity here at home and guiding us through some dangerous waters internationally? And the third criteria for me, I think, was independence. I want somebody who is going to be able to challenge my thinking and not simply be a yes-person when it comes to policymaking…” [Link]

Biden walking with Kerry and Nawaz Sharif near Lahore earlier this year

Arguably, the most dangerous waters to be waded through internationally in the next few years will be the tribal areas of Pakistan and it’s border with Afghanistan. There is probably no one in the Senate who knows more about these issue than Biden. In fact, remember this article I blogged about last November:

President Pervez Musharraf and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto each placed telephone calls from Pakistan to Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to discuss the country’s crisis before either talked to President George W. Bush.

On Saturday, Bhutto stressed to Biden the need for parliamentary elections in January with Gen. Musharraf remaining as president but leaving the army. Musharraf called Biden Tuesday and asked that their conversation be kept confidential. Biden got the impression Musharraf could accept January elections although he had triggered the crisis by suspending the constitution. [Link]
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Mutinous Fashion: T-shirts for the political season

A few weeks back I offered a challenge to SM readers: Design t-shirts for me to wear at the Democratic National Convention next week and I’d buy them from you and publicize them:

design a t-shirt that features a political or social (but non-partisan) message and I can order it using Café Press, Threadless, or one of many other internet t-shirt companies. Send me the design at abhi [at] sepiamutiny dot com. I will narrow it down to the best entries and have SM readers vote on the finalists. I will be at the convention for three full days so I will purchase up to three winning t-shirts to wear on the floor. The more clever/funny/relevant/socially conscious your t-shirt, the more likely it is to grab attention and communicate your message to all the varied citizens expected to be in Denver

Well, a handful of you did take up the challenge (and I thank you)…but none to my satisfaction. What can I say, I am very hard to please and my standards are quite high (as the interns at our North Dakota headquarters know all too well). The response was also much less enthusiastic than I had hoped for. Thus, the always creative Manish and I joined forces once again (he did co-found SM in case you forget) to come up with our own original designs to sell to you all. Below are two that I will be sporting at the convention next week. These two are ready for sale now, but a few others will go on sale as early as next Monday, exclusively through SM and Ultrabrown.

Hopefully everyone understands the references but if not remind yourself here and here. Tell your friends.

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Razib on Reihan + Grand New Party (updated)

Razib beat me to the punch in profiling the rising desi-pundit Reihan Salam. We first mentioned Reihan on SM a few years ago when he, as a blogging neophyte, held a guest spot on Daniel Drezner’s prominent blog & raved about PunjabiMC and H&K. Since then, his footprint has grown both through his own blog as well as via coauthoring a provocative new book, Grand New Party which advocates a sort of Natalism to “save” the Republican Party.

Reihan classifies himself as

Rawlsekian neoconservative singulatarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberal incrementalist.

SM Favorite Razib heard Reihan speak recently and characterized him this way

WITNESSING Reihan Salam speak off-the-cuff feels like some intensely demanding, habit-forming new spectator sport. While he’s in full rapid-fire, animated flow, the rapt listener remains completely engrossed, delighted by his insights, analysis, and wide-ranging references, wowed by his effortless formulations and disarmed by his wry asides.

…So, who is Reihan Salam? If you don’t know of him yet, you will. Salam is an American-born son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Harvard graduate, prominent political blogger and journalist, and now co-author of a serious and fast-selling political manifesto Grand New Party.

To add that he also blogs about pop culture doesn’t begin to describe the man’s breadth or curiosity. He has long posted original poetry and rap lyrics on the web and steeped himself in pop music, both Japanese and Anglophone.

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