Amber Coggin, fellow Twitterer from Alabama, also created a tag cloud of President Bush’s farewell speech, which I thought was appropriate to link here as well:

Chris, Michael, and I are pleased to announce the launch of a new site today: PublicSentiment.net!

PublicSentiment.net is part of a larger effort to capture public sentiment on the web, but specifically to reveal the spectrum of people’s unedited, raw opinions about certain current affairs. We picked up on this idea during the election when we felt the media’s reporting hardly reflected people’s nuanced sentiments about politics. We were sure that people weren’t divided among quite such arbitrary lines (the Reds and the Blues), and we wanted people’s individual voices to be heard.

Right now we have two major public events that are gathering a lot of the media’s attention again: President Bush’s term is over and President Obama’s term is beginning! What a great opportunity to expand the coverage of opinions to everyday citizens!

We encourage you to read what others have already contributed to our site, bidding a farewell to W and aloha to Obama. And we invite you to write an aloha or farewell yourself.

Please give us feedback and share the site with others! Thank you for your interest!

And this sentiment is reflected in this week’s words (for the week ending on November 9, 2008). CHANGE. OBAMA.

I hope we can all agree that we want to live in a country where we are moving toward, not away from, greater acceptance of all differences, whether they be political, racial, religious, cultural, or otherwise.

To achieve this, we must vote *NO* on California’s Proposition 8 and vote *FOR* equality for everyone!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last night I had my Obama sign torn down and my sign for our district Congressional hopeful, Jeff Morris, burned. Yes, burned with melted plastic all over my lawn. This illustrates a huge difference between the right and left. We believe in free speech and would never think of doing such a thing. Yes, it may be a fringe on the right but it is there. That being said, it has motivated me even more than Sarah Palin has to get Barack elected.

I encourage you all to do something, anything. Give money, write letters to ed., register voters, canvas neighborhoods, etc. The future of America depends on it.

I can’t seem to find a single thing about Sarah Palin that I relate to.

So when a friend of mine circulated this note (via email) today, I thought I would post it in response to my disgust and dismay from yesterday (the bold text is mine). And apparently in the last seven days, the Women Against Sarah Palin have received personal notes from 60,000 women! Take that, you desperate housewives!

From the email and original call to action:

Friends, compatriots,

We are writing to you because of the fury and dread we have felt since the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Republican Party. We believe that this terrible decision has surpassed mere partisanship, and that it is a dangerous farce-on the part of a pandering and rudderless Presidential candidate—that has a real possibility of becoming fact.

Perhaps like us, as American women, you share the fear of what Ms. Palin and her professed beliefs and proven record could lead to for ourselves and for our present or future daughters. To date, she is against sex education, birth control, the pro-choice platform, environmental protection, alternative energy development, freedom of speech (as mayor she wanted to ban books and attempted to fire the librarian who stood against her), gun control, the separation of church and state, and polar bears. To say nothing of her complete lack of real preparation to become the second-most-powerful person on the planet.

We want to clarify that we are not against Sarah Palin as a woman, a mother, or, for that matter, a parent of a pregnant teenager, but solely as a rash, incompetent, and all together devastating choice for Vice President. Ms. Palin’s political views are in every way a slap in the face to the accomplishments that our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers so fiercely fought for, and that we’ve so demonstrably benefited from.

First and foremost, Ms. Palin does not represent us. She does not demonstrate or uphold our interests as American women. It is presumed that the inclusion of a woman on the Republican ticket could win over women voters. We want to disagree, publicly.

Therefore, we invite you to reply here: womensaynopalin@gmail.com with a short, succinct message about why you, as a woman living in this country, do not support this candidate as second-in-command for our nation.

Please include your name (last initial is fine), age, and place of residence. We will post your responses on a blog called ‘Women Against Sarah Palin,’ which we intend to publicize as widely as possible. Please send us your reply at your earliest convenience—the greater the volume of responses we receive, the stronger our message will be.

Thank you for your time and action. VIVA!

Sincerely, Ellen Rosten
womensaynopalin@gmail.com

Christopher and I have been feeling strongly that we need to do something to bring this country back on track. (Specifically, get Obama elected.) In all likelihood, California will go to Obama, but we are bordered by the “battleground” state of Nevada, which also appears to be a high “return on investment” state (according to FiveThirtyEight.com). We noticed that the local Obama campaign was looking for volunteers to make calls to Nevada, so we decided to spend a few hours last Saturday volunteering our time.

I’ve never phone-banked before and I never thought I’d be good at it. In fact, I was not good at it. But we also had an interesting experience. Instead of calling to get people to vote or to talk to them about Obama’s issues, we were simply taking a poll of who they were likely to support in November. Apparently this is the tactic at this stage of the game (we were not leaving voicemails)—this is still considered “early on,” I guess. By assessing people’s support, they said we would have a better idea of how Nevada would vote than the weekly polls announced by other groups. Furthermore, we could ask voters what issues were most important for them, relay this info to Obama headquarters, who could then target advertisements locally addressing these issues. In theory, it sounds great and makes a lot of sense.

In practice, I’m not sure exactly what we accomplished on Saturday. Our local office may have had as many as 3,000 voters names from the Public Database of Voters. Among the 20-some volunteers that day, we placed calls to everyone within 2-3 hours. I can really only report on my experience, and a bit of the experiences Christopher reported to me—surely, other people had better (more promising?) experiences?

The large majority of people I called didn’t even answer the phone. This could be because they were busy (mid-day on Saturday) or because I was calling from my personal cell phone and they might have screened their calls. Most of the people on my list were “independents” or “non-partisans”; probably less than 2% were “democrat” or “republican.”

When people did answer, many of them hung up the phone as soon as they heard that I was volunteering with the Obama campaign. (This discouraged me.) Two or three snickered and said things like, “And what might you be calling about?” I only connected with a few people who were willing to have a three minute conversation about what their issues were. One said illegal immigration. One said Obama is talking a lot of talk, but she can’t see how he will execute. One said he was disappointed with both candidates, but would be confident he will have made up his mind by November. One said he’s voting for “anyone but Obama” and promptly slammed down the receiver. One woman seemed wholly disenchanted—she was leaving the country for a vacation, didn’t care about absentee voting, and basically was just ignoring everything that is going on in politics. I only spoke to two people who said they were definitely voting for Obama, and one of them somehow made up for all the negative feelings I had that day. I don’t even remember his name anymore, but he said that he was about to start getting paid full-time to work for the Obama team in Nevada. Yay!

At the end of the day, I felt that I didn’t learn much about Nevada voters. True, I was mostly talking to folks who were undecided, but even then, I didn’t get much information from them that I thought could be used by the local Obama team in a positive way. Since most people didn’t answer the phone or refused to talk to me, I didn’t even get a sense of the overall political vibe in Nevada. In fact, a few people were annoyed that they have been called several times recently; some asked to be taken off our list. How is this type of semi-intrusive calling actually benefitting Obama’s cause?

This post is really meant to document my experiences phone-banking last weekend. I may do it again, though I don’t think I am very good at cold-calling like this. I do want to encourage other Obama supporters to find some way to get involved, though. Perhaps after another few weeks, the tone of the phone calls will change in a way that we can better connect with voters. But perhaps we should instead focus on getting people registered to vote. A short day-trip to Reno, Nevada, close to the SF Bay Area, could prove to be enormously useful.

I found these tips about voter registration deadlines (in Nevada). Anybody want to take a day trip with me in the next few weekends of September?

Nevada does not provide for online voter registration, but you can do it by mail with this downloadable voter registration application. You can register in person at Nevada DMV offices, university campuses, some social services agencies, and county clerk / registrar of voters offices. In Washoe County, go to Registrar of Voters, 1001 E. Ninth St., P.O. Box 11130, Reno, NV 89520-0027.

General Election [registration deadline]: October 4, 2008, if you register to vote by mail. October 14, 2008, if you register to vote in person.

Nevada provides for early voting; general election early voting begins October 18. Early voting locations and polling places for the regular election are provided on sample ballots mailed to registered voters. If you don’t receive this information or want to confirm that you are registered to vote, call the Washoe County Elections and Voter Registration Center at (775) 328-3670.