Steeltown Blues:
Aliquippa Is
Fired Up and
Ready To Go

By Carl Davidson
Progressives for Obama

carld717@gmail.com

You knew something special was happening when the youngest, freshest face in the room got up, took charge and called the meeting to order-"Hello, I'm Scout Sanders, and welcome to the first meeting of Aliquippa for Obama!'

Sanders was a full-time Obama volunteer, a student from the University of Connecticut, and her bright smile and enthusiasm brightened up a room of about 30 residents of Aliquippa and a few other nearby towns.  Those who came were all ages, from young teenagers to retired workers in their seventies, a little more than half were African American, about two-thirds were women...

This is a reply to important questions on influencing the Obama campaign, from David Hamilton (MDS, Austin, TX), posed last week on our ‘Progressives for Obama’ yahoo group email list.  --Carl Davidson, webmaster, 'Progressives for Obama, '

Battleground Reports:
Getting ‘Progressive Clout’
in the Obama Movement

By Carl Davidson
Progressives for Obama

How do progressives and antiwar voters increase their influence within the Obama campaign?  

The place to start is where you are, by working on expanding your own influence among local voters, building or creating new local grassroots groups, and winning these voters to take part in them or be in communication with them in various ways. The rule here is that most politicians, including Obama, pay attention mainly to organized voters and organized money. Since the later isn't our forte, work on the former. Then...

On this day in 1967, I was preparing to take the written and road tests for my first driver’s license. Several members of the Senior Class at The Dalles High School, including a few of my friends, were enlisting for military service in hopes of finding a better assignment than they would as draftees as the war in Vietnam raged.

There had been a demonstration that year in my school, which included a student walk out and sit in, but it wasn’t about issues of war and peace. A student publication had been banned from campus, and its editors suspended from school, for including articles critical of the Principal and school board policies.