Tuesday, May 6th - Primarily Cluttered Mind pt. 2

Okay, here is the rest of the weekend. You can find pt 1 here. You may want to read that first, because some of it referenced here.

Saturday - Errands and Freezing My Ass Off for Hillary - Saturday was my normal laundry day, with the added joy of being slightly hung over and very tired. After that, I went plant shopping to fill the pots that I had purchased the week before. I bought a number of colorful plants, along with two basils, rosemary, and garlic (yes, I'm growing garlic!). I still have one more window box and a barrel to fill, and I'm probably going to call on Tyler to help me fill those with something funky.

The funny thing is that as I was standing on my balcony, which is festooned with Hillary posters, minding my own business and planting, two Obama canvassers came around to my apartment building. As they moved towards the door, they gave me the DIRTIEST look like I'm some sort of Communist or Socialist, not a fellow member of the Democratic Party. Ya'll really need to get over it, because I was planning on waving and being polite.

After getting cleaned up, I met Blanche and Mom at Olly's, so that we could walk over to the Hillary rally. The temperature had dropped continuously during the day, and while we had a blanket, none of us were really dressed for the weather. Once we got there, the line was already tremendously long, going up and down parking garage ramps and all over the White River State Park, which is where The Lawn concert venue is located.

At the party the previous night, Blanche had obtained two yellow passes into the venue, and after talking with someone else we knew from the party, we were able to get a third for Mom, not really knowing what they meant. There were two other passes available, blue and red, and we quickly discovered that blue was just a ticket, red indicated that you would definitely get in and be close to the stage, and yellow was going to put us on STAGE! Woo hoo! I had a stack of red passes, three that I was saving for Liberty, Stella, and Stan, and the rest I proceeded to distribute to people around me and other gay guys I recognized.

Around 6:30 (we'd been there since 5:45ish), the line started to move forward towards the security checkpoint. It was so cold. It was very nice to just get behind a building. We made it through security pretty easily (though if forgot about my metal pack of Altoid Mini's), and we made our way along the line indicated for the yellow tickets.

My excitement for the fact that we would be in the bleachers on stage was tempered a bit when I saw a ghost from my past sitting in an unavoidable position on stage. My ex! Ugh... I don't know how or why he was able to get a hold of those tickets, but trust me, he was the last person I wanted to see.

Anyway, we proceeded to take our seats and freeze our asses off for a couple of hours. Around 7:30/8:00 they started to wheel out visiting stars, which included a lot of politicians from other states and people from Hollywood. We got to see Ted Dansen, Mary Steenburgen, Sean Astin, and Rob Reiner.

Then we, the people on the stage, saw that Hillary had arrived, and it was then that Sen. Evan Bayh came out to introduce John Mellencamp, who sang his song "Our Country." After that, Evan introduced Hillary, and they were trying to stall because Bill Clinton was en route. He finally got there, and he spoke a bit before handing the mic over to Hillary. It very much felt like a rock concert, and if anyone saw clips of it on CNN, I was the guy in the red jacket directly behind her, jumping up and down with a yellow sign that said "Job, Jobs, Jobs" on it.

It was a pretty surreal evening, but I am glad we went to it!

Wednesday, April 30th - Hump Day Wrap Up

I didn't post today because I really didn't have that much to say. Plus, it was the last day of the month, which means I needed to finish some things before the dreaded report cycle begins again.

Anyway, after thinking that this coming weekend would be a low key one, which I was really hoping for because I literally have something happening every weekend after that until late June, I found out that it was not to be the case. I really should have known better since it is the weekend before the primary, but hey, this is all new to this slack jawed yokel.

Anyway, after forcing myself to go to the gym last night, taking a shower there (which I loath), and then going directly to karaoke, I met up with the Mean Girls (minus Maestro but adding Brooklyn), and we proceeded to have our normal Tuesday night out. Then Sebastian, my friend with the Clinton Campaign, came in with invitations to a party on Friday in support of LGBT Hoosiers for Hillary. There goes the low key weekend!

On top of having the party at a local socialites house, we will have two special guests, which may not be the biggest named stars in the world, but it is a nice thing to have people to add some pizazz to the night. We have Ronnie Kroell (Make Me a Supermodel) and Ellen Greene (Little Shop of Horrors and Pushing Daisies), and frankly, I loved both those shows. Hell, the only reason I watched Make Me a Supermodel is because I thought Ronnie was HOT, and Little Shop of Horrors is one of the earliest live action movies I remember going to see with my family. Ellen played Audrey (not the plant), and now she plays one of the Aunt Vivian on Pushing Daisies, which was one of my favorite shows before the writer's strike cut the season short.

So this party will be my next Adventure in Hillaryland, and then on Saturday night, Hillary is making an appearance with John Mellencamp on The Lawn at White River State Park in the heart of Downtown Indy.

Below are pictures of Ronnie and Ellen. Take a wild guess which one I'm adding to my (not so) regular feature of Beefcake of the Week:

Thursday, April 25th - Adventures in Hillaryland - The Kickoff and The Handshake

I'm going to have to apologize to my regular blog readers because until May 6th this blog is probably going to be wall to wall politics. The baseline fact is that Indiana's Primary has not had any political significance for 40 years. I know it may be shocking to some states that get burned out every four years on a steady diet of mailers and commercials, but I can barely remember the last time a major presidential candidate campaigned here, let alone sent me a mailer or put a commercial on a local station. Indiana has always been a fait accompli, but this year is different. We are pretty much ground zero for the campaign at this moment. As a political junky, I am going to revel in it, but I will be sure to make some normal posts now and then.

While Hillary and family have campaigned quite a bit in Indiana in the past few weeks, yesterday, in the warm sun of Downtown Indy, it felt like the major kick off to the actual campaign. Blanche and I had heard about it the day before, and we made plans to leave work and walk down to the rally. Yes, walk! I actually live about 12 blocks from where it took place, and frankly, it is still so weird to think how close these candidates are going to be to us over the next 13 days. Anyway, I left work about 11ish to meet Blanche at 11:30, and when I picked up my mail, I was greeted with the very first campaign mailer from the Clinton Campaign. It was one on NAFTA, and it brought up the whole flap of Obama's surrogates and Canada. Go Hill!

Anyway, as we walked down Meridian St (the main thoroughfare of Indy), we felt kind of silly with our pins and Hillary signs, but the closer we got to the American Legion Mall, we felt more comfortable around our kind of people. The American Legion Mall is a large green space in downtown that is flanked by the Central Public Library to the north and the World War Memorial to the south. Along it's edges are the World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War Memorials. And yes, not only was Indianapolis designed by a counterpart of Pierre L'Enfant, who designed Washington, D.C., but we also have the most war memorials of any other city in the country besides DC. So, basically, it was the perfect place to kick off a rally to win Indiana.

After getting through security and losing our signs to campaign staff who wanted to control the sight lines of the media, we settled in near the stage to wait until Hillary arrived. I was impressed with the number of gay people that I recognized, except for the gigantic, 6'6 dude who was standing near the dais obscuring all good camera angles. I appreciate people wanting to get there early and be up close, but frankly, if you're blocking the sun, you should be courteous and not take a prime place. It became a moot point anyway after Sebastian, a friend of ours who works on the campaign, moved us right up to the rope line where Hillary would walk in. Yes, we both got to shake her hand (that is my thumb in the picture). Alas, I don't have a good picture of her shaking my hand, because it is kinda hard to hold the camera, say hello, hold out your hand, and hit the button on said camera.

Anyway, I am not going to go into great detail about the speech, because it was your standard stump speech, but I am happy to see how well it integrates with the commercials that are currently playing. It all makes perfect sense the points she is trying to make and reinforce to the electorate, and I have to say that, even though the it was midday on a Wednesday, there was a large and enthusiastic crowd there. Hillary supporters are never going to be the raving chanters that promulgate around Obama, but please believe, they are equally as passionate in their support of this candidate. I will say this, I am forever struck by how brilliant this woman is. Her grasp of the issues are so far beyond any other candidate, that it is, frankly, an abomination that she doesn't have this nomination already. On top of that, she didn't mention her opponent once, but if you saw the coverage from Obama in Indiana, you can see he is already going negative.

All in all, it was a great day, and I am ready for more. Give 'em HELL, Hillary! We're here for you!

Thursday, April 17th - Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!

As my post from yesterday stated, it was a pretty crappy day. I don't know if it was a my nerves about the Out for Hillary Debate Party that Blanche and I were throwing last night, or if it was just a general sense of burnout with my job, I think it was probably a mix of both. To alleviate the burn out, I decided at the last minuted to take Thursday and Friday off, which is the main reason I'm not blogging until now, and even though I've been to work for a little bit to do some things, I am generally happy with being on a pseudo-vacation.

I left work around 3:30, and I promptly fell on the couch and took as long of a disco nap as I could. Even though Wednesday is a designated skip day on the new workout plan and I was even a good boy and went to bed early on Tuesday, after a fun dinner with Sassafras, Guitar Hero, and American Idol. However, I was still exhausted out of my mind. Again, I think this may have been a symptom of the stress from work and the fear that the Out for Hillary event could either be a bust or a debacle of biblical proportions.

Around 6:00, I met up with Yoplait to pick up his karaoke equipment so we could have a sound system at Olly's. He runs Karaoke at the Metro on Tuesday nights and Olly's on Wednesday, but since we needed it earlier than he is normally there, I offered to pick it up. This didn't take very long, so I pulled up a stool at Olly's and started downing cup after cup of......coffee. Yeah, there was no way I was going to get trashed before the debate started (that came later). I just took a moment to organize my thoughts and just comfortable with what I was going to stay for my welcome message. I'm good at the public speaking thing. I've just found, that as I have aged, I tend to ramble if I do not plan things out. So, I definitely didn't want to do that. Blanche and Mom arrived shortly there after, and that is when the over all queasiness reached a fever pitch.

As we started to set up, we found out that Olly's had decided that we couldn't do anything overtly campaign oriented, which kinda negated the whole purpose of what we were doing. I know they were afraid of people being offended, even going so far as to hang signs next to ours stating their position (or non-position) on the race. However, I was taken a bit aback at the restrictions. Plus, I had heard that some Obama folks were planning to crash the party, and had even met at lunch that day to plan out their attack (ah, unity...gotta love it). After a few minutes of indecision, we decided to take over the largest booth in the place, and that became Clinton Country. It was then that I just decided to roll with it, and make do with what we have. Luckily, making do meant the bar was packed with Hillary supporters, and there was nary an Obama fan in sight. Everyone was respectful to each other's opinions, at least as far as I saw, and I made sure to point that out in my opening statement. The good thing about democracy is that you have a right to support whomever it is you choose, and while I would love it if everyone was a Hillary fan, I'm not going to fight with someone to change their mind.

I honestly didn't get a chance to see the entire debate because I was mingling and getting interviewed for a conservative blog (!), but I will make a few opinions about it. Barack Obama looked dead tired, and he didn't come off as the affable guy he purports to be. Yes, the moderators hammered him over seemingly trivial and non-policy related things (Rev. Wright, "Bitter," and William Ayers), but come on, do you think these things are just going to go away? They are going to be front and center in the General Election, and if he, as the chosen one, cannot answer them better than he did last night, then we are pretty much screwed! I'm being serious, too. That in and of itself is an decision the Superdelegates need to decide upon. Hillary, as usual, mopped the floor with him on the details. The woman is brilliant, and frankly, I would rather have a smart pragmatist at the helm in these tough times than a smart dreamer who thinks he's going to fix Washington on top of fixing all the problems in America. Something has to give!

All and all, the evening went amazingly well. We filled up Olly's, and we got confirmation from the staff that it was certainly not even close to a typical night. I have to think the owners will be happy with the rise in revenues. I just wish they had trusted us more. I certainly understand where they were coming from, but they made it pretty impossible for us to do anything. The thing that made the night for me was when an undecided person came over and thanked me for organizing this. Even though she is still not sold on Hillary, she was happy to see people taking charge and trying to energize the gay community. That to me, made it all worth while for me, and I am happy that it all turned out well.

I'm going to write more tomorrow about a group that spoke during one of the commercial breaks, The Indiana Fairness Network. Stay tuned!

Thursday, April 10th - Out for Hillary Debate Party

I've talked about this a bit before, but I just wanted to premier my poster artwork for it. I'm pretty happy with it. Especially since I was completely blocked until last night. So, not bad for 24 hour design work. The party is a week from tonight.

Click to Embiggen...

Friday, April 4th - Adventures in Hillaryland - The Visit

Even though it is almost a week after the fact, I am finally here to document the visit that Hillary Clinton made to the west side of Indianapolis last Saturday. For someone as politically inclined as me, it is pretty amazing that this is the first time in 32 years of life I have ever attended a campaign rally, but when you take into consideration that presidential candidates have avoided Indiana like a two headed step sister for 40 years, then it really isn't all that surprising.

The event started at 10am, but the doors were opening at 8:00. Blanche and I decided we should get there at 7, after I emphatically said there was no way in hell that I was going to get there at 6. Ben Davis High School is one of the largest high schools in Indianapolis. So, I figured, even if there was a large crowd, we would still be able to get into the arena without any problems. By the time we got there, there was already a pretty long line, and unfortunately, it was very cold. However, despite the cold, it was evident that there was a lot of excitement in the crowd to see Hillary. Of course, this may have been because there were enterprising individuals walking up and down the line selling buttons and tshirts ("Get Your ICE Cold Tshirts Here!). Outside of the soccer mom behind us who insisted on talking baby talk (you okay, gorgeous) to her, at least, 6 year old, it was a pretty pleasant experience.

At 8:00, the line finally started to move inside, where we were met with what was basically a smaller form of airport security. Just as with the airport, there were some lines moving fast and others moving like a 90 year old man. I made Blanche jump lines so we could get in quicker, which was pretty funny because some other guys that were ahead of us were sill standing in line when we had our seat and I had come back out to use the restroom. As you walked in, almost every 5 feet, there were Ben Davis students trying to get you sign up to volunteer. It was great to see, but it was pretty annoying to hear it that much, especially since we were already signed up. When we entered the arena, we saw some of the volunteers that we met at the first meeting, and they let us get seats on the floor about 20 feet from the state. SWEET! All in all, we were pretty much in our seats by 8:30, which meant an hour and a half of just sitting around watching the local media make fools out of themselves interviewing some of the more crazily attired people in the audience. Oh, and I had to sit next to a pudgy 10 year old who was more concerned about filling his gaping maw than watching Hillary, and since the chairs were very close together, if he had elbowed my kidneys one more time, he would have been launched at the Secret Service.

It was 10:15 before Joe Hogsett, Indiana Chair for the Clinton Campaign, came out to start the cavalcade of introductions, and while Clinton supporters will never be the zombie chanters like the Obama folks, the excitement in the room was wonderful. It was great to see people of all ages and backgrounds standing up and cheering for Hillary. This to me was the best part of the whole thing. Since I am such a political junky, I have heard pretty much every iteration of her stump speech, and since I have seen and shook hands with her before, I was much more interested in gauging the crowd reaction. There were a lot of great questions from the crowd in the town hall portion of the event, and it just struck me again just how brilliant this woman is, which leads me to being extremely annoyed that she has not sewed this all up already. There was one gentleman who was physically shaking at the opportunity to read a letter that he head written. He was coming from the standpoint of a deeply Christian man who gets some ridicule for supporting a Democrat. He compared her to Esther from the Bible, and Hillary was obviously moved by his story. That moment was pretty much a great summation to a wonderful event.

Celebrating Women: A Note from Dr. Maya Angelou

I will not get to my update on Adventures in Hillaryland, but since Blanch and I are going to the opening of the main Clinton office tonight, I will just wrap those up into one.

With that in mind, I want to repost a blog entry from HillaryClinton.com by Maya Angelou:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

This is not the first time you have seen Hillary Clinton seemingly at her wits end, but she has always risen, always risen, much to the dismay of her adversaries and the delight of her friends.

Hillary Clinton will not give up on you and all she asks of you is that you do not give up on her.

There is a world of difference between being a woman and being an old female. If you’re born a girl, grow up, and live long enough, you can become an old female. But, to become a woman is a serious matter. A woman takes responsibility for the time she takes up and the space she occupies.

Hillary Clinton is a woman. She has been there and done that and has still risen. She is in this race for the long haul. She intends to make a difference in our country.

She is the prayer of every woman and man who long for fair play, healthy families, good schools, and a balanced economy.

She declares she wants to see more smiles in the families, more courtesies between men and women, more honesty in the marketplace. Hillary Clinton intends to help our country to what it can become.

She means to rise.

She means to help our country rise. Don’t give up on her, ever.

In fact, if you help her to rise, you will rise with her and help her make this country a wonderful, wonderful place where every man and every woman can live freely without sanctimonious piety, without crippling fear.

Rise Hillary.

Rise.

Tuesday, March 25th - Adventures in Hillaryland

Yesterday, Blanche emails me to tell me that there will be an organizational meeting for Hoosiers for Hillary at 6:00 on Monday night. Regardless of the fact that it seems a bit disorganized to have a call for a meeting on the day of the meeting, we decide to get off our blog-hineys and actually go.

Blanche indicated that he was a bit apprehensive as to what we were getting ourselves into, and I told him that he didn't need to be. It was going to be a bunch of old women, and my main fear was that it was going to be a disorganized mess. Both of those things came to be true, but we are still going to do our best to help the cause.

When we arrived at the Steelworkers local shortly before 6, we were a bit underwhelmed by the location. I realize it is sometimes difficult for a campaign to get prime real estate for a short term lease, but to say that this location is in the armpit of Indianapolis, is like saying that Detroit is the garden spot of Michigan. It is not that it is an awful area, it is just very run down, and it doesn't exactly smack of confidence and renewal for America.

When we walked in we were greeted by a member of the Clinton campaign staff, though we didn't really know that until the meeting started, and as we walked into phone bank central, we were greeted by the aforementioned old women gathered around talking about Reverend Wright and how horrible MSNBC is to our girl. There was one other man there, sitting quietly off on the other side of the table. Both Blanche and I recognized him, so we're fairly certain he is a homosexual, but under the harsh lighting of a conference room, you never know if it is indeed someone you saw in the flattering lighting of the club.

We shuffled over to the other side of the table, and we tried to avoid eye contact with people so we would not be sucked into the conversation. It is not that they were not talking about important things, but they were talking the talk of people who do not read blogs as much as Blanche and I do. So, they are maybe about a week behind the news cycle. Plus, Blanche didn't want me getting into an argument over exactly why Evan Bayh will not be selected as Hillary's running mate.

The meeting started with introductions, and as you can imagine, it was a wide range of people. The head volunteer is actually a Republican for Hillary, who "came to Hillary" because she was the first candidate to actually explain why we needed universal health care in this country. I kept noticing in further conversations she kept harping on how fiscally conservative Hillary is, and I thought to myself that she might not be the best spokesperson for the cause. Of course, in this big red state, she might just be exactly what we need. There were actually two other Repubs there, too (one was a mid-twenties male!), which I think is something interesting to contemplate.

Outside of three girls in their 20s or 30s, most of the rest of the meeting was made up of women of a certain age, who kept coming back to the need for breaking the glass ceiling. While I will never begrudge anyone the validity of their support for a candidate, that being reason number one for supporting Hillary strikes me on the same level as someone voting for Obama just because he is black. There has to be more than that, and if these are the people who are going to door to door, they need to start with policy and end with the emotional need.

The meeting started to spin out of control when another gentleman, let's call him CO for community organizer, was wondering why the campaign wasn't talking about going into neighborhoods and attending or creating events to appeal to the electorate. CO was youngish, and I think he was taking umbrage to the overall old person bent of the discussions, which admittedly had been about going into nursing homes and getting the elderly to vote. His heart was in the right place, but the meeting, if it had been lead well, was mainly about getting people to man the phone bank, canvass door to door, and other odd jobs. He ended up getting in an argument with a Political Science professor (who oddly taught one of my classes in college) about not just making a push for the youth vote at colleges, because people like him have never nor never will step foot on a college campus (his words). Everyone was talking at once and over each other, and the staffer running the meeting looked like he was about to start cracking skulls.

The meeting finally reached the point of no return when a friend of CO spoke up. She was an African American woman in her 20s, and she admitted that she was still undecided over whether she was going to vote for Obama or Clinton, which made me wonder why she would come to a volunteer meeting for Clinton. Anyway, she wanted to know why she should choose Clinton, which caused more people to talk over each other. She then said something that set the feminist movement back 20 years, "I'm an emotional woman, and I can't imagine a president PMSing on the job." Blanche and I both thought it was time to jump for cover, until someone, thankfully, pointed out that PMS is probably not something Hillary, at her age, needs to worry about.

Let that sink in for a minute...

The meeting came to a close shortly after that. I can appreciate that the Clinton Campaign is trying to get the office up and running as quickly as possible, but I can't help but feel a little discouraged at just how disorganized it is. While I think they are doing an amazing job with Bill and Chelsea criss-crossing the state the past couple of days, to places like Logansport (my home town) that I am pretty sure haven't had a Presidential visit in a long time (if ever), they just seem to be a step behind on the ground game. When I offered some of my knowledge of Indiana and Indiana politics, I got the distinct impression that they plan on trucking in more campaign staff that really have no clue about Indiana and try to run a cookie cutter campaign. While I think your basic GOTV campaign can work to some extent here, I also know there are a lot of people like my parents, so disgruntled about telephone salespeople (even with a no-call list), if they do not recognize the number, they either don't answer it, or they will answer, then lay down the phone so the person is talking to dead air.

You need to be able to tread a line in Indiana. We're a lot more complex than the image of slack jawed yokels that most people have when they hear "Hoosiers." There is a lot of nuance in all the population, and if a campaign can harness that, they can win this state. I have high hopes that things will get on track here. There is certainly enough time, but come on, get your act together!