November 2024

There were 11 posts published in November 2024 (this is page 1 of 2).

Memories of Thanksgiving parades

I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on NBC this morning while preparing for our Thanksgiving meal. There were quite a lot of Broadway show excepts and pop performers, but there were also the marching bands (both high school and college). When I was in band in high school in the 1970s, the comic strip “Funky Winkerbean” had a character who was the band director at Funky’s high school. His name was Harry L. Dinkle, and was a great entertainment to me and several of my band friends. One year, Harry’s band was going to go to the Macy’s parade in New York City. Of course, they had many obstacles to overcome, but my memory is that they made it to New York, although they may have not marched in the parade. The strip author Tom Batiuk also has a page on Harry Dinkle on his website.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

What a difference 161 votes makes

There is a saying that ” your vote makes a difference” or “every vote is important”. In a Oregon House race that just concluded, every vote was, indeed, important.

This happened to be Oregon House District 22, in which I reside. The incumbent, Republican Tracy Cramer, was being challenged by Democrat Lesly Munoz. On November 5th, initial results showed Cramer leading by over 500 votes. However, as votes continued to be processed, Cramer’s lead narrowed. On November 14th, Munoz took the lead by a single vote.

Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, and in addition, Oregon counts votes mailed that are postmarked by Election Day and received within 8 days after Election Day. As a result, my county (Marion County, Oregon) was still receiving valid votes through November 12, and then was continuing to process ballots after that point. so vote totals kept changing.

After all valid ballots had been counted, there were still over 800 ballots for this House district that needed to be “cured” to be considered valid ballots. In general, this meant that there was a signature verification issue, and the ballots were set aside. Marion County then sent letters to all of those registered voters informing them of the problem and told them they had to go to the county elections office to “cure” their vote by 5pm on November 26th. The campaigns and parties also received lists of these voters, and worked to get these voters to cure their ballots. As of November 25th, there were still over 500 ballots not cured, and the last report from Marion County showed Munoz ahead by 149 votes. The final unofficial tally was released by Marion County around 6:00pm on November 26, with Munoz leading Cramer by 161 votes. Yes, in this race, every vote did make a difference.

Tip for creating a WordPress podcast feed

I have written before about using WordPress to host podcast files, but I have had problems in getting a stock WordPress site to create a feed that loads in a podcast client (like PocketCasts). I decided to look into this yesterday, and figured out that the post format has to be “Audio” (if it is “Standard”, even though the enclosure appears in the feed, the feed will not be recognized in PocketCasts).

I then updated all the posts I have with podcast files to be “Audio”, and created a new category (“In The Car Podcast”), and added that to all the posts. I then was able to create a feed (https://andysylvester.com/category/in-the-car-podcast/feed/), and was able to load that feed in PocketCasts – hooray!

In The Car Podcast – November 23, 2024

I recorded this on 11/23/2024, so I am using that in the title, even though I am posting it 2 days later. Coves the election, what to do next, and what technical projects I think I will work on next.

Links referenced in the podcast:

Emptywheel: What next?

Emptywheel: Lessons from Red States on How to Push Back

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Responding to residents proved foundational in Gluesenkamp Perez victory as district picked Trump

CNN: Gallego offers advice to Democrats after winning in state Trump won

The East Is A Podcast: I was referencing this episode

Datasette: Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

Federated Wiki: Main Github repo

How to get the Democratic message out there

Recently, Dave Winer has written about how the Democratic Party stops communicating its message when the election is over. His position is that the Republican Party has supporters/surrogates/podcasts/TV networks pushing the Republican message 24/7/365, but that the Democrats are only “on-the-air” during the lead up to an election.

This is not a new message from Dave Winer. He has long voiced the opinion that past Democratic campaigns (Obama in particular, but now Harris as well) shut down the campaign websites they created, lost contact with the voters they organized, and left a void in the Democratic Party organization. See also similar comments from Ken Smith echoing this refrain.

Shortly after the election, Dave Winer put out a request for identifying who was behind the @kamalahq social media feeds, which did a good job of responding to Republican activities during the 2024 presidential campaign, pretty much in real time. Within a few days, he had a name (Lauren Kapp), a link to her LinkedIn site, and a link to one of her TikTok videos, where she said that two staffers and three interns produced the content for these feeds. Based in the frequency of updates, I would say they worked seven days a week keeping the flow of content going.

I think it was great that Dave Winer was able to use his blog and network to find this person. His next steps were a little underwhelming, and I think it is worth taking some time to analyze how the “call to action” could have had more effect. His post of November 19th where he revealed the identity of Lauren Kapp included these words:

“We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web.”

Good statements, but no next action step provided. Also, the use of the “royal we” (“We need to…”) implies that someone needs to take the ball and move it forward, but no effort is made to identify or motivate “them”. If you wanted to try to do something about this communication problem, why stop at identifying the talent and leaving the rest up to “them”? Dave recorded a podcast giving some more detail on how he sees this project, but again, no next step is provided. Also, I think it would be easier for the target audience (“them”) if there was a next step in the post instead of trying to get someone to listen to a podcast that has no action step.

Two days later, Dave Winer followed up on his first post, saying he would contribute $100 to get @kamalahq “back on the air”:

“Let’s get the Dems back on the air before the inauguration. I’ll kick in $100 to get it started, and I’ll tell everyone I know to fund it too. There’s no time to waste.”

A nice offer, but who is going to do something about it? The phrase “when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge” comes to mind. Dave’ earlier version of this post encouraged people to reach out to every Democratic influencer they know about this topic, but it ended up getting revised to “I’ll throw in money when someone else puts it together. Maybe he made some other efforts, but if he did, why not tell us about it?

Before I examine some alternatives, I want to be clear – this is a typical problem of ideas thrown out on the Internet. “Here’s an idea, world – get back to me when you have it implemented”. I am boring down a little deeper on this one because Dave puts out calls like this fairly often, and I think it’s a good idea, but sometimes ideas need help.

Now, what if there were some steps suggested that people could take like:

  1. Reaching out to Lauren Kopp before even making the first post and seeing if she is interested in participating in keeping this news flow going, and if she is, telling us about it. That could provide a spark.
  2. If she is interested, start a GoFundMe or some other crowdfunding vehicle to see if there is other interest.
  3. Reach out to your local Democratic county organization or state organization, provide links to these posts, see if there is interest/support (here is a next step for readers)
  4. Keep banging the drum (Dave says he does this for projects he is promoting)

These are a few ideas of how to help make this idea (getting a prolific social media platform for Democrats going again) a reality again.

SPOILER ALERT: I actually did steps 1 and 3, will post back on what response I get…taking action is key, not just posting ideas on the Internet…

Thoughts on the US 2024 election

I am feeling somewhat better now. Last week, I was suffering from “election depression. On the night of the election, we turned the TV off at 10pm. In the morning, neither my wife nor I wanted to turn the TV on, but we did, and the first words we see are “TRUMP WINS”. Ugh. As I thought about the the past four years, and why did the election end up with a Trump win, the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” came to mind. It was necessary to update the Electoral Count Act, and it was necessary to take actions to have hundreds of lawyers ready to fight frivolous election fraud claims, and it was necessary to build up the elections offices across the US to ensure a free and fair election. But, those things, in and of themselves, were not sufficient to guarantee victory for Kamala Harris. Another phrase that comes to mind is “preparing to fight the last war“. Again, preparations were made to avoid another violent takeover like January 6th, but preparations were not made (or actions taken) to help ensure that Donald Trump would lose the election (fair and square). I am not the person to say what should have been done, or how the Democratic Party should have approached the 2024 election, but the fact that Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote shows that (1) more people wanted Trump than Harris, and (2) all of the weird things that Trump did, all the things he did, the civil and criminal cases against him, did not sway his supporters to vote for Harris.

Nine days after the election, Trump has picked up the rest of the swing states, and Republicans will be in control of the House and Senate – the trifecta. Trump’s cabinet picks so far look like a “clown car from the circus”. His strategy – selecting people who will be totally loyal to him.

For myself, I need a little rest from the election. My wife and I have cut way back on our news consumption. I think our short term plan will be “watch and listen” or “wait and see”.