Lubbock Left

I have added some handy donation links over at the top of the right sidebar. They will take you to ActBlue, the online fundraising tool used by the Lubbock County Democratic Party. You can give a one time donation, or you can become a sustaining member of the Lubbock County Democratic Party by giving as little as $10 a month automatically with a credit card.

Now is the time to set up your monthly contribution to the Lubbock County Democratic Party, so we can build the infrastructure that all local campaigns will rely on.

I’ve been posting regularly at the Avalanche-Journal’s Lubbock Online Discussion Forums, and it’s been a great experience so far. A few of the regulars there have made their way to Lubbock Left as well. Thanks, guys! :)

With this post I am basically thinking out loud about where the best online public space in Lubbock is to be found. The Lubbock Online forums are pretty good. KCBD and El Editor each have discussion forums, but they are not regularly used. I have found a few messageboards over the years dedicated to clubbing, live music, various religious groups, small groups of friends, and so forth. None of them, not even the Lubbock Online forums, fit my vision of an open virtual space dedicated to citywide, countywide, or regional community discussion.

Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc offer some sense of community, but they are not well-suited to debate and discussion. Blogs are limited to how large their readership is, which is either a function of how well they self-promote or of how many friends the blog author has.

Messageboards are not hard to set up, and they are cheap to maintain. Would you support a city-run or county-run messageboard that is open to the public?

Also, please post a comment if you have encountered an interesting online community based here in Lubbock. I know there are places I have missed in my search so far.

Greetings, those of you who followed a link to here from El Editor’s local news channel! If you are looking for my initial analysis of the DeLeon recall petition, it’s in four parts:

Part Three (the meaty one with numbers!)
Part Two
Part One
Part Zero

Thanks, Bidal and Abel, for running a great paper and website with hard-hitting local coverage!

Made it through 209 names so far in the data entry portion of my little project. Hopefully tomorrow I will have the rest finished so that I can start my analysis for real.

For disclosure’s sake, I’m not in favor of the recall election. I am in favor of the people’s right to circulate a recall petition and to have it counted fairly as many times as they care to try. I really believe that Linda’s constituents value her 20+ years in public service in spite of the latest hiccups which have more to do with public relations than with policy.

And yes, I also wish that City Secretary Becky Garza had allowed watchers from each side of the issue to be present for the validation process. (I have worked with Becky Garza in the past and have been impressed with her professionalism, but I believe that prohibiting watchers was not the right decision.) At least the petition itself is available to the public, along with the reasons for each rejection, when the final count is released next week.

Onward.

When it comes to analyzing this second petition to recall Linda DeLeon, the data entry is killing me. I’ve designed my database, but I’m only about 1/10 done entering the information from the petition. So far I’ve put in 50 names.

I have determined how to calculate the number of households on the petition, the age of the petitioners, and how many petitions were gathered on each day. For the 1/10 of the petitioners so far, the mean age is 54.16, with over 20% of the signers 65 and older. The 50 petitioners so far are divided into 33 households. So far the two busiest signature-gathering days were 7/25 and 7/26.

I’m aware that the above statistics are meaningless while I only have 1/10 of the petition in my database, but that’s the kind of information I’d like to gather to satisfy my curiousity.

One bit of news that is meaningful now: there are enough petitioners missing voter ID numbers to disqualify the petition, assuming that the City Secretary cannot verify those voters. That’s not a good sign for the petition organizers.

LubbockLeft has obtained a copy of the Linda DeLeon recall petition submitted two days ago (at 4:52 PM — cutting it close!) and will mine it for statistical and demographic information.

Stay tuned!

One of the wingnuts’ favorite slurs is “Urban Liberals,” as if both adjectives are bad things to be. After a little examination, I think you’ll agree that they use that phrase at their own peril.

Urban citizens deal with a greater number of people than suburban and rural people. Urban people deal with a greater diversity of people than suburban and rural people. Urban people deal with more complex issues than suburban and rural people.

So, what does it mean when a majority of the demographic that deals with the most people, the most diversity, and the most problems… leans left politically?

I believe it suggests that the political philosophies of the Left are more mature, more tested, more sustainable, more forward-looking, and more well-suited to real-world complexity than those on the Right. Terms like “social justice,” “the public sphere,” and “sustainability” mean much more when you live in a dense society where you can’t drive your SUV to your 2-story house to escape. It’s easier to be socially conscious if you have to ride the subway.

Calling activists on the Left “Urban Liberals” may as well translate to “Hey everybody, the Liberals have figured out solutions to the world’s toughest problems.”

A strong progressive voice in Lubbock, TX.