the battle of the signs

so when we got to the office this morning, this was going on.

the audacity.

monday was the last day for voter registration in pennsylvania and it was NUTS. i don't want to show our hand by mentioning specific numbers, but we met our goal for the new latino registration and had lots of new registrations in general. (wal-mart was especially fruitful.) the gop isn't going to know what hit them on november 4th!!

so i'm in charge of out of state volunteer housing now. i've been tapped to do it.

cold pizza - a local specialty

so apparently hazleton is also famous for "cold pizza". it's room temperature pizza. it's always served room temp. and you can only buy it from certain places. i tried some today. it tastes just like it looks: like day-old, room temp little cesars, i.e. delurcious! read more:
http://www.roadfood.com/Forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6109

so today was a REALLY BUSY DAY! we had 25 out-of-towners. all from new york. one group came from clinton, ny; they left at 6:00 am to make the four hour drive. another group of fourteen got organized through the barackobama.com website. (go there and DRIVE FOR CHANGE from your state!!!) we knocked on hundreds of doors today. and i think the official count was 75 new voter registrations, and i think about 30 of those were latinos. just today!! tomorrow is the voter reg deadline in penn so we are trying to have a last big push. of course, those registrations come at a cost. one of our high school interns had to endure an indecent proposal of having sex with some guy's virginal friend for money. she laughed in his face and walked away. ah, don't you just love people?

my favorite moment was when an older lady was sitting next to me in the office talking about palin and said: "can you believe she entered a beauty contest? did she look at herself in the mirror twice? i mean i'm a plain jane, but at least I KNOW i'm a plain jane." priceless.

sarah palin: she winks and cutes

sarah palin has officially made cute a verb. that's what she does. she cutes. and winks. i'm just quoting one of our stellar volunteers. she's the one who made the homemade chicken soup.
a bunch of hazleton volunteers who made food for the out-of-towners. the menu included:
lasagna, chicken soup, egg salad sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, sloppy joes, chili, spinach quiche, raisin cookies, and carrot cake.


sabrina, the carbon county field organizer, enjoys the chili.



i enjoyed the cake.

we had three groups of new yorkers come into hazleton today to knock on doors and do voter registration. the pa deadline for voter reg is this monday, october 6th. i headed out and ducked my head into a few businesses with latino patronage. i was a big hit at the domincan barber shop and the latina beauty parlor. i'll be back tomorrow and monday. today i registered six people in about two hours, all latino. !!!SI SE PUEDE!!!

hazleton campaign office s.o.s.

so our campaign office is totally volunteer-powered, in terms of staffing, office supplies and dunkin' donut supplies. we have some out-of-town volunteers coming into town this weekend to canvass and we are so low on supplies that we aren't even sure if we'll have enough printer ink to print out the turf sheets for the volunteers. if anybody out there hasn't stepped up and wants to get involved in the campaign, send us a staples gift card or something similar.
our office address is:

barack obama's campaign for change
44 w. broad st
hazleton, pa 18201
phone: 570.454.0211

and for my new york peeps who are weekend warriors, come to hazleton!! it's not that far away and there is so much work to be done here. hazleton is the new phily. give us a call when you want to join us.

barack's campaign for change this is linz speaking.


"well good luck to ya but i got the wrong number!"

if i had a gun, i'd shoot the sonuva bitch

so yesterday was another busy, full day. i was in the office working from 9:30 am -9:00 pm, registering voters, making phone calls to volunteers to get them out and canvassing this weekend, entering data, and assembling yard signs for our die hard volunteers.

we had one woman, dawn, come in because she heard that we had springsteen tickets for philly show/get out the vote rally this weekend. think he'll play "streets on philadelphia"?
http://www.kbsradio.ca/news/music/87/801046
the tix are priority seating for volunteers who put in at least four hours. so she sat right down and made over 125 phone calls to get her tickets. she's a union member and was laid off. she was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of bush that said "clusterfuck accomplished". pretty awesome.

i headed out in the early evening to do some voter registration. i knocked on doors on wyoming street and a lovely dominican woman answered the door. she said that her daughter, a student at penn state, was filling out a card for her. i told that i could fill one out instead and turn it in right away so that she was sure to be eligible to vote. she wanted to call her daughter and double-check with her. (so cute!) so she invited me in and i sat down on the couch. she was born in the d.r. but had been living in hazleton for over ten years. she also went upstairs to drag her son out of bed and downstairs to register. after clearing it with her daughter (she passed the phone to me too), i registered them both. i also stood outside the library for awhile and got a couple of people that way. all in all i registered seven people, most of them latinos in like two hours.

we cut out of the office a little before 9:00 to watch the debate at bottlenecks. i'm sure you saw for yourself, so i won't rehash it. then back to the office to pick up some stuff, and home to do more data entry. i wrapped up at 12:30 am and left dave and heather slaving away.

new day. here we go again.

as i was typing this, a phone banking volunteer said that she called a man in his nineties on the phone who said he was a big obama supporter and campaigning on his behalf in his highrise. he also said that if he ever ran into bush "if i had a gun, i'd shoot the sonuva bitch." still feisty to say the least.

don't worry honey, i'm voting for him

so yesterday was my first day on the job. i rolled into the office with heather around 9:30. (we have to work out the shower shifts more efficiently.) the day consisted of data entry, phone banking, voter registering, and a women for obama meeting. highlights included:"
the dominican resterante that gives discounts to us because we work for obama

the guy on the street who stopped to talk to me because i had an obama t-shirt on and offered to come by the office and buy me lunch

the eighty-something-year-old-woman who hollared "what's this about?" at me when i phone banked her, but after i told her i was with the obama campaign she sweetly said, "don't worry honey, i'm votin' for him."

the women for obama meeing attract 45 women who are fired up and ready to go. i especially appreciated the little chocolate donuts.



after we the meeting ending, the calls stopped, and we took a break from data entry, heather, dave, and i headed out to bottleneck, a local bar for some food and a pitcher.



the best thing about this bar is that it used have two separate entrances, one for men and one for women. and on the men's side, underneath the "men's" bar, there is a latrine with a drain so that men wouldn't have to trouble themsleves by leaving their stools to relieve themselves.

the scene

i live above this pizza place


this is the outside of our campaign office downtown

this is the inside of our campaign office downtown

















we are just down the street from lou barletta's campaign office.
lou barletta is the xenophobic mayor who hates hispanics. http://www.stoploubarletta.com/he is running for state congress and must be stopped.










we are also across the street from this store. the owner is the mother of the (in)famous obamagirl.
watch one of her videos.