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Items of special interest

Service Opportunity

We hope to see everyone working together with the Metropolitan Birmingham Services for the Homeless on April 10, 20100.  Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for more information and to fill out volunteer form. Click here for more information:  SCN_0007.pdf

What’s on deck…

Back in early January, as we began to plan activities for 2010, we developed a list of various issues we thought would be appropriate to explore and emphasize, that would appeal to the membership of OTM Dems, and be worthy of our attention and efforts.  We discussed ways and methods to educate ourselves, as well as carry our concerns and views to the general public. It is, after all, part of OTM Dems purpose to plant more “Blue” flags in our predominantly “Red” neighborhoods. We asked for input and ideas from the larger group at our meeting in the 3rd week of January. I highlighted those initial ideas, and added those generated from the “floor”, on my technology-challenged, wooden easel- mounted, butcher-paper flip chart. (Thanks for your remarkable patience!)

We’ve made progress on a few of those ideas, I’m glad to say. We reviewed area politics and issues at a standing-room-only meeting in February with our guests local newspaper columnists John Archibald and Kyle Whitmire.  As I write this, we’re just a few days away from our March meeting and an appearance from Alabama Arise’s Kimble Forrister. He’ll coach us on how to take effective action to encourage our legislators to remove the state portion of sales tax on groceries – an issue deemed critical by a large number of our members.  We’re planning now for events in April, May, and beyond, that you’ll hear more about in the near future. Member Linda Cohn is organizing a service opportunity to aid less fortunate citizens of our community – more to come in the next few days.  On April 13th, the Faith & Politics Roundtable will screen “Open Secret”, a short film based on the actual transcripts of the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention. The filmmaker, Melanie Jeffcoat, will join us. Even as we work at this ambitious pace, that list of issues that we developed in January remains long. It has lots of good ideas that deserve our attention.

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In the beginning…

As the third generation of leaders for OTMDems gets a solid start out of the gate, we would do well to revisit briefly our original purpose and design.  In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election it seemed that our party had fairly well reached its nadir in these parts.  Party-switching raged, spirits were abysmal, and most everyone of our stripe was feeling thoroughly discouraged, isolated and powerless.  As W, Dick, and Donald gloated, those were dark days indeed.  However, there existed here any number of generally ordinary and anonymous folk who believed they might go stark-raving mad if they didn’t do something more than continue to argue with their televisions and lecture their kids at the supper table.  We were pediatricians and teachers, realtors and retailers, accountants and lawyers, bankers and business people, from every walk of life.  More importantly, we were little league coaches and scout leaders, PTA committee chairs and deacons, too.  What we shared was that we were Democrats, and we felt a call to action.

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What are we going to do

so, then we need to consider what to do for next year.

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