New Florida Young Democrats Website

www.flyoungdems.org

New FYD Website, I don't know if you have checked it out yet (you probably haven't, since it is just premiering) now is the time!

It looks great. The old website should be redirected there soon too... but we are make small steps forward. Check it out.

Miami Democrats to School John McCain On The Economy

WHAT: Press Conference with South Florida Democrats. Educators, Democratic Party leaders and activists will join to school John McCain on the economy during his visit to Coral Gables, Florida.

WHO: South Florida Teachers


Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Bret Berlin

Miami-Dade Young Democrats President Florence Moss

Democratic Activists

WHEN: TOMORROW SUNDAY, April 27, 2008 at 3:00 PM EST

WHERE: Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables - (Intersection of Columbus Blvd and Anastasia Avenue)

**IMPORTANT BACKGROUND**: As gas and food prices skyrocket, the Republican Recession fostered by eight years of Bush mismanagement is taking a severe toll. South Florida is groundzero for the subprime mortgage meltdown. But Republican presidential candidate John McCain admits he offers little in the way of direction for America's economy.

"I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." John McCain quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2005

"The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should. I understand the basics, the fundamentals, the vision, all that kind of stuff." John McCain quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Dec. 18, 2007

DETAILS: English and Spanish spokespersons will be available.

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WES MCCARVILLE ENTERS RACE FOR HOUSE DISTRICT 29

Wes McCarville, former President of the Brevard County Young Democrats, who, under his leadership, were very successful in electing Rep. Sasso this past spring, announced on April 2, 2008 that he will run for the Florida House of Representatives, District 29. Here is the text of his announcement:

"After much thought and consideration, I am pleased to announce that I am entering the race as the Democratic candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, District 29. I believe the voters of the 29th District are ready for a leader who can represent their real interests. I will promote a vision of the future that will return economic prosperity to our region that includes public input, accountability and provides economic growth that is sustainable to meet the needs of our citizens. The present legislature in Tallahassee has not effectively dealt with the economic downturn that has affected all of our citizens. I will work to break through this status quo to bring about real change.

I propose an open government, accountable and responsible to the people,that actively promotes our strengths. We all know that our District has much potential for economic opportunity as evidenced by the growth we have experienced in the past. I will pursue policies that encourage economic growth by embracing our unique resources such as a well-educated workforce and newly developed business and retail complexes.

As your representative, I will aggressively promote America's space program and maintain its reputation for innovation and excellence. I will work to attract additional private space ventures to the space coast. I will support policy to protect our region's delicate ecosystem which is so important to our residents and serves to bolster our region's thriving tourism industry.

Now more than ever, due to reduced revenues, we need an efficient, effective government that stretches every tax dollar to benefit our citizens. I will work to cut the fat from the budget while maintaining the services of importance to all Floridians. I am not beholden to special interests groups that have influenced some of our politicians to act in ways not responsive to our citizens. I have entered this race to bring a voice back to the people of our District.

Our citizens have long been ready for change, but they have not been provided with a real choice. I now offer voters that real choice."

The Wes McCarville Campaign has a website for more information or to make a contribution. The campaign website is www.investinwes.com.

Why You Should Get Involved in Your Local and State Parties

This Blog post is written by Kevin Bondelli, Southwest Region Director for the Young Democrats of America. He is the SW counter part to the Florida Young Democrats President Alan Brock, who is the Southeast Regional Director for YDA. (Join the facebook group)

It is amazing how closely Kevin's argument for joining the party out in Arizona rings true here in Florida. You have until June to file to be a Precinct Committee Person, and in most places in Florida (at least around our area of the state)you will win unopposed.

And now for insight from Kevin:

We all know the stereotype of the composition of local and state Democratic Parties: a plethora of old activists that consider anyone under 50 a young Democrat. While this keeps many younger voters from becoming involved in those entities, it would be to your advantage to bite the bullet and take the plunge.

“But Kevin, there is nobody at these meetings that is even close to my age and I would rather just be involved with Young Democrats instead!”

I know that’s what your thinking, and trust me, as a former state party employee I feel you, but the rewards of involvement will vastly outweigh the costs if you and your organization commit. Here is why:

The local and state parties determine the allocation of a lot of resources, and if nobody is there to advocate for youth programs, they are going to be overlooked.

Elected Precinct Committee persons and state committee members (at least in Arizona) vote on who becomes delegates to Democratic National Conventions, so while advocating for youth representation goals in delegate selection plans is important, having a number of young democrats involved will make the biggest difference.

Some of those older activists are actually quite interesting, and talking to them and learning from their experiences can be an invaluable education for you and your members.

Fundraising lead generation. The members of your state and local parties are the high-efficacy donors, even if they are small-contribution donors, and knowing them personally will give you a much better opportunity of raising money.

You can sell your organization and young voters in general to party regulars, and getting your message out to them will increase your legitimacy and exposure.

You are officially changing your role from “future of the party” to the “present of the party.” As long as young democrats are absent from the regular party apparatus it will appear that Young Democrats is AAA and the local/state party is the major leagues, and when you get older you graduate and get called up.

The more your state party knows you the more you will be able to partner up with their big events. In Arizona the state party works with YDAZ to have after-party fundraisers following their big dinners.

Common apprehensions of Young Democrats about getting involved:

The older activists don’t want us there. This, actually, is far from the truth. During my time at the Arizona Democratic Party I can’t count all of the activists that openly expressed their wishes that more young people were involved. While there will always be a few that look at younger Democrats condescendingly, they tend to be the minority. They won’t bite, I swear (a lot of them don’t even have real teeth).

But there won’t be any people close to my age there. Not yet. That is why you have to bring them. The Arizona State University Young Democrats have done a great job of this in the state legislative district that encompasses Tempe, and with that involvement there are now two state representatives from that district under the age of 30. How cool is it when their are people representing you at your state capitol that are your age? The answer is: very cool.

It isn’t worth my time. Seriously, did you just forget to read the entire first part of this post? Yes, it is worth your time.

Alright Kevin, you’ve convinced me. Now how do I get involved?

Become a precinct committeperson. Get appointed now and when elections roll around become an elected PC. Your local/state party can help you with the process.

Start attending your local meetings. Find out when and where they meet, bring some friends, and talk to the people there. Let them know that you want to get more involved. Once you’ve been to a couple meetings tell other friends that they should come too. Once there are more young people attending, more young people will attend. If you build it, they will come.

Go to state committee meetings. The people here are the top Democratic activists in your state. See if a representative from your state chapter can give a report at these meetings.

Have you been successful in getting involved with your local and state parties? Is there something I missed? Leave a comment and share your stories and ideas.

Young Democrat Candidate

Alan Brock, President of the Florida Young Democrats, is running for the Wakulla County Commission. Make sure to check out his website: www.voteforalan.com. We are really excited about this race, and we wish him well!

If you have the ability, please check out his website: www.voteforalan.com and considered making a donation.

Tax Hike in the Air for Smokers!!

A great article in the Orlando paper today about raising the taxes on cigarettes here in Florida. I think this is a great idea, and something that the state should do. The Young Democrats of Florida are fully behind any effort to raise the taxes on cigarettes.

The cost of smoking is high on the tax payer, and helping to raise the cost allows the state to move towards breaking even, and will allow the state to allocate funds to serve other areas of need.

For the full article click on the title bar, but for the start just read below:

TALLAHASSEE - For nearly two decades, while almost every state has raised its tax on cigarettes, Florida's has remained the same: 34 cents a pack.

Now there's a renewed effort, spearheaded by South Florida Democrats and health-care advocates, to boost Florida's cigarette tax by $1 a pack, to $1.34. The national average for state cigarette taxes is $1.12.

Supporters have retooled their pitch in a tight budget year, arguing the tax increase would not only reduce teen smoking but also generate an estimated $1 billion annually to offset some looming cuts in state health-care expenditures.

See You Tonight: Legislative Aides Appreciation Party at Paradigm

The Florida Young Democrats (www.floridayd.com) and the Leon County Young Democrats (http://lcyd.blogspot.com/) in an effort to thank the Legislative Aides for their hard work, cordially invite you to their third annual Democratic Legislative Staff Appreciation Reception. We hope you can make it out tonight, Wednesday, March 19, 2008, between 7:00PM to 11:00PM at Paradigm Lounge (115 West College Avenue).

Join us for Breakfast THIS Saturday!!

This year, the FYDs are hosting the official breakfast of the 2007 Florida Democratic Party Convention. All ages are invited (and encouraged)!

Join us Saturday morning, Oct. 27 for a hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage, oven-roasted potatoes, pastries, coffee and Florida orange juice at Disney's Yacht & Beach Club. Click on the title above to buy your tickets today!!

The funds raised by the breakfast will go toward turning out 18-35 year-old voters in 2008. As you may know, Florida has one of the lowest young-voter participation rates in the nation. We are going to change that, with your help.

We'll be kicking off the excitement Saturday before the General Session with our keynote speaker, the amazing Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was elected to the state house at age 26 and now fights for Florida in the U.S. Congress. We'll also be introducing our new Florida Young Democrats Executive Director.

Show your Democratic pride and support for the future of our party. Join us for the Florida Young Democrats Breakfast!

Remember, breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Florida Young Democrat Chapter of the Year Award Goes to:

This past weekend the Florida Young Democrats had several very successful meetings at the Florida Democratic Party conference. Today Matt Cole, Immediate Past FYD Chair, had these words to say:


Fellow Democrats,

I am honored to report that Omar Khan (LCYD member) has been elected to succeed me as Chair of the Florida Young Democrats. Omar's work as FYD Executive Director is greatly appreciated and I look forward to his continued contributions to the development of future Democratic leaders.

Over the past two years, right up through this past weekend, this administration:

Developed an executive structure based upon the Democratic Party and its nomenclature.
Instituted a chartering process that eliminated dues, encourages closer ties with county DECs, and prevents the possibility of competing claims of authority.
Established a Mission and Vision statement to more clearly define our goals.
Enacted the positions of Regional Directors to more plainly establish geographic regions and Outreach Directors to more formally target Young Democrat sub-groups.
Founded the Florida College Democrats as an associate group of the newly created Florida Young & College Democrats.

Our caucus was joined by FDP Chair Thurman, Congressman Barney Frank, and Governor Mark Warner. We were also joined by several local, regional, and statewide candidates including Jim Davis, Rod Smith, and Alex Sink.

The FYD Annual Awards winners were presented. They include:

County Chapter of the Year: Leon County Young Democrats
College Chapter of the Year: Florida State University College Democrats
High School Chapter of the Year: East Side High School Young Democrats, Alachua County
FYD Event of Distinction: Leon County Young Democrats, for the Democratic Legislative Staff Reception
Jeffrey Mattison Wershow Award: Stephen Gorham, US Navy Veteran
Young Democrat of the Year: Kristian Cosme
Democrat of the Year: Honorable Karen Thurman
Lifetime Achievement Award: Senator Bob Graham

The role of FYD Chair requires a great deal of time, energy, and diplomacy. There are scores of Young Democrats who have assisted me and contributed greatly to this organization over the past few years. It would be impossible to name every member individually, but in addition to Omar, I would like recognize: John Reid, Chris Gallaway, Michelle M'Sadoques, Gershom Faulkner, Alan Brock, Kristian Cosme, David Geller, Bret Berlin, Kristin Carter, Alex Patton, Dave Cutler, Erica Graves, Rick Minor, and Reggie Cardozo. State Representative Ed Jennings, Jr. and State Senator Dave Aronberg should also be acknowledged as both supporters of and role models for the FYDs. For her love and patience, I am also grateful to Carolyn Develle.

Although I have passed along these guiding principles to many of you already, they are worth revisiting: Be Local: Invite locally elected Democrats for discussions on current issues; Be Connected: Help members develop connections with local Democratic leaders, either elected or in your DEC;Be Social: Keep meetings lively and informal so that your members will enjoy this time with their political peers;Be Rewarding: Allow members to sharpen their political skills by presenting or debating a topic.In conclusion, it has been a privilege to serve you as FYD Chair. In my new Executive Board role as Immediate Past Chair, I look forward providing institutional memory and assisting Omar to the best of my abilities.

Democratically Yours,

MattMatthew Cole,
Immediate Past Chair
Florida Young Democrats

Quick Updates

Last Night's LCYD Meeting went really well. We were lucky to have Omar Kahn, the Executive Director of the Florida Young Democrats join us. The FYDs have an impressive new website that I encourage you to check out: www.floridayd.org. It is still under construction but it is already leaps and bounds above what it use to be.

The LCYDs met are group requirement at last nights meeting, so we will be marching on in this weekend's Heart Walk!

Lastly a great young democratic leader has resigned in Tampa today. Janee Murphy, the Hillsborough DEC Chair, a DNC member and the elected Secretary for the Florida Democratic Party. I am sure that Janee will stay active with party politics, but I believe that it is a shame that we drive out some of our most promising young leaders.

Blog wars

This last weekend's events in south Florida went very well, and hopefully I will have some pictures and more information to post in the next couple days... I did want to post this Adam Smith story from yesterday's St. Petersburg Times titled "Florida's new political blog wars". Note which Blogs it mentions and which Blogs it leaves out.... It chooses the right leaning Sayfie Review over The Fort Report but it does mention Mike's 'not affiliated , but still a YD' Blog Florida News.....

At Florida Politics last week they debated whether Florida Democrats should focus on improving their showing in big counties or rural counties. Florida News noted that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher back in 1994 aired a campaign ad implying Jeb Bush helped Fidel Castro by backing a free-trade agreement.
Sayfie Review gave Katherine Harris' entry into the U.S. Senate race far less play than it did Gallagher's and Charlie Crist's long-expected announcements for governor. Meanwhile, Blogwood bashed Harris as "a staunch opponent of medical choice" and knocked incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson for voting for a bankruptcy reform bill opposed by many consumer groups.
The political blogosphere is taking off in Florida, but no one really knows yet whether it's a blip in how political journalism and communication work in Florida or the start of a dramatic change.
New Internet sites devoted mainly to state, local or regional Florida politics seem to be popping up every week. Most of the new ones are left-leaning. Some encourage online dialogue. Some are solo political rants about the news of the moment. Some, like Sayfie Review and the Fort Report, mostly aggregate daily articles from across the state. Others critique the reports and reporters themselves. Most are free to anyone with Internet access, but at least one newcomer, Florida Insider, charges a $149 annual subscription fee for its essays, analyses and tips on political doings in Florida.
"You're seeing a revolution out there. It is a revolution as momentous as the printing press," Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, told reporters and academics from the Southeast gathered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week.
The broader national story of the influence of the Internet on journalism and politics has been well-told: Bloggers basically pushed CBS News anchor Dan Rather into early retirement after leading the charge in questioning the authenticity of documents concerning President Bush's military service. Bloggers and the Internet helped catapult Howard Dean, who started out as the obscure governor of Vermont, into a well-funded frontrunner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
"In the old days, the agenda-setting and the issue-framing was a closed shop," said Justin Sayfie, a Fort Lauderdale lobbyist and top Republican fundraiser whose Sayfie Review reaches about 5,000 readers every day. "You had the big media organizations, and their reporters were basically controlling the issue-framing and agenda-setting. Now that power to frame issues and set agendas is democratized."
Sayfie's political bent is more subtle than many of the other bloggers, usually shown by how prominently he highlights stories, rather than through overt opinion. Seeing the growth in Democratic-leaning, opinion-heavy blogs, though, Sayfie plans to start a more opinionated conservative blog later this summer.
Some national blogs - dailykos.com, for instance, or andrewsullivan.com - are so well read by political junkies and insiders that the bloggers have become virtual celebrities themselves in the mainstream media world. Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a prospective presidential candidate again in 2008, recently paid homage to the new medium and invited some of the most prominent bloggers to dinner at his Georgetown house.
But as the blogging world grows increasingly crowded for national politics, getting noticed in the blogosphere becomes tougher. That may be where state politics come in. "If you want to be prominent, the national stage is getting crowded, said Mathew Gross, Dean's former Internet director, who participated in the roundtable organized by UNC's Program on Southern Politics, Media & Public Life. "On the state level, it's still wide open."
Some of those on the front lines of Florida's blogging community say they're mainly looking for an outlet. If they gain some prominence in the process, so be it.
"There are a lot of people frustrated by the political process, and blogging is a very empowering activity," said Derrick Newton, a Democratic consultant in Miami who recently started contributing political analyses to the Florida Politics blog.
Readership remains small, but often includes opinion-makers and influential people - be they political activists or elected officials. Subscribers to the Sayfie Review daily newsletter, for instance, range from Gov. Jeb Bush to people in the White House to almost every Florida political reporter.
"There's really no money in it, so it's a labor of love. I like to share my opinion," said Norwood Orrick, 40, who owns a computer shop in Tampa and says a few hundred people check out his Blogwood site daily. "Hopefully, we can persuade the persuaders. You're aware of the regional blogs, so perhaps our coverage will help influence your coverage."
Bloggers and blog readers are sure to grow along with broadband Internet access. So too are the sticky issues that accompany them. The Federal Election Commission is now grappling with whether bloggers should be regulated, and some experts see the blogs as the next big loophole for bypassing campaign finance restrictions.
Most bloggers don't consider themselves journalists, and don't feel bound by any presumption that they must be fair or balanced. But that doesn't mean they're immune from libel laws. One particularly biting anonymous Florida political blog, the Grapefruit, disappeared a couple years ago soon after it posted an account of a state senator frolicking with lobbyists in a hot tub at a St. Petersburg hotel.
Frontiers are fraught with unforeseen problems and issues, and online politics is no different. But I don't have time to think about those right now; I have to check whether this column got decent play on the Safyie Review.

Chairs race narrows

Diane Glasser, Broward County's State Committeewoman, has dropped out of the race for chair. I have linked to the story in the title bar. Jeff Ryan dropped out after failing to qualify last week. This leaves Congresswoman Karen Thurman and Doug Courtney, former chair of the small county coalition. So things look fairly good for the former Congresswoman.

Google Karen Thurman

Karen is the person who the Florida Young Democrats endorsed for chair. Here is an excerpt from an email from our statewide president Matt Cole:

"Over the past week, I asked for your input on candidates for Florida Democratic Party (FDP) Chair in the form of a poll our Yahoo Groups website. As President of the FYDs, I have one vote for the upcoming election of FDP Chair. Because voting is "on the record," my vote will be seen as an endorsement. Jeff Ryan received more support from Exec Board members who voted, but Karen Thurman was overwhelming preferred by FYD members and Chapter Presidents who voted.

I have spoken with both Jeff and Karen. If elected Chair, each candidate understands of our goals and has promised to provide the continued support we need. The new Chair must build upon the work that Scott Maddox has done and continue to improve communication, increase fundraising, broaden the state party's appeal, and develop future leaders. Based on your input, on May 7, my vote will go to Karen Thurman.

The former Congresswoman represented much of North Central Florida in Washington for ten years. She successfully raised 2 million dollars in her last campaign and has provided leadership on many issues including: education, the environment, and health care. Karen has also been provided leadership for many groups including: labor, women, and veterans. "