Thursday, November 06, 2003

First secretive zillionaire Chico Sabbah saw his company and his anonymity destroyed by the events of 9/11. Now his former business partners have broadened their lawsuit to include his labor of love: the American Hebrew Academy, an innovative Jewish boarding school he founded in Greensboro. As usual, the N&R's Margaret Moffett-Banks is all over it. 5:13:07 PM    comment []

Local issues: How big of a water rate increase will Greensboro need to pay for the coming upgrade of the sewer system beneath Irving Park, which might run to $50 million? Will the Guilford County school system consolidate its scattered offices and build a big new building at the soon-to-be-usable corner of South Elm and Lee? 2:18:29 PM    comment []

About twenty people turned out for last night's Greensboro-area Dean meetup at the Green Bean on South Elm St. The campaign's overall meetup numbers for last night: "137,900 people, 820 locations, 50 states, 20 countries." Greensboro volunteer organizer Abigail Seymour gets information on the meetup agenda from the Dean campaign over the Internet. She prints out some materials, and gets the rest by package delivery. This week the focus was on writing letters to undecided voters in Iowa. Volunteers (who heard about the meetup by email, or reading the Web, or in a conversation with a fellow student at UNCG...) were handed a packet with the name and address of a voter, a card, and a sample letter. The campaign even sent along pens and stamps. Dean HQ also sent a DVD that was shown a couple of times at the front of the cafe, with messages from Dean and campaign manager Joe Trippi that were specific to this meetup day. Dean presented much better into the camera than he seems to do in many live performances. There was even a clip of Dean on the Leno show. So it's months before the NC primary, and a year before the election, and Dean has this group of well-equipped local volunteers here in Greensboro, working away on coordinated projects for the national campaign with hundreds of other local nodes on the network, and ready to act locally as well. The cost of each volunteer-run operation to the campaign is the cost of materials and shipping. This is the revolution, and weblogs are just a part of it. 10:44:10 AM    comment []