If you thought the fight to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was finally over, think again.
We all thought it was a done deal when President Obama signed the repeal into law. But House Republicans pulled a stunt that could delay or even stop the repeal from taking effect by passing an outrageous series of amendments to the bill that funds our military.
We can’t stay silent in the face of this new GOP push to turn back the clock on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t tell.
Help the DCCC surpass their goal of getting 100,000 signatures to their petition supporting the repeal. We need to hold the House Republicans accountable for putting their radical social agenda ahead of keeping our military strong and our families safe.
When I served in Congress, it was an honor to sponsor and fight for legislation to finally end this discriminatory policy. As an Army officer, I saw firsthand how the policy forces patriots to lie about who they are just so they can defend the freedoms that make America great.
We could not have passed legislation to repeal this policy without your grassroots support. Now, we must keep the pressure on, by exposing the despicable tactics that the Republicans are using to stop the repeal from taking effect.
Over the last few years, several innovative electric vehicle (EV) technologies have emerged in the marketplace and we’ve been working to update our green transportation infrastructure. As a result, we’ve now developed the largest corporate EV charging infrastructure in the country. We’re also including the next generation of plug-in vehicles in Gfleet, our car-sharing program for Googlers.
Posted: 09 Jun 2011 10:02 AM PDT
(Cross-posted on the Green Blog)
When Google.org launched the RechargeIt initiative in 2007, there were no commercially available plug-in hybrid EVs on the market. So we bought several Toyota Priuses and had them retrofitted with A123 Hymotion batteries to create our own mini-fleet of plug-in hybrids to demonstrate the technology. It was the birth of Gfleet, which has since become a valued perk and makes it easier for Googlers to use our biodiesel shuttle system to commute to work by providing green transportation options for people after they arrive at the Googleplex. The new Gfleet will include more than 30 plug-ins, starting with Chevrolet Volts and Nissan LEAFs, several of which have already arrived and are available for Googlers to use today. We’ll be adding models from other manufacturers as they become available.
To juice up our new cars and provide more charging options for Googlers, we’ve been working with Coulomb Technologies’ ChargePoint® Network to continue to expand our EV charging infrastructure. We’ve added 71 new and faster Level 2 chargers to the 150 Level 1 chargers we’ve installed over the last few years, bringing our total capacity to more than 200 chargers, with another 250 new ones on the way. The ChargePoint Network provides us the charging data necessary to track and report on the success of our green transportation initiative.
Overall, our goal is to electrify five percent of our parking spaces—all over campus and free of charge (pun intended) to Googlers. Our expanded charging system has already helped several Googlers decide to buy new EVs of their own, and we hope others will, too.
All told, Gfleet and our biodiesel shuttle system result in net annual savings of more than 5,400 tonnes of CO2. That’s like taking over 2,000 cars off the road, or avoiding 14 million vehicle miles every year! But we’re only one company, so we hope other companies think about how they can incorporate these new technologies into their own infrastructure. By supporting new, green transportation technologies, we’re enabling our employees to be green and doing our part to help spur growth in the industry.
Posted by Rolf Schreiber, Technical Program Manager, Electric Transportation
I want to show you a quick presentation I’ve been giving to the first staff coming on board here in Chicago, outlining our strategy to win and our overall approach to this campaign.
In the weeks and months to come, we’ll ask grassroots supporters like you to meet with one another and local organizers to take the first steps to victory on November 6th, 2012.
But before we begin meeting in living rooms and backyards across America, it’s important that we communicate with each other about a set of principles for the organization and our overall strategic thinking about how the race will shape up.
The most important aspect is this: Our campaign will be grounded in President Obama’s experience as a community organizer. This notion of ordinary people taking responsibility for the organization at the neighborhood level is not only the way to win, it’s also the way politics ought to work. Our campaign will be an example of innovation and efficiency, but it will also be an example of civic engagement at its best and most rewarding.
Have a look at the briefing, then share it with your friends and neighbors and ask them to help build this campaign with us:
This plan will evolve as we get feedback from grassroots supporters like you over the weeks and months ahead. That’s already happening — as you know, we’ve already started the process of having one-on-one conversations with people in every state to gather thoughts and ideas, and thousands more talks will take place over this spring and summer.
But this briefing should give you a sense of our current thinking about how we’ll build an unprecedented grassroots campaign to win — with you leading it.
I went to El Paso, Texas, to lay out a plan to do something big: fix America’s broken immigration system.
It’s an issue that affects you, whether you live in a border town like El Paso or not. Our immigration system reflects how we define ourselves as Americans — who we are, who we will be — and continued inaction poses serious costs for everyone.
Those costs are human, felt by millions of people here and abroad who endure years of separation or deferred dreams — and millions more hardworking families whose wages are depressed when employers wrongly exploit a cheap source of labor. That’s why immigration reform is also an economic imperative — an essential step needed to strengthen our middle class, create new industries and new jobs, and make sure America remains competitive in the global economy.
Because this is such a tough problem — one that politicians in Washington have been either exploiting or dodging, depending on the politics — this change has to be driven by people like you.
Washington won’t act unless you lead.
So if you’re willing to do something about this critical issue, join our call for immigration reform now. Those who do will be part of our campaign to educate people on this issue and build the critical mass needed to make Washington act:
Take a moment now to watch my El Paso speech and join this campaign for change:
In recent years, concerns about whether border security and enforcement were tough enough were among the greatest impediments to comprehensive reform. They are legitimate issues that needed to be addressed — and over the past two years, we have made great strides in enhancing security and enforcement.
We have more boots on the ground working to secure our southwest border than at any time in our history. We’re going after employers who knowingly break the law. And we are deporting those who are here illegally. I know the increase in deportations has been a source of controversy, but I want to emphasize that we are focusing our limited resources on violent offenders and people convicted of crimes — not families or people looking to scrape together an income.
So we’ve addressed the concerns raised by those who have stood in the way of progress in the past. And now that we have, it’s time to build an immigration system that meets our 21st-century economic needs and reflects our values both as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.
Today, we provide students from around the world with visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities. But then our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or a new industry here in the United States. That just doesn’t make sense.
We also need to stop punishing innocent young people for the actions of their parents — and pass the DREAM Act so they can pursue higher education or become military service members in the country they know as home. We already know enormous economic benefits from the steady stream of talented and hardworking people coming to America. More than a century and a half ago, U.S. Steel‘s Andrew Carnegie was a 13-year-old brought here from Scotland by his family in search of a better life. And in 1979, a Russian family seeking freedom from Communism brought a young Sergey Brin to America — where he would become a co-founder of Google.
Through immigration, we’ve become an engine of the global economy and a beacon of hope, ingenuity and entrepreneurship. We should make it easier for the best and brightest not only to study here, but also to start businesses and create jobs here. That’s how we’ll win the future.
Immigration is a complex issue that raises strong feelings. And as we push for long-overdue action, we’re going to hear the same sort of ugly rhetoric that has delayed reform for years — despite long and widespread recognition that our current system fails us all and hurts our economy.
So you and I need to be the ones talking about this issue in the language of hope, not fear — in terms of how we are made stronger by our differences, and can be made stronger still.
You’ve been hearing from Messina about our overall strategy and what’s at stake in this election. My job as the Battleground States Director is to report back to you on the nuts and bolts of what we’re building in communities across the country.
I want to take you through it in detail, so you can understand how to get involved and shape our organization where you live.
We’re going to build it from the ground up. And we’re going to use this summer to roll out our team model and organizing structure through grassrootsplanning sessions in homes and by videoconference.
Here’s the full briefing — watch it here, and if you’re willing to get involved now and be part of the organization in your community, let me know:
Some of these planning sessions are already under way, and we’re starting to get some feedback. I got one email from a supporter named Steven, who hadn’t been involved at all since 2008, and only went to his grassroots planning session on a whim.
As a result, he’s all-in — he wants want to get involved fast, and also has all sorts of new ideas for how he can apply his skills better this time and which friends and colleagues he can reach out to about joining the campaign.
The subject line of his email about the meeting was “Inspiring night.”
This kind of organization-building isn’t just an electoral strategy — it’s a reflection of what we believe in as voters and citizens. It’s a commitment to the kind of politics that begins in backyards and living rooms and empowers every single American to get involved and organize for the changes they want to see.
At a moment when it feels like the only thing that separates our opponents is how quickly they want to end Medicare as we know it, winning this way — driven locally, powered by the grassroots — will be a rebuke to those in Washington who still think that people across the country don’t have a seat at the table where decisions are made.
I’m asking you to pull up a chair. If you’re willing to get involved now, at this crucial point in the campaign, let me know here:
P.S. — If you don’t have time to watch the video, here’s a quick rundown on where we stand:
— Messina mentioned the one-on-one initiative last month. We’re going to talk with every person who volunteered or made a donation last time. So the staff and I started making calls and meeting with people one-on-one. And then those people started having their own one-on-ones with others. So far more than 75,000 individual conversations have happened across the country. The results are a massive army of newly energized volunteers, plus thousands of pages of ideas and feedback that will inform how we shape our organization nationally.
— Grassroots planning sessions are under way across the country — we’ve had dozens so far with more than a hundred still to come. Everyone has been or will be invited to one.
— You heard about our Summer Organizer Program when we asked you to help recruit them. Well, there are now hundreds across the country, and they start next week. We were pleasantly surprised that the number of applicants far exceeded what we saw when we launched this program in 2008, and you’ll be hearing more about them — and in many cases from them directly — in the coming months
If you thought the fight to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was finally over, think again.
Be a Seed for Change 
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