Tomorrow night is Dean/DFA Meet Up.  One of the items on the agenda for this month is Verified Voting.  If you are a Meet Up host, here is some information you'll need.  Please forward this on to any Meet Up hosts you know.

Oh, and be sure to tell your Meet Up groups about Blog for Iowa and how to sign up for Democracy for Iowa.  Thanks!

Hi Democracy for America MeetUps,

As the new Executive Director of VerifiedVoting.org, I'm very excited that you all have decided to have a MeetUp to discuss how to make sure that people's votes are counted even with the new electronic voting machines that are popping up around the country.

VerifiedVoting.org is all about reliable and publicly verifiable elections... we've seen too many examples already of elections that have had irregularities and, in at least one case, had to be done over.  You can see examples of these problems here.

We're enlisting folks to take action all over the U.S. in the following ways:

- If you can make it to Washington, D.C., for any or all of April 23 - 28, join us for Verified Voting Lobby Days. Please email lobbydays@verifiedvoting.org with
the days you can attend. (We won't work on the weekend of the Women's March, just on the Friday before and Monday - Wednesday afterwards.)

- Call your Congressional representatives to urge them to support H.R. 2239 in the U.S. House of Representatives and S. 1980 in the U.S. Senate.

Last night, Passover began.

Happy Passover!

Grassley spells out formula needed for Bush to carry Iowa

Times-Republican Online, Marshalltown

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, this week laid out the formula needed for the pResident to carry Iowa in November -- a massive absentee campaign and a lot of love. . . .

A lot of love?

"Even if he [Bush] does very well nationally, the Democrats have very good organization in Iowa," Grassley said. "We've got to have a mail-in campaign that just about equals the Democrats. If we do that, then I think we can carry Iowa."

Sure, if Iowans forget we need jobs, forget the lies told to take us to war, forget the Medicare bill that enriches the big pharmaceutical companies, forget the way the Bush Administration divulged the identity of a deep-cover CIA agent to retaliate against her husband, forget the . . .

"The Democrats have taken an anybody-but-Bush attitude toward defeating him so they get behind anyone without question," Grassley argued. "There's a great deal of hatred on the part of base Democrats toward Bush."  To offset that, Republicans will need to demonstrate the same amount of love toward Bush that the Democrats have in hatred against him.

Oh, brother.

When asked if Republicans in Iowa were "feeling the love," Grassley replied, "Not yet, but they have to."

Just like the neo-cons to force people to "love" their leader.  What I'd like to know is just when exactly Grassley was taken over by neo-con pod people?

(Read the entire article here.)

Good morning, Blog for Iowa!

I decided to teach myself how to put up a poll this morning.  Come to find out, it was the easiest and quickest thing I've done on the Blog for Iowa thus far. 

You will find the Howard Dean Photo Poll on the left sidebar under the Tools component.  Please enter your opinion.  I don't really know how it works.  Thought we'd do a trial run for a few days.

The interesting thing about setting it up was that our blog service, BlogHarbor, has set up an agreement with the poll software company.  When you create the poll at Blog Polling, it looks gray.  Then, when you copy the code and put it inside a component, the whole thing turns yellow.  I know, I shouldn't show that I'm so amazed by little things like that, but each new experience has been fun and challenging.

Democracy for Iowa Website

Eventually, I'll start working on the Democracy for Iowa website.  I've been in contact with Georgette in California, who will be setting up Blog for California.  She liked our system and wanted to know which blog software we were using.  We've kept in touch and yesterday, I was confessing to her that with my limited knowledge of HTML code, my biggest worry was that I wouldn't be able to match up the colors of the DFIA website with the Blog for Iowa.

So, Georgette writes me back, and she has gone to the Blog for Iowa and looked at the underlying code using View, picked out the color codes we are using, and sent me the HTML numbers I will need to match up the websites.  Can you believe that?  I love Dean people.

Clickable Map

And speaking of lovable Dean people, Chad in Washington State is working on a Clickable Map of all the Iowa Congressional Districts and the Iowa State Legislative Districts for us.  Eventually, I will give you an email address to use to turn in the information you have accumulated about candidates in your area.  We may add the information for DFIA County Coordinators to the map, too.

The 21st Century Democrats Training Session

I spoke with 21st Century Democrats yesterday.  They advise setting up one big training session in a central location, so Alta and I were thinking maybe Ames would be good.  It's almost perfectly centered in the state, and it's easier to navigate than Des Moines is.

Also, we may postpone the training session until we get our infrastructure set up and our CC positions filled.  So, it will not be on for June, as we had originally intended.  All DFIA members are welcome to attend.

Don't forget to vote in the poll.  Let me know if you'd like a photo of Howard Dean up on the Blog for Iowa site.