My uber liberal libertarian/socialist brother asked me this last night while I tried to convince him that legalizing weed--while a good idea--would be a huge waste of political capital, at the moment. Fortunately, I didn't have a chance to answer, because I'm really not sure I know.

Sure, we want to repeal the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind and get out of the Iraq, but that's not really "doing" something, that's undoing. Once we clean up the mess made by Bush, where do we want to take the country?

If we can accomplish the goals set out in the post below, it will be a proud moment for the group, but no one joined the NU Democrats because they want to see 50 people in a meeting. The reason we all joined is because we want America, Massachusetts, Boston or somewhere else to be a better place. We only control a tiny part of the process, but we are still working towards that goal, otherwise there is no point.

So please post in the "comments" below your answer to what we--the Democrats--are doing. Here are a few of my ideas:

1. Working towards better education. According to my high school history teacher, the United States spent more money on education in the 1920s than the rest of the world combined. Tom Brokaw says that the result was "The Greastest Generation" and would wouldn't lie to us, would he? To me education is the answer to nearly every one of our problems. We need to trust local school districts again and shift the focus from holding educators "accountable" to giving them the tools they need. Education should be our first priority and we should fund it accordingly.

2. To paraphrase my boy Howard Dean, if Costa Rica (not to mention nearly every "first world" nation) can have universal health care, why can't we? I'm far from an expert on the subject, so I am not worried about the means of insuring everyone, just that it gets done.

3. As someone from Vermont, I know first hand that racism is still alive and well in many places, and as someone who went to high school I know that homophobia is too. I'm tired of the racist "jokes" that nearly everyone I know makes and I am tired of people using "gay" as a synonym for "bad". If you ask me, the way to change this is through education, but I'm open to suggestions.

Following the meeting this evening, I wanted to post about what our goals moving forward are. Week after week I will make sure that I update as to the progress of our goals as we grow as a group and hopefully bring change to the Northeastern Campus. The targets we hope to reach are as follows:

1. Bring A Friend To Every Meeting
2. Build Connections to other student groups and other schools
3. Register 200 Voters (hopefully as Democrats)
4. Two Awareness Events on Campus Each Month
5. 50 Regular Members at Each Meeting
6. 5 Speakers This Semester
7. A Fundraising Total of $500 (for free Pizza and other worthwhile investments)

Everyone is going to have to work together to accomplish these goals but I am confident that together we may achieve all of this. We have a lot of potential here and if we work together we may accomplish everything we want this semester and going forward.

I was going to use this space to talk about the developments on the first day of the Confirmation Hearings for Justice Samuel Alito. However, the developments of the first day amount to a lot of scripted BS and glorified introductions. As for my opinion on today, Alito is a pretty boring guy and most of what is said is about code words. These hearings are going to come down to Alito’s beliefs on executive power and abortion. The Executive Powers issues is extremely important and seems to fall into the lap of democrats with recent developments being what they are. If the democrats can cause Alito, who isn’t quite the slick Roberts to slip up, then there is a chance he wont be confirmed but these executive power issue must be brought out and it must be clear that he is out of the mainstream on many issues standing against regular people, an issue democrats tried to push multiple times today. The major problem I see for us democrats is that not many people seem to care or have a strong opinion at this time. If people aren’t paying too much attention and there is no major sound bit leading for us I think it is tough. However, based on what I know of Alito at this time he seems to stand most for corporations and not siding with people and being against Roe v. Wade. Things will be interesting as the real game starts tomorrow and goes into the week.

Below I have built up somewhat of a list of sources that may be useful in evaluating these hearings:

New York Times: Alito Confirmation Navigator

Washington Post : Special Report on the Alito Hearings

Slate's Coverage

The Center For American Progress