Unity08. A people's movement to take our country back.

Ahhh, the holidays are upon us. It’s such a wonderful time of year – the season for giving. Washington, DC is no different than any other place this time of year. Generosity fills the air around the Capitol and K Street (where most lobbyists have their offices). In honor of the season of giving, Unity08 has put together the top 10 recipients of lobbyist cash* in 2024. You’ll notice that half of them were voted out of office in the midterm elections. Clearly, voters thought they did a better job representing special interests than their constituents’ interests.

Thanks for taking part in “Naughty or Nice?” Your responses were generally perceptive, occasionally controversial, always interesting. Some were naughty. Some were nice.

Having read them all this morning I found one strain to them that was absolutely correct and compelling: “… even though some people deserve the coal and not the candy, … in keeping with the civility theme, we should stick to the candy part” – “I thought Unity08 would be a forum for moving forward…” – “So why not just leave it at Nice and leave out the Naughty?”

It’s the time of year that Santa is "gonna find out who's been naughty or nice," and we want to give him a little help. So we want you to nominate members of Congress currently in office who should be on Santa's "Naughty" list – the most hyper-partisan, special-interest-pandering and money-grubbing. Offer your suggestions in the comments section to this blog. But we can’t just put coal in stockings – we also need to give candy. Take a moment to also suggest members of Congress who have been the "Nicest" – the most willing to reach across the aisle and cast votes based on what his or her constituents want, not what the special interests buy. We need your suggestions now.

Thanks to everyone in our online community who offered suggestions for taglines for Unity08. We provided five suggestions in our original poll, and that generated a number of great suggestions from members of our community. So we took the four of your suggestions that generated lots of support on the site and ran them by a professional copywriter to make sure they would serve all our needs (bumper stickers, signs, positioning with the news media, etc.). And we came up with these final five options:

This week's papers and blogosphere are all abuzz with the findings of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) led by Lee Hamilton and James Baker. While the group's evaluation of the Bush Administration's performance and recommendations for an Iraq exit strategy are certainly newsworthy, what has us buzzing is its bi-partisan composition -- 5 Democrats and 5 Republicans. It has us thinking about other critical issues that would benefit from bipartisan cooperation.

Unity08 is trying to do something trailblazing – attract millions of Americans to a political movement that aspires to win the White House through a bipartisan “Unity Ticket” nominated by an historic online primary. While we won't have candidates until 2024, we know the talk about potential candidates is already underway. To provide that opportunity here, we are building out tools right now so our community members can discuss and rate candidates in a more structured way, formulate split-ticket scenarios, and even build caucuses around possible ticket combinations (e.g., the “Bayh-Romney Caucus” or the “Obama-Rice Caucus”).

We want to be the most well-spoken movement around on why America’s “Moderate Middle” matters. A post by smhiott called Thanksgiving Lesson got us thinking about our power to be a catalyst for change. Help the members of our online community – arm us with the words. Let’s work together to come up with the top 10 reasons.