MOMocrats™

Two Great Announcements! Please Meet Bubble Genius & Care2.com

Two new things happening here.

We at MOMocrats are very pleased to announce that we have a delightful sponsor for our MOMochat Blog Talk Radio show--Bubble Genius!

It's soap, people, cute shapes and motifs, with all-vegetable ingredients and not tested on animals. Plus, in a wink to political junkies, there are fun PooDoo dolls of your favorite partisan villains, John McCain soap-on-a-rope...and even random space alien soaps and a glorious bagel-shaped soap.

We love Bubble Genius because we know that political participation is like rugby: leaves you sweaty, there's ocasional blood-letting, definitely mud-flinging, and sometimes you barely move the ball down the field. So of course you need to clean up from the muck of electoral politics.

We also signed onto Care2.com's publisher network, featuring petitions to support some of your favorite causes. Every time you sign a petition from our site, you'll be supporting a cause and also helping MOMocrats earn 75c for each email signature on the petition. We're joined in the publisher network by other great content sites and magazines like Mother Jones and Ms. Magazine. It's a way for us to subsidize what it costs to run this site, and maybe--with your help--grow it in directions we've been yearning to take it for a while now.

So please, when you see the petitions at the end of our posts (or hopefully soon on our sidebar), sign up and help us out as you're helping out your cause.

Thanks for reading, and clicking!

The MOMocrats

 

A Woman Who Supports Gay Rights & Marriage Equality Boycotts Target

I applaud this woman for publicly withdrawing her purchasing power from Target.

Recently the corporation donated $150,000 to the Republican candidate for the gubernatorial campaign in Minnesota, Target's home state. This sparked ire from LGBT groups, who demanded to know how Target could support an anti-marriage equality candidate at the same time as they supported gay rights and causes.

As mentioned by Randi Reitan, boycotting Target will be hard, because it's convenient to shop there and it's a handy place to pick up gifts for kids and grandkids. Soon it'll be time to stock up on back-to-school stuff. But I admire her allegiance to her cherished LGBT family members and friends, and her quiet, principled stand.

Corporations and marketers want to court women because they know we control the purse strings. Sometimes I detest being treated as if I'm merely Giddy Shopper Lady. (I mean, I am all that, AND more. Heh.) What if we could take that same power of the purse strings and use it for good, not evil? Together we could really get Target's attention. Maybe we could even get them to do the right thing--be consistent in their support of LGBT causes.

Cynematic's cobwebby blog is P i l l o w b o o k.

Help save homemade toys, handmade kids clothes, and above all, tons of small businesses from the wrath of the CPSIA

Mamas, I desperately need your help.

As we all know, lead and toxic chemicals do not belong in our children's toys. Congress, fortunately, acted quickly to fix that problem. Unfortunately, they did so by passing the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act which threatens to destroy small businesses with prohibitively expensive testing and labeling requirements. In other words, the small artists, toymakers, and WAHM crafters--you know, the people who already make products that we love and trust--are going to go under while the big honkin' toy companies can continue making their plastic crap in China. You can read all about it here. If you are okay with legalese. 

Say goodbye to the beautiful carved wooden toys you find at craft fairs or on etsy, the homemade baby slippers knit by a mom trying to support her family while she stays home with her kids, the cute handmade bows that your neighbor is selling to raise some spending money.

MOMocrats giveaway: Cool "Super-limited edition" T-shirts celebrate our future first family

Aren't these shirts the coolest? These are the first Obama shirts I've seen that I would actually buy and so I've ordered one. Can't wait to wear it around this weekend!

From the designer's website (where you can order one):

Super limited edition--(more in the works though)
Men's is grey, women's is pink, various sizes. American Apparel brand
$25 each, with all profits going towards an Obama 08' campaign contribution.

Change is coming.

One lucky MOMocrats winner will win a shirt! All you have to do is leave a comment below and finish this sentence: On election night...

We will pick a winner on Thursday Oct 29! As always please make sure your email works so we can contact you if you win.

Congrats to Connie who won the shirt!

Trick or Vote! Obama-Biden Halloween Edition

Right around the corner: the High Holy Days of Halloween, up there with Chinese New Year and Thanksgiving in importance in our household. Agonizing over and careful selection of a costume starts in July and is a multi-month and fickle process, Chez Cynematic. (The five year old will be Yoda.)

You getting excited too? First of all, you need to get your pumpkin and carve a big Obama logo on it. Patterns and instructions here, at YesWeCarve. (Do yourself a favor, you MUST look at the awesome pics.)

Then, you need to figure out your costume. Paper Obama masks available here. People who want to be (or exorcise through playacting) scary-ass race-baiting, soul-sucking, brain-eating zombies can find McCain masks here.

I won't even Go There on the Palin thing. Too. Effing. Frightening.

Less Political Whine, More Political Wine!

Politics and wine go together like ... well ... sometimes it's just good to have a glass of wine when you're talking politics, especially when it's with someone who doesn't share the same, shall we say, sensibilities!

But a couple of politically active guys who also love wine noticed that at a lot of political events, the wine that gets served was, shall we say, not worthy of any sort of nomination.

And so, The Political Winery was born!  One of its founders, Chris Trebilcock, took the time to talk with me a couple of weeks ago, about the inspiration for this venture.

"Often, when you attend a political event, like a fund-raiser, some random wine is chosen just by price.  We saw a market there, to provide quality, affordable wine to political events," Trebilcock told me on the phone just days before he was headed off for his honeymoon!  And so, a great business idea was born!

Interestingly, he and his partner are from different sides of the political aisle.  Trebilcock has held a variety of positions in politics, including time spent working for former Michigan Governor James Blanchard.  His partner in wine, John Helmholdt, also has a lengthy resume of political involvement.  But their love of good, inexpensive wine led them to to create the Political Winery (who so graciously donated some items for our recent MOMocrats Swag-o-Rama!)

At the moment, they offer a couple of different red and white wines, and hope to corner the market on wine for the politically active in coming years.   And who knows -- they might even be serving it at the conventions!

When she isn't honing her sommelier skills, you can also find Joanne pondering the political at her place, PunditMom. She also hangs out at The Huffington Post and BlogHer, where she is a Contributing Editor for Politics & News.

Also, PunditMom's DNC coverage starts today with something a little "unconventional!"

The MOMocrats' New Shoes

I'd like to take a break from our regularly scheduled political programming for a moment and highlight the fact that the MOMocrats are not only smart but stylish as well. If the Emerge adage is true that we should donate at least as much as our most recent pair of shoes to a political candidate, MOMocrats who visited San Francisco for BlogHer may be in trouble.

Friday, several of us who are also part of the Silicon Valley Moms Blog Group (from New York, DC, LA, Chicago and more) got together for new head shots, networking and shopping at Saks on Union Square, courtesy Saks, Chevy (GM), and Yahoo as sponsors. What transpired was an unplanned attack on the shoe department. Beth arrived first, buying power red Stuart Weitzman pumps (shown above right) worthy of any woman in Congress.

an honorary MOMocrat

I spent the weekend with two of my closest girlfriends and couldn't have been more pleased to have been picked up from the airport in this car.  I figured none of you would mind if I offered her honorary MOMocrat status and of course, she's gladly accepted.

New MOMocrats T-Shirt

For all you Powerful Blogger Ladies out there...just what you've always wanted, a way to show your power and promote MOMocrats! MOMocrat Steph designed a t-shirt proclaiming our power, as women and as bloggers. You can customize the color and style of the shirt to fit your own fabulousness.

Buy one now (or any of our MOMocrats Zazzle merchandise) and 10% of your purchase goes toward funding the MOMocrats trip to the Democratic National Convention in August.

Powerful Blogger Lady T-Shirt by Momocrats
Create a Customized Shirt Using www.zazzle.com
More Computers Science Technology T-Shirts

The Art and Commerce of Barack Obama

My feeling is that you know a candidate is something special when he (or she as the case may be) is inspiring art. And I don't mean the bad "French Poodles for Obama" buttons on etsy.

Although come to think of it, if there was one for bulldogs I'd probably get it.

When I stumbled across the Ann Arbor-based shop Stories and Divinations I was absolutely awed by the artist's gorgeous narrative Obama collage bracelet for $135 - plus if you tell her a story you can save 20%. How's that for the true soul of an artist?

Her entire political section is a civil libertarian's happy place.

So, have you picked out any Obama goodies to buy yet?

-Liz sits at home in her unfashionable sweatpants seeking out hot trends for parents as the co-editor of shopping blog Cool Mom Picks. She also exploits her life for humor at her personal blog, Mom-101.