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MoveOn founder, Tea Party figure meet »
Truth is, MoveOn's Joan Blades - clad in Lululemon yoga pants and clogs - and Mark Meckler, sporting a leather cowboy vest, boots and a belt buckle larger than a baby's head - have been talking online and over the phone for a few years now. Blades has been involved in similar types of projects for about a decade, but this is a fairly new school of political thought, which posits that people can come together to find some common ground without abandoning their core beliefs. The occasion was the latest installment of Living Room Conversations ( www.livingroomconversations.org), Blades' latest national transpartisan project that she co-founded with former GOP operative Amanda Kathryn Roman, who lives in New Jersey. The Depression-era law prevented commercial banks from getting involved in investment banking, but it was repealed in 1999 during the Clinton administration. Too often, outfits like MoveOn and the Tea Party get so wrapped up in beating each other in the partisan, Twitter-driven politics of the moment that they don't take time to see who is picking both of their pockets. [...] they introduced themselves, then said what they wanted to get out of the conversation. In introducing herself, Linda Gilbert of Sacramento County, an information technology consultant, small business owner and one of Meckler's Tea Party friends, said, "Government hasn't done anything other than get in the way and deter people from getting things done." "Did you go to public school?" asked Elisa Batista, a friend of Blades' from Berkeley who publishes the MotherTalkers blog and whose husband, Markos Moulitsas, is the Kos of the powerhouse Daily Kos liberal political blog. Everybody hung around for another 20 minutes to talk - about their families, about crime prevention, about books to share - even after Blades officially ended the session. A Gallup survey in December found that 36 percent of the respondents identified themselves as "independents" - more than those who said they were Republicans or Democrats. [...] there is plenty of room for transpartisan agreement, too, Blades said, especially for a country that seems starved for it in the face of tough national debates over guns and spending and immigration. "[...] if there's one thing I learned from MoveOn, it is that if it's the right time, right place, these things can take off," Blades said. Source Main page (current trends)
More about: Amanda Kathryn Roman, Elisa Batista, Joan Blades, Mark Meckler, Markos Moulitsas, MoveOn, Tea Party