Pierce writes: "In these times, everything looks like an ill omen. The capitol is crowded with crows. But it is not an exaggeration to say that if you're not following the ongoing insanity in Oregon, you are missing a look into a very dark future."
A militia member in Oregon. (photo: AP)
The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future
25 June 19
People with guns have involved themselves in a legislative dispute while the officials of one political party cheer them on.
n these times, everything looks like an ill omen. The capitol is crowded with crows. But it is not an exaggeration to say that if you're not following the ongoing insanity in Oregon, you are missing a look into a very dark future. It begins with a not-at-all-unusual squabble between the Republicans in the Oregon legislature and the Democratic Governor, Kate Brown. At issue is a huge bill aimed at dealing with the climate crisis. On Thursday, every Republican member of the Oregon state senate took a powder, denying Brown and the Democrats a quorum and effectively killing the bill.
Now this is not an unusual tactic. Not long ago, Democratic lawmakers in Texas and in Wisconsin blew town for the same purpose�to throw sand in the gears of a legislative act of which they did not approve and could not stop by conventional means. In Wisconsin, it was to slow down an anti-union measure. In Texas, it was about a redistricting map that gerrymandered the Texas legislature into a farce. The legislative lamsters all had a good time, taking goofy videos in what appeared to be Holiday Inn lobbies while Republicans back home fumed. (The Texans, it should be noted, won a temporary victory.) What makes Oregon different is what the fugitive Republican senators did.
The Republican senators�with the full support of the Oregon Republican Party�made common cause with armed domestic terror groups. (Calling them a militia is a misnomer, regardless of what they may think of themselves.) When a Republican state senator named Brian Boquist heard that Brown was sending the Oregon state police after them, he told a local television station:
Send bachelors and come heavily armed. I�m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It�s just that simple.
Almost immediately, the local domestic terror groups sprang to Boquist's defense. From ThinkProgress:
A member of the Oregon 3 Percenters � a militia group whose members have vowed to combat what they perceive as constitutional infringement � said they would act as the senators� de-facto bodyguards against the state police. �We have vowed to provide security, transportation and refuge for those Senators in need,� they wrote in a Facebook post. �We will stand together with unwavering resolve, doing whatever it takes to keep these Senators safe.�
In Idaho, where some of the lawmakers have supposedly fled, the state�s 3 Percenters group was similarly willing to defend the Republicans as well, posting threatening memes on its Facebook page. �This is what the start of a civil war looks like,� the group wrote in one post. �Elected officials seeking asylum in a friendly jurisdiction.� Speaking to ThinkProgress, Eric Parker, president of the group Real 3 Percenters Idaho, said the group was currently networking to figure out if Brown had asked for any �out of state resources� � such as help from the FBI or Idaho State Patrol � and were willing to assist the the Republican senators in any way necessary.
And you could find a way to wave this off as well, except for what happened on Saturday. From the Oregonian/OregonLive:
A spokeswoman for the Senate President confirmed late Friday that the "Oregon State Police has recommended that the Capitol be closed tomorrow due to a possible militia threat."
An "Occupy The Senate" rally on Sunday, sponsored by the local and state GOP, seems to have fizzled. (Jason Wilson on the electric Twitter machine is your go-to on this, and he has pictures, including one of a chainsaw the size of a Saturn V.) That doesn't calm me down at all. There has been a wildness in the land for a while now and, at this moment, at the top of the government, we have a president* who's more than willing to give that wildness a purpose and a focus.
People with guns have involved themselves in a legislative dispute while the officials of one of the political parties was rooting them on, and one session of a state legislature was cancelled because of it. Roll that around in your head for a while and see where you end up. Something is building in our politics and now I wish I hadn't watched that series about Chernobyl. We may be exceeding the tolerances of all our systems.
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Volunteer to contact voters and assist in getting Bernie supporters out to vote in your state's primary. Spread the word to vote in person, request a copy of the ballot you submit, and keep that copy. The more massive the voter turnout for Bernie, the more difficult it will be for the 1%ers to pull off election fraud, also known as 'vote death by Diebold', as happened in Gov. Jeb Bush's Florida in 2000, as verified in the documentary, "The Uncounted".
In some states (for example, Colorado), these are the steps needed to get Bernie nominated as the state's Dem. presidential nominee:
1. register in a timely manner as a Dem., as needed to attend and effectively participate in the Democratic caucus in the precinct in which you reside
2. attend your precinct caucus, and seek election as a delegate or alternate to attend your counties' assembly as a del. or alt. for Bernie
3. be prepared, as a Bernie supporter, to be kept waiting outside of where the assembly is being held, for an egregious length of time, for no legit reason and, possibly, in bad weather, while Hillary Clinton supporters are seated inside.
Above point #3 is based on exactly what happened in Colorado's El Paso County Assembly in 2008, in Colorado Springs.
All Bernie has to do is what he's preached for decades because now America is ready to listen.
nuff said....
This may be a last chance before the Koch brothers "take-over" is complete. It is imperative that we unite behind Bernie Sanders. The groundswell of interest in him is reaching an historic intensity for this early in the campaign cycle.
Hillary, on the other hand, is one more corporate Democrat in the same neoliberal tradition as Bill. Business as usual, it won't matter what she says in her campaign any more than it did what Obama said. And she has yet to make any real commitment to breaking up the big banks and putting banksters in prison. Or a long list of other things I am sure I don't need to mention here in this company.
GO BERNIE GO!!
(This is the sub-group, within the party that for all intent and purpose appears to be working in lock-step with right-wing, conservative, corporate sponsored patsies intent on slicing up America for their own riches. It's they've been picking the party's candidates and dictating the absurd rules of play).
Long live the status quo! Long live the Monarchy! Long live the New American Century! - or is it now at a thousand years (again)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_From#The_Democratic_Leadership_Council
It was Al From who founded the DLC. The DLC came into existence after the 1984 presidential election, when Walter Mondale lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan. Democrats started paying attention to them after the 1988 election, when Dukakis lost 40 states to Bush and the Republicans had won five out of the previous six presidential elections.
I no longer support the DLC, but I do think they were needed back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By that time the party had lost five out of six presidential elections, four of them by 40 or more state landslide margins, two of those being 49 state wipeouts. It was clear that, by the late 1980s, too many Americans were unwilling to entrust the White House to the Democrats.
The DLC helped the Democratic become attractive again to suburban voters. But in the Bush area, once suburban voters had come back to the Democratic Party, it was no relevant. And it was not relevant during the 2000s and later.
I made the same mistake voting for Kerry in 2004. Only now does his resemblance to a character in the old Pogo comic strip called "F. Olding Munney" dawn on me.
Bernie is a standard-bearer , and an example for those Democrats now in office - as well as the ones we need to elect to throw out the Republicans presently in Congress - that his message is ascendant and should be paid attention to and supported.
There are huge crowds showing up to see him in red states as well as blue, I think, because more and more Republican voters have figured out that the RNC line has not served them. That is as it should be, though there are no guarantees. I am simply saying that while you have a point, the way to get more Democrats elected to Congress is to support Bernie's example.
But the larger point that I made is that, even if he were to become President, especially with a GOP-controlled House and Senate, Sanders almost certainly would have to agree to compromises people here on this board would consider "betrayals" or "sellouts".
Obama ran a great campaign, but he turned his campaign over to the DNC after he won and the strangled the grass roots aspects of it. OFA became a top down organization that organized phome banks. Activists became frustrated and stopped attending. When is the last time you heard from OFA? DFA is still strong because they allow their membership a voice.
Bernie wants his supporters to march on Washington and demand the change he is fighting for.
an enthusiastic base will also have coat tails.
There is no excitement for anyone else...
Well I am glad that he is launching a movement. That is what is needed. But is this "movement" going to focus on school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and obscure municipal offices no one cares about? Is this "movement" going to focus on midterm elections? Is this "movement" going to focus on ballot initiatives? Is this "movement" going to create a new generation of progressive activists like the right did in the 1970s and 1980s?
Those are the infrastructures that need to be build. Very bad legislation is coming out of various state legislatures. I hate to use GOP terms, but the states are very much the "laboratory of democracy". I think there is too much of a focus on the presidency at the expense of boring, unsexy local offices no one cares about. And in those offices a lot of damage can occur.
Again what I fear is that, should Bernie become President, which I still highly doubt, people will have unrealistic expectations. And when he inevitably can't meet them, especially with a GOP controlled Congress, when he inevitably has to agree to compromises, people will come out here and call him a "sellout".
I met Bernie at a media convention in St Louis some year5s ago when he was still in the house. I hadn't given money to any politician since I resigned as a Republican precinct captain after talking with Reagan in 1980 and being scared to death with his ignorance. After talking with Bernie I've sent him money every year since then and also give to others like Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren.
Why don't you focus on electing the right people to Congress?
I agree 100% with focusing on lower offices. I think too many progressives focus on national politics at the expenses of local offices, state legislatures, and other positions.
Remember 2008, when Barack Obama was going to "transform America"? The only way in which he's lived up to the hype is via his healthcare initiative, which is good (which is why the GOP tried to blackmail the country with the threat of national debt default to stop it), but a long way from enough.
No matter how much oohing and ahhing Sanders can get out of liberal idealists looking for a new hero, what guarantee is there that he won't follow Obama's trajectory?
The penalties havent gotten big yet, but when they do the ACA will be even more unpopular..
1) No Republicans, not even Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, were going to support any bill whatsoever.
2) Obama couldn't even count on every Democrat supporting every part of the bill.
Against that backdrop, as I've asked people who bash Obama for not bringing the public option or single-payer, how were the votes going to materialize? Who would have changed their mind?
So far the ACA seems to be working well. I agree it's not perfect but is saving lives. Millions more people have access to healthcare who didn't before.
I agree that it's not perfect, but it at least curtails some of the worst abuses of the US healthcare system. It is saving lives.
Inevitably, unless there is a watershed election like 1932, Sanders is almost certainly not going to have the votes in either chamber of Congress to get his agenda passed in its purest form. That means that he is almost certainly going to have to make compromises that people here will view as "betrayals" and "sellouts".
It goes back to what I've said here repeatedly. People throw all their hopes onto one or two candidates, expecting that person to be some sort of "savoir", only to see those unrealistic expectations destroyed when they collide into the crosswinds of political reality. People expect one person to implement the politically impossible. And then they turn around and become despondent and depressed whenever it becomes blatantly obvious that said candidate can't even come close to meeting said expectations.
Bernie wont make that mistake....
Obama turned his campaign over to the DNC...a huge mistake...
What's your problem with Bernie Sanders... AND (what you are implying???) "electing the right people to Congress"?
...
You are not selling that snake-oil about Bernie being better in the US Senate, are you?
.
If Bernie won he would bring along some congress members too, and if he's thinking right he'd have Howard Dean doing his 50 state thing and stop the losses Obama started by naming Rahm to replace him. Rahm the ignorant sucks!
But this election is just one battle in a war that has been going on for 10,000 years, since the rise of the oligarchs (the kings and the priests) in the early centuries of the Agricultural Revolution. It will continue until either they are brought to heel or the world as we know it comes to an end.
Either way, whenever we stop fighting, they win. As Gar Alperovitz says, we are going to lose some battles, including some big ones. One might think that after ten thousand years we would have learned that the oligarchs are never going to roll over and concede defeat.
They'll just rig the electronic voting machines.