2019 Blue Commonwealth Gala

Over the years I have contributed to individual candidates - more recently Democrats - but have not gone to a political party fundraiser in over 20 years since I left the GOP after that party was taken over by Christofascists who turned that party into the equivalent of a rabid dog.  That was until now.  With all 140 seats in the Virginia General Assembly up for election in November, 2019, the husband and I will be traveling to Richmond today to attend the Blue Commonwealth Gala - a Democrat Party fundraiser - in Richmond (thanks to our friend Jenny who will be house/dog sitting for us).  Headlining the event is presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg who will now be joined by rival candidate Amy Klobuchar.  Other speakers include a who's who of Virginia's Democrat congressional officeholders.

For years now, the Virginia GOP's strangle hold on the General Assembly has held Virginia back and blocked an array of legislation that would benefit Virginians ranging from commonsense gun control, to LGBT non-discrimination protections, to ending medical care disparities for minorities and poor Virginians (Governor Northam is currently pushing to end the disparity in maternal deaths for minority mothers).  Indeed, winning Democrat control of the House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate in November, 2019, will be decisive in determining whether Virginia will continue to emerge as a leading modern state or remain part of the southern states backwater that want to turn the clock back to the 1950's or earlier. 

I urge fellow Virginians to get politically involved, make sure you are registered to vote, and go out and vote in both November, 2017, in the Virginia elections, and in November, 2020.  We need to turn Virginia blue and send a message to Donald Trump.  Then, in November, 2020, we need to take back America in 2020 from the Trumpists and extremists who now control the GOP. 

Headed Towards Political Homelessness?

I left the Republican Party roughly 20 years ago (I do not remember the exact date I resigned from my City Committee seat) because the GOP had veered too far to the right and could no longer embrace the concept of the separation of church and state, something has become even worse under the Trump/Pence regime.  While never officially a Democrat - I have gone to some Democrat city committee meetings - I have more or less supported Democrat candidates with money and even housing campaign staffers for up to four months at a time. Now, I fear that the Democrats are going to veer in the opposite direction.  The ideology police swarming around Ralph Northam are but one symptom as the push of a "no tolerance and no forgiveness ever" policy that I suspect will ultimately cannibalize the Democrat Party and drive many like myself away.  

I also see this far left extremism infecting the struggle for LGBT rights in Virginia which, by default has forced many to support Democrats since the Republican Party of Virginia remains firmly in the control of religious extremists at The Family Foundation and neo-Confederates.  Indeed, there are events already scheduled where I now find I have no desire to attend.  I simply have no desire to see a considerable number of people that will be in attendance and have even less desire to pledge financial support given the true character of these same individuals that I have witnessed over the last few days.  

Supporting third party candidates isn't the solution since, voting for them is a wasted vote and money donated might just as well have been burned in a fireplace.  The take away is that I am not sure what the answer is, but the husband and I will definitely be rethinking our support to many, especially senior elected officials who have proven they will quickly throw others under the bus and have no true loyalty to anyone. Loyalty is a two way street in my book, not one way.

It's Time to Get in the NRA's Face in a Major Way

Having been a political activist for 25 years, one thing that drives me to distraction is the difference - perhaps laziness is the better word - of so many Americans when it comes to paying attention to politics and getting off one's butt to support responsible candidates and to oppose toxic elements in political life.  Few organizations are more toxic in American politics than the NRA which basically trades in death and puts gun manufacturers' profits above all else, including the lives of school students as demonstrated by the NRA's opposition to any type of sane gun control legislation after every mass shooting.  Only in America does such carnage go on and on while NRA puppets in elected office do nothing by offer utterly worthless "thoughts and prayers."  A column in the New York Times exhorts Americans to get off their asses and do more than dwell in social media.  The rubber hits the road by confronting and getting in the faces of NRA bought politicians and voting them out of office.  Here are column excerpts: 

Cameron Kasky, a 17-year-old at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who survived last week’s mass shooting, wrote a beautiful essay for CNN.com that declared: “At the end of the day, the students at my school felt one shared experience — our politicians abandoned us by failing to keep guns out of schools. But this time, my classmates and I are going to hold them to account. This time we are going to pressure them to take action. This time we are going to force them to spend more energy protecting human lives than unborn fetuses.”

Cameron, God bless you for that sentiment. But just one piece of respectful advice: If your generation and mine want to get serious about a gun control crusade, we all need to get out of Facebook and into someone’s face: the N.R.A.’s.

This fight can’t be won on Twitter or Instagram. . . . . The N.R.A. is not just in the chat rooms. It’s in the cloakrooms of Congress and state legislatures. And it’s there with bags of money and votes it uses to reward lawmakers who do its bidding and hurt those who don’t.

I loved seeing the 100 students from your high school taking buses Tuesday to Florida’s capital to directly press lawmakers. That’s a great start. I hope every high school follows.
But, ultimately, nothing will change unless young and old who oppose the N.R.A. run for office, vote, help someone vote, register someone to vote or help fund someone’s campaign — so we can threaten the same electoral pain as the National Rifle Association, which, according to PolitiFact, spent $203.2 million between 1998 and 2017 funding its candidates, defeating gun control advocates and lobbying. This is not about persuading people with better ideas. We tried that. It’s about generating raw electoral power and pain.

Because most of the G.O.P. members of Congress who do the N.R.A.’s bidding care about only one thing: their jobs. The pay of a typical congressman is $174,000 — and free parking at Reagan National Airport — and they will sell themselves to whoever can generate the votes to enable them to keep both. . . . . This is primarily a G.O.P. problem today.

How do we know that? Read the paper or the web. The G.O.P., which claimed to stand for conservative family values, has prostrated itself before the most indecent person to ever occupy the White House — a man who lies as he breathes, smears poor, nonwhite nations and reportedly had sex with a porn star shortly after his wife delivered their son. But G.O.P. lawmakers are mute on this because President Trump energizes their base and ensures their $174,000-a-year jobs and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

Republicans won’t back common-sense gun laws that would protect fully developed human beings — because the N.R.A. energizes their base and funds their campaigns and ensures their $174,000-a-year jobs and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

This is a party whose “Freedom Caucus” was so obsessed with our rising national debt that it tried to prevent Barack Obama from spending a dime to stimulate our economy after it went deep into recession — but just voted to add $1 trillion to the debt for a corporate tax cut without regard for the burden put on our kids.

Trying to embarrass them to act on principle is wasted breath. . . . . They know full well that a common-sense banning of all military assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, or mandating universal background checks for gun buyers or to prevent terrorists and the mentally ill from buying guns, would not curb the constitutional right to bear arms.

They know full well that they’re in the grip of an N.R.A. cult, whose heart is so frozen, it’s content to watch innocent children and adults get gunned down weekly — rather than impose common-sense gun limits. They know all of this — but they suppress it, because they also know if they vote for common-sense gun laws, the N.R.A. will fund their next opponent.

Like I said, this is just about raw naked power, and that is what sensible gun control advocates have to generate more of now — in the form of votes and campaign funding. Otherwise nothing changes.

Keep speaking out, Cameron — but never underestimate what some people will do for a $174,000 job and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

 Many ask why the husband and I are so politically active and give money, provide housing to candidates' staff members, and use whatever influence we can muster to get voters out on election day to support good candidates.  The answers are easy.  First, it is a duty of Second, and more importantly, bad things happen when good people fail to act.  In 2016, far too many good people were lazy and failed to vote.  The result is the nightmare that occupies the White House.  Another is a GOP totally beholden to the NRA.  This can change, but people must get off their asses and and get to work NOW.  The 2018 midterms are a perfect opportunity to send the GOP and NRA a message.  And remember that silence equals complicity.

Why Progressives Shouldn’t Support Bernie Sanders - A Pragmatist View

I will admit that that I like some of the positions that Bernie Sanders is taking on economic issues and, of course America's broken American Dream.  But the former political party activist in me knows that the ultimate goal is to back a party candidate that can win come the general election. Given the swamp fever that has overcome the Republican Party it is even more important that no Republican win the White House in 2016 and thereby allow the Supreme Court to be further tilted against average Americans and needed regulations that hold robber baron like corporations in check.   It is this reality that has caused former Congressman Barney Frank to make the case why progressives should not back Bernie Sanders and in the process potentially weaken Hillary Clinton in the 2016 face off with the GOP nominee.  Here are highlights from his piece in Politico:

Republicans fear that if Hillary Clinton is nominated fairly easily, while they are locked in a bitter, lengthy, ideologically charged series of primaries with a large cast of characters of varying degrees of plausibility, she gets a head start for the real fight. . . . they believe boosting Sanders’ candidacy is their only way to prevent Clinton emerging as the nominee with broad support early in the process, strengthening her position in November.

They are correct.

I know that there is a counter-argument made by some on the Democratic left that a closely contested nomination process will help our ultimate nominee — that Clinton will somehow benefit from having to spend most of her time and campaign funds between now and next summer proving her ideological purity in an intraparty fight, like Mitt Romney in 2012 — rather than focusing on her differences with the conservative she will face in the election. But neither an analysis of the current political situation nor the history of presidential races supports this.

I believe strongly that the most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals — on health care, immigration, financial regulation, reducing income inequality, completing the fight against anti-LGBT discrimination, protecting women’s autonomy in choices about reproduction and other critical matters on which the Democratic and Republican candidates for president will be sharply divided — is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year. That way, she can focus on what we know will be a tough job: combating the flood of post-Citizens United right-wing money, in an atmosphere in which public skepticism about the effectiveness of public policy is high.

Without any substance, some argue that she has been insufficiently committed to economic and social reform — for example, that she is too close to Wall Street, and consequently soft on financial regulation, and unwilling to support higher taxation on the super-rich. This is wholly without basis.

And as Paul Krugman documented throughout the 2008 nomination campaign, she was, on the whole, to Barack Obama’s left on domestic issues.

True, not on Iraq. Having myself voted against that terrible mistake, I agree that her position on the war is a legitimate concern for those of us on the left. The question then becomes whether this was a manifestation of a general tendency to support unwise military intervention, or the case of her joining every other Democratic senator who had serious presidential ambitions in voting for a war that the Bush-Cheney administration had successfully hyped as a necessary defense against terrorism.

I regard liberal senators’ support for the Iraq War as a response to a given fraught political situation rather than an indication of their basic policy stance — like Obama’s off-again, on-again support for same-sex marriage. . . . . Most relevantly for this discussion, she will clearly be for less military spending and intervention than the Republican nominee.

There is not only no chance — perhaps regrettably — for Sanders to win a national election. A long primary campaign will only erode the benefit Democrats are now poised to reap from the Republicans’ free-for-all.

Regrettably, I believe that Barney Frank is correct.  Therefore, we need to focus on making sure the Republicans go down to defeat in November, 2016.