Tag Archives: Democrats

Fashion

PRAYING FOR SYRIA – and Donald Trump! PLEASE, MR. PRESIDENT, DON’T FUCK UP!!!!!

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Praying today for the people – THE CHILDREN! – of Syria! Praying our President acts with grace and wisdom.

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A scary, uncertain time. Peace! In the ‘hood, Syria, Russia, America! pics: R.T.

McGovern, Pelosi Call for Congress to Reconvene to Debate Military Authorization for Syria

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Congressman Jim McGovern, a senior House Democrat and leading critic of the expanded use of military force by presidents in both parties, joined House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers calling for Speaker Ryan to immediately call the House of Representatives back into session to debate an Authorization of the Use of Military Force for military actions taken in Syria.

In February 2017, Congressman McGovern led a bipartisan group of 19 lawmakers calling for Speaker Ryan to hold a debate and vote on the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) for U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

Following President Trump’s unilateral action to order airstrikes against Syria last night, Congressman McGovern is renewing that call with this statement:

“Every president must obtain congressional authorization to launch military strikes and President Trump is no exception. President Trump’s unilateral action to attack Syria without consulting Congress and obtaining authorization is an alarming violation of the checks and balances put in place by the Constitution – safeguards established to prevent presidents from taking our country to war without the consent of the American people.

“Americans must have a say when it comes to war. President Trump’s failure to work with Congress to achieve a bipartisan consensus on military action has shut out the voices of the American people and raised serious concerns about the possibility of military escalation without any input from their elected leaders. The time to debate U.S. military operations is before we drop bombs and send troops – not after.

“Today I am joining the growing bipartisan call for Congress to immediately reconvene to debate the path forward for U.S. military operations in Syria. If the President intends to escalate U.S. military involvement in Syria, he must to come to Congress for an Authorization for Use of Military Force which is clearly crafted to meet the threat and prevent another endless war. The American people and our men and women in uniform deserve nothing less.”

*******

Full Text of Pelosi Letter to Speaker Ryan:

April 7, 2017

The Honorable Paul Ryan
Speaker of the House
H-232, United States Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Mr. Speaker,

I am writing to request that you call the House back in session immediately to debate any decision to place our men and women in uniform in harm’s way.

Bashar al-Assad ‘s chemical weapons attack on his own people places him outside the circle of civilized human behavior. Assad also continues to attack his own people with conventional weapons. Meanwhile, Russia props up the Assad regime and enables its brutal war crimes to continue.

The President’s action and any response demands that we immediately do our duty. Congress must live up to its Constitutional responsibility to debate an Authorization of the Use of Military Force against a sovereign nation.

As heartbreaking as Assad’s chemical weapons attacks on his own people was, the crisis in Syria will not be resolved by one night of airstrikes. The killing will not stop without a comprehensive political solution to end the violence. The American people are owed a comprehensive strategy with clear objectives to keep our brave men and women in uniform safe and avoid collateral damage to innocent civilians in Syria.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible on this matter of grave concern to our national security.

best regards,

NANCY PELOSI
Democratic Leader

Fashion

“Trumpcare” – NOT in style!!!😱😱😱

But first …

*****

REPUBLICANS SUSCEPTIBLE TO “OVERPROMISING” POLS

By Steven R. Maher

“If you’re going to live a good life, you’ve got to live within your income.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Treasury Secretary George Humphrey

“Through his time in office, he [Humphrey] insisted that the government do just that. He fought profligate spending, irritating liberals and imprudent tax cuts, to the annoyance of conservatives.” – From “Eisenhower: The White House Years,” by Jim Newton.

Recently, I was watching a talk show and heard one Republican pundit say that Trump “overpromised” on health insurance during his candidacy for the Presidency.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump repeatedly promised that his replacement for Obamacare (some call it “Trumpcare”) would allow everyone to choose their own doctor and medical plan; would cost less money; increase benefits and make available universal coverage to all Americans.

How was such a miracle to be accomplished?

Basically, through the miracle of the marketplace. Trump vowed he would make insurance rates go down and make health insurance benefits go up by increasing competition of insurance companies by allowing insurers to sell their policies across state lines.

“Believe me,” Trump would say after promising how much better a program than Obamacare, Trumpcare would be.

Trump later backed off from these pledges, saying health care was more “complicated” than he had anticipated.

Susceptible to this?

Why did so many of Trump’s supporters believe this?

I’m beginning to believe that Republican voters are particularly susceptible to demagogic appeals. We saw this with “Supply Side” economics. Under this highfalutin theory, Congress could cut taxes, increase military spending and balance the budget – all at the same time. Try doing this with your personal life. You will find yourself in bankruptcy court. Granted, you will live high off the hog, eating caviar, filet mignon and lobster to your heart’s content – right up to the point where you run out of credit cards and the bondholders decide to cut you off.

Unfortunately – or rather fortunately, given who is in the White House – there is no Chapter 11 under which nations can default on their debt.

Someday the United States will have to balance its budget. Better that we do it now ourselves, rather than wait until America’s creditors force us to do it.

Republicans used to be the party of fiscal rectitude, wearing the old green shade accounting hats as they counted beans. They threw away those sensibilities when they adopted the fraud known as “Supply Side” economics. Now they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater with Trumpcare.

The Republicans won’t be the party of common-sense economics, like Dwight Eisenhower, until they give up “supply side” economics and “Trumpcare.”

Hoffman, InCity Yum Yums

You be the judge

By Jack Hoffman

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pic:R.T.

I was planning on writing my column for Rose on pass codes/words, but something else got my fancy up. Before I continue, I have just one question about pass codes/words: With all this hacking that’s going on … how the hell do they get into all these files, if they don’t know the pass code?

I’ll await a good response from some geek out there.

Now for what’s important:

I confess when this presidential nominating process began I was cheering for Donald Trump, before the oddsmakers didn’t give him a shot. I wanted him to win so he could bury the Republicans for the next 10 years — maybe longer!

And that’s what scares the hell out of the Repugs who refuse to back him.

I saw a bumper sticker on a parked car that read “I just don’t trust the government.” So I pasted a note on his car, saying: “I suggest you give back your Medicare and Social Security.” With an attachment that read: “It’s your government, too.”

Just this week the war of words has really picked up. It seems everyone or just a few are a little pissed off at their government.

Why?

And who is a racist and a bigot and some other choice words?

Let me turn to the Oxford Dictionary to define “bigot”: “A person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another.”

Sound familiar?…hello, Donald Trump!

After my wee bit of being pissed off, I received the following from a political pal of mine in Florida: It’s titled “Why you should vote Republican.”

Ok, let’s see why:

We’ve blocked every Obama move. We kept another liberal out of the Supreme Court, country be damned;

we cut taxes for the wealthy;

gerrymandered and suppressed the minority vote in every district we could;

repealed “Obamacare” 51 times at a cost of more than $54 million to taxpayers;

we shut down the government, wasting another $21 billion;

we didn’t pass a single jobs bill.

We blocked immigration reform, background checks, minimum wage and equal pay for women;

made women’s choice much harder to exercise;

cut off unemployment benefits, and even filibustered the Veterans Benefits bill.

Most important, we got many states to put in voter IDs so we can keep minorities at a minimum. Of course, there are no real statistics that there is any real voter fraud. Oh! that damn Federal Court is ruling against those IDs!

And we only worked 97 days this year!

Oh, and we want your vote!

Right.

And we are in need of your money!

I’m saving my pass codes column for when I simmer down…

Comments? Email Jack at jack5225@verizon.net

Hoffman, InCity Yum Yums

I’m back!

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Watch out, Worcester, Hillary and Trump – Hoffman’s in town, with plenty of commentary in the back seat!

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Yes!!! pics:R.T.

By Jack Hoffman

First, I want to thank those who cheered me up on just about every new medical problem I incurred. Secondly, I want to thank Rose, who got me off my lazy ass. I wish her all the best on her paper’s fifteenth anniversary.

Has it been that long, Rose?

[Yes, Jack!]

I wanted to come up with a column about something you haven’t read or seen during the past couple of weeks: A discussion or promise to do something about the high cost of a college education.

Yes, Bernie did, and later on Hillary got the Bern. It seems the pundits don’t see anything exciting about college costs, so they flashed more of Trump’s meandering slop.

And yet we belabored through drug commercials you can barely follow. Except watching cute ladies and circe type girls selling another batch of Cialis erection highs.

Followed by the legal ads for having a problem with the drugs that were just being sold.

As many of you know, I spend my summers on the Cape trying to score some loose change and a having a puff or two learning what the summer flock of the young folks have to say about America. One of my pleasures … or shall I say experiencing my loquacious mouth running wild, call it just another manic episode…

Our conversations usually run the gamut – from politics, up to and including college costs. When we get into the latter all the European kids are not just shocked but find U.S. college costs incomprehensible. Especially, when you throw out costs like $50,000 to $65,000.

So here are the facts – you can take them to study hall! One only out of four students from four different countries said he had pay $1,000 for this year for college. The other costs ranged from $00!! to $500. If you get excellent grades in Europe, the cost is 0.

According to the Pell Institute Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, TICAS The non-profit Institute on Higher Education, there is today 42 million Americans bearing a $1.3 trillion indebtness from college loans!!!!!

The real story is that student debt is a $140 billion year industry that got the go get ’em permission from Congress.

Along with the collection orders equal to the IRS.

In other words, they can attach your pay, repo your car and put a lean on your home.

Just a footnote – ask your primary care doctor, if he/she is young, Just what his/her debt is. Mine owes $400,000!!! Is it any wonder very few kids are not going into medicine? As many of you already know, these debts are the subject of family arguments and even more.

So you want to read more and get sick? Read this month’s Consumer Reports. The piece is titled “I kind of Ruined My Life By Going to College.”

One last thought: the interest rate today is 8% – 9% on these loans. Just think of this: the government and the debt collectors are making loads of $!

I’m here and got lots more to say if I can stay out of hospitals…

Comments, questions, compaints? Email Jack at JackH5225@verizon.net

InCity Voices

The end of the GOP and the rise of the Greens!

PR and VP
Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka

By Gordon Davis

The Green Party seems to be the only viable electoral party in the center-left.

The Green Party US is moving to the left. At its 2016 Convention it adopted an anti-capitalism platform. A surprising and bold move for the Greens in the USA.

This anti-capitalist platform is likely to mean a furious fight for the hearts of the Greens. Although the Greens have always rejected any corporate contributions, unlike the Republicans and the Democrats, there are many in the Greens who do not have a clear anti-capitalist agenda.

Does the anti-capitalism platform mean that the Greens will want the so called social democracies of Western Europe? Perhaps another alternative will come about. We will have to see what develops.

In many ways this future struggle within the Greens has the same feel as that which occurred in the late 1960s in SDS. The split in SDS was over how to defeat capitalism.

For President, the Greens nominated favorite and native daughter to Massachusetts, Jill Stein. For Vice President, the Greens nominated Ajamu Baraka, human rights activist. Mr. Baraka is somewhat like Tim Kaine; neither overshadows their respective Presidential candidate.

Cornell West
Cornel West and delegates

At the Greens Convention was a good number of former supporters of candidate Bernie Sanders. For the most part, they were younger and more enthusiastic than the longtime Greens. Former Sanders supporters have made their presence known to the Green-Rainbows in Massachusetts!

It was not clear whether the former Sanders supporters at the Greens Convention were actual delegates or just unofficial attendees. This seems to bode well for the Greens who will likely pick up many younger former Sanders supporters and increase the Green draw as a political party.

The labor vote has not come easily to the Greens. This might have been due to the ties of labor bosses to the Democratic Party. I suppose at some point the Wall Street bosses’ friendship with the Democratic Party could lead to Labor’s defection to the Greens. The Democrats under President Bill Clinton helped destroy labor and the social safety net – and signed bills that led to mass incarceration. Hillary Clinton has paid only lip service to the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement.

During the 1930s the Black vote went from the Republicans to the Democrats when we Black people saw that Wall Street had no plans to end the Great Depression and racism. It is likely something similar will take place in the future.

The Democratic Party was a coalition created by FDR to nullify the Wall Street bosses. Those bosses caused the Great Depression of the 20th Century and the Great Recession of the 21th Century. Today the Democrats are in bed with Wall Street while pretending to be pro-labor.

The Republican Party has split into three parts: fascist, libertarian and the Charlie Baker moderates. It is no longer a coherent entity. Only the fascists have the potential for growing, blaming immigrants and using racism. The Libertarians are just in the wrong century. The moderate Republicans are moving into the Democratic Party where they are being openly courted.

Like the Know Nothing Party of the 1800s, the GOP is disappearing! It seems that the Greens are becoming the new FDR coalition…

Fashion

Steve M.’s columns – always in style!

InCity Book Review

Too Dumb to Fail

By Matt K. Lewis

Reviewed by Steven R. Maher

This book, “Too Dumb to Fail,” subtitled “How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim its Conservative Roots),” displays the Republican establishment’s mindset as presumptive nominee Donald Trump gears up for the general election. The book’s major flaws are it ignores the catastrophic Presidency of George W. Bush as the main reason for the Republican party’s current predicament, excludes how the party’s business elites deindustrialized America in pursuit of profit (giving rise to Trump), and how “supply side” economics drowned the country in red ink.

Published in January 2016, five months ago as this review is being written, the book’s title is derived from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail,” about the financial crisis of 2008.

Supply Side economics

Ronald Reagan emerges as the hero of this narrative. Lewis paints a picture of Reagan that some will find unrecognizable. Under Lewis’ narrative, Reagan was an intellectual, deeply read in history and economics, who cleverly concealed his in-depth knowledge of political issues behind an “everyman” facade. He even cites a Saturday Night Live skit portraying Reagan in this fashion.

Lewis credits the late Congressman and NFL star quarterback Jack Kemp with converting Reagan to “supply side economics.” Under this theory, tax cuts pay for themselves, spurring economic activity and broadening the tax base. “Previously, Reagan, like the entire GOP, had been a ‘green eyeshade party’ – pessimistic bean counters worried about deficits and balanced budgets,” writes Lewis. In practice, under Reagan and George W. Bush, supply side economics led to trillions of dollars in deficits and the income inequalities which has shrunk the middle class and given rise to Donald Trump’s economic populist candidacy.

It is notable that two Presidents who put balancing budgets above tax cuts for the wealthy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, had economic booms during their second terms. Americans were much better off with the ‘green eyeshade party’ running the country than the supply side crowd.

If Reagan is the hero of the story, writes Lewis: “[T]here are villains such as Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, Scam-PACs [political action committees set up to defraud donors], and others who are (in my view) moving us in the wrong direction.”

The Vultures

In his analysis of how the GOP went wrong, Lewis saw the Republicans making the South their political stronghold by appealing to the racist inclinations of white Southerners as the start of the decline. He leaves out, of course, Reagan’s announcement of his 1980 Presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan. In a chapter entitled “The Vultures,” he goes over how the GOP “made the mistake of building up, or reflexively defending” hucksters such as “Joe the Plumber,” who tried to monetize his 15 minutes of fame questioning candidate Barack Obama; George Zimmerman, who shot to death the teenage African-American Trayvon Martin; and Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who was glamorized by the GOP for refusing to pay the federal government over grazing rights, until Bundy made several racist remarks about African-Americans.

America’s changing demographics appear to trouble the author of “Too Dumb to Fail” most. He writes that the natural adherents of the Republican Party, white male voters, are rapidly decreasing as a percentage of the over-all electorate. He writes that Republican Presidential candidates should be trying to expand their party base by appealing to Latinos and African-Americans. Donald Trump’s negative ratings among these two groups is currently in the stratosphere, hovering above 80%. Short of resurrecting Martin Luther King or Cesar Chavez to be his running mate, Trump’s practice of attacking minority voters is likely to doom his White House ambitions.

Lewis ends his book by urging readers to get involved in Republican politics as bit players, self-educating themselves the way Reagan did, and support the billionaire Koch brothers (yes, those Koch brothers), who have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns at all levels, and received afterwards legislation favorable to their financial interests.

InCity Voices

This just in! InCity Times ace political writer Steve Maher is back!

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Woo-hoo!!!

DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS SHOULD ABANDON CAUCUSES, SUPERDELEGATES, UNPLEDGED DELEGATES AND CLOSED PRIMARIES

By Steven R. Maher

Sometimes one gets the impression that America democracy is dissolving before our eyes as the rank and file rebel against the party elites through the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Part of what voters are rebelling against are the rules set up by these elites to preserve their own privileges and the huge amount of money flooding into the political process because of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Together these two toxins are poisoning the American people’s belief in the Democratic process.

The antidote to these poisons is uniquely American – let the voters decide, not the super-delegates,unpledged delegates, or the party bosses.

Caucuses

The first thing each party should do is abolish caucuses, replacing them with primary elections where party voters choose the candidates. The caucus process embraces a fundamentally un-American concept that everyone knows what candidate you voted for. Unlike a primary, voters can’t go into a voting booth and in privacy select the candidate of their choice. They have to go “caucus” in the corner of the meeting hall for their candidates, where their choices are known to all. This is a situation which lends itself to retaliation and boycotts in which individuals can be targeted for reprisals for supporting a particular candidate.

Caucusing imposes what I call an “availability tax” on working business persons or single parent mothers. If you’re a small entrepreneur (Republican) trying to get a business up and running, taking three or four hours out of the day to caucus means foregoing business opportunities. Likewise, a single working parent (Democrat) trying to support several small children on a minimum wage job (or two jobs) may have to cut back on food, the electricity or some other vital expense to pay for a baby sitter to watch their children while Mom caucuses.

The caucus system is an expensive privilege for many, not a right.

For the two reasons cited above, both parties should replace caucuses with a primary election where voters can walk in, cast a ballot, and leave with the knowledge that their input, anonymously made, counts.

Superdelegates

In 1972 the Democrats had one of the worst electoral defeats in history when Richard M. Nixon defeated George McGovern in every state but Massachusetts. After this, the party created “superdelegates.” Wikipedia defines ‘superdelegates’ this way: “These Democratic Party superdelegates include distinguished party leaders, and elected officials, including all Democratic members of the House and Senate and sitting Democratic governors. Other superdelegates are chosen during the primary season. Democratic superdelegates are free to support any candidate for the nomination.” The same website put the number of superdelegates at 719.

Superdelegates were created to prevent another George McGovern from winning the nomination. It seems tailor made to block Bernie Sanders. It reeks of the rancid belief that the people can’t be trusted to make their own choices, and the party bosses should in some exigent circumstance select the nominee against the will of their own party. Selecting the candidate with the most votes is the American way.

Unpledged delegates

The Republicans don’t directly make members of the party’s political establishment “superdelegates” the way the Democrats do. But they do allow their state organizations considerable leeway in creating electoral processes that are favorable to party patricians, and in the case what I call “mini-conventions,” which almost totally disenfranchise the lower party ranks.

Depending on the website you wish to cite, there are 168 unpledged delegates (Politico) or 457 (Mother Jones). “The only people who get unpledged status are each state’s three Republican National Committee members,” says Wikipedia. “This means that unpledged delegates are only 168 of the total number of delegates. However, unpledged delegates do not have the freedom to vote for whichever candidate they please. The RNC ruled in 2015 that the unpledged delegates must vote for the candidate that their state voted for; the unpledged RNC members will be bound in the same manner as the state’s at-large delegates, unless the state elects their delegates on the primary ballot, then all three RNC members will be allocated to the statewide winner.”

The Mother Jones figure seems to include those states, like Pennsylvania, which elected 57 delegates unpledged to any candidate. Some of the Pennsylvania unpledged delegates, to their credit, said in advance they would vote for Trump if a majority of their constituents did. Others stated they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances, regardless of how the majority of the people voted.

Particularly insidious are the “mini-conventions” like that in Wyoming, where Ted Cruz won 14 out of 14 delegates. In these shams, voters go to precinct meetings, where delegates are elected to a county convention. At the county convention, delegates are chosen for the state convention, where delegates are for the national convention are picked. This is what Trump has accurately described as a “rigged process.”

Closed primaries

Closed primaries are those where only someone who has been a party member for six months or more are allowed to vote. In Massachusetts, Independents can take either a Republican or Democratic ballot, and revert back to being an independent after they vote.

This writer understands why some party members would prefer that the party nominee espouses their party’s basic liberal or conservative brand. A good example of this can be illustrated by the reference to the two second-tier parties in Massachusetts, the Libertarians and the Green Party.
Libertarians advocate shrinking the size of government and reducing governmental interference in Americans’ private lives. How would Libertarians feel if thousands of left-wing Democrats voted in a Libertarian primary for a Libertarian nominee who wanted to double size of government and insert government totally into the private lives of all Americans? Probably the same way the Democratic Party establishment felt about large numbers of independents entering the Democratic primary to vote for Bernie Sanders.

The Green Party is at its heart an environmentalist party. How would the Greens feel if thousands of right wing Republicans entered the Green Party to pick a nominee who favored fracking and land strip mining? Probably the same way the Republican establishment felt about thousands of independents flooding their primary to support Trump.

The two party system has served America well. To preserve this system, the two major parties need to have the elasticity to absorb elements such as those supporting Trump or Sanders. The closed primaries should be abandoned. Otherwise, as John F. Kennedy warned in his inaugural address: “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Fashion

Politics – always in style! (It’s how we change the world!)

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2016 Caucus Information 

Ward 1 
3/5/16
44 Park Ave, Braley &Wellington Insurance 9:00 AM

Ward 2 
2/20/16
116 Country Club Blvd Lincoln Village Center 10:00 AM

Ward 4 
2/27/16
Salem Square Worcester Public Library Banx Room 10:00 AM

Ward 5 
2/13/16
2 Addison Street Addison Apartments 1:30 PM

Ward 6 
TBD

Ward 7 
2/20/16
2 Circuit Ave Alhambra Nights of Columbus 12:00 PM

Ward 8 
3/5/16
138 Green Street NeighborWorks HomeOwenrship Center 10:00 AM

Ward 9 
2/29/16
335 Chandler Street NU Cafe 7:00 PM

Ward 10 
3/6/16
143 Highland Street Sahara Restaurant 4:00 PM

*****
Worcester Democratic City Committee
Candy Carlson, Chair 

InCity Voices

Feel the Bern! Bernie Sanders wins big in New Hampshire!

By Chris Horton

Bernie 60% Hillary 38% in New Hampshire: how did THAT happen?

Bernie scored a huge win in NH, beating all expectations. It was the result of hard work, but it was something more.  Something is shifting in American politics, and everyone who’s paid attention can feel it. 

The NY Times reports that under 30 voters, the “social media generation”, went for Bernie by more than 80% – many voting for the first time!  We saw them at Worcester’s North High School, 4000 wildly enthusiastic young adults turning out on 2 days notice, but Tony from Marlborough says that at the rally at Concord (NH) high school Tuesday night the enthusiasm and energy that filled the room went far beyond that! Dating himself, he said it was “more exciting than a Rod Stewart concert.  Bernie has attained Rock Star status!”

The NY Times observed that Sanders had “only” won half the Democratic voters in NH, and his victory margin was almost entirely from independents.  Seriously?  “Only?”  With practically the entire Democratic establishment coast to coast endorsing Hillary, with thousands of Democratic officeholders and operatives – hundreds from Massachusetts including Jim McGovern – commuting to New Hampshire to campaign for her every weekend, pulling even was huge! 

Half the Democratic base walked away from their leaders!

Bernie won the bigger cities, but won by huge margins in a lot of small cities and towns, especially the old mill towns along the rivers. Some produced lopsided margins, up to 80% for Bernie (and twice the number of Trump votes.)   Stone from Dudley described his old hippie friends living in one of those towns whose politics “had gone underground because “they believed they were surrounded by ignorant fascists,” who “woke up to discover that most of their neighbors feel the same way they do!”

Jack told of a meeting of his gun club this week outside Worcester. About 100 members showed up and everyone was taking about New Hampshire.  He estimated the house was evenly split between Sanders and Trump supporters, with the “gun nuts” and “survivalists” lining up with Trump and the “sportsmen” nearly unanimous for Sanders.  The two camps had in common being totally fed up and done with politics as usual and the “political establishment”, as personified by Hillary.  

To his surprise, he thinks that if Trump dropped out, many of his supporters would come over to Bernie!

Putting this all together, I think what we’re seeing is bigger than the sum of a lot of individual choices.  Whole communities seem to have decided “Bernie’s our guy, and we’re all going out to vote for him!” 

This might seem like a miracle, but it was already there. Bernie’s not telling us anything we didn’t know – he’s showing us each other!  Like Stone’s old hippies, most of us felt alone with what we knew and believed. We believed that what we wanted was impossible and hopeless, could never happen in America. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes moment.  

Everyone already knew the emperor was naked, but they dared not say so because everyone else said they could see his clothes.

There’s a broad consensus starting to form that it’s time for Bernie – and for us.  In a way, Bernie IS us!  The pundits and odds-makers betting on Hillary will be confounded because they have nothing to compare this to!
But before we get all Kum-by-ya about Bernie’s campaign, I’ll let Bill, who spend many weekends campaigning in New Hampshire, have the last word.  

Bernie won not just because the moment, the message and the messenger were right but “because a whole boatload of people put their butts out on the streets, day after day, week after week, talking to the people who thought they might vote for Bernie and getting their commitment to actually do it.”  He figured that knocking on 20 doors in an hour was getting Bernie 1 vote.  

Many thousands of volunteers putting in dozens or hundreds of hours each added up to hundreds of thousands of votes!

I asked Bill: can we repeat that here in Massachusetts on March 1?  “That depends on how fast we hit the road and how many people we can put on it!  The work is not hard and you can learn how in 20 minutes. I could tell you what to say but it’s your own authentic conversation that really wins people’s votes.”

InCity Voices

What I learned at the state Democratic conference …

By Edith Morgan

The Democratic Issues Conference was held Saturday, in Springfield, on September 19, on a mild but dry and eventually beautiful day.

Massachusetts Democrats met at the MassMutual Center in downtown Springfield to reaffirm their values, touch bases with members throughout the State, get some training, and hear from one another how things were going everywhere, and to lay plans for the future.
 
I attended this conference as an elected delegate from Worcester Ward 3 –  a conference that I have attended many times I the past, and which always gives me some interesting insights and renews my knowledge about the Massachusetts Democratic Party.
 
Of course, on display outside the Center were the usual signholders, touting their candidates, as well as collectors of signatures for various causes,  and distributors of pamphlets about a variety of ideas, from pleas for humane treatment of chickens and other food animals to analyses of the contrast between capitalism and democratic socialism , and the inevitable pleas to end “Citizens United”, with large signs reminding Democrats that..” corporations are not people”, and that” Money is not speech.”
 
Once inside the spacious Center, we received our credentials, which identified us by name, and also gave us the section were assigned to ..  once the convention began.
In the free time left over before the beginning of the formal part of the day, we visited the exhibit hall where rows upon rows of tables displayed materials and information about all the candidates, the organizations working toward democratic goals, or supporting various candidates, manned tables full of literature, buttons, pencils, as well as fee candies, stickers, and various other mementoes pushing their particular ideas. I have a drawer-full of pins, pencils, stickers, etc.. I have collected over the years, so I went around, and picked up various mementoes and flyers from groups that I support, signed my name onto athose mailing lists whose information I wanted to pursue further, and dropped everything I got into a very sturdy bag which was given to each of us free…
Once were  all assembled in the great hall, and the usual opening ceremonies were completed, there began a series of speakers.  I haven’t space enough to summarize what they all said, but all reiterated in one way or another what Democratic goals and achievements were. (The party platform had been sent to all the delegates by mail several days before, and I had refreshed my memory about the particular during the week.
 
For me the highlights were the appearance of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who brought us all to our feet, and fired up the assembled thousands for the job ahead.; and the speech by one of my favorite Democrats,  Howard Dean, who outlined his reasons for working in support of Hilary Clinton.  Supporters of Bernie  Sanders and O’Malley also gave impassioned representations on behalf of their candidates.

After the formal speeches and awards were completed, five resolutions were passed unanimously (the texts had been passed out among us earlier. And then we proceeded to the “Breakout sessions”, eleven educational 45-minute presentations designed to give delegates facts, techniques, ideas for better getting their message out to the public. and then we all drove home hopefully better informed and fired up to be ful participants in the democratic process.