This is posted on behalf of SDEC member and frequent commentor at BOR John Robert Behrman, who is traveling in the Northeast after having attended Netroots Nation. John Robert asked me to post his following comments:
I agree w/ recent open letters by SDEC member Dennis TEAL and DNC member John PATRICK that there is no point to negative campaigning in a "Louisiana Primary" today, given that (a) there will be a highly partisan run-off and (b) there are both real primary elections as well as an important general election - a decisive general election in Harris County -- next year.
I would add that, in any event, there are much more important matters than battle of the bitch-lists immediately at hand. And, the credibility of every single Democratic elected party or public official is on the line over one of them right now:
This is in reply to the posted article, "The Future of Democrats in Texas", by Mr. Mike Lux.
Beginning with the Carter-Mondale reelection campaign of 1980, the Washington Beltway Democratic Consultantocracy has now written off Texas in presidential elections for 28 consecutive years.
In bypassing Texas voters in presidential election campaigns, the Consultantocracy guaranteed the atrophying of Democratic social and civic infrastructure in this state.
If it weren't so tragic, it would be hilarious to hear members of the Consultantocracy who are responsible for the Beltway group-think that has spent nearly 3 decades snubbing Texas voters, such as apparently Mr. Lux by his self-characterization, lamenting over "what's wrong with Texas voters?" It is like starving a person and then complaining that the person acts like someone who is starving.
We have been living for nearly eight years now through the national nightmare of the Bush-Cheney presidency, a gang of silk-tied thugs who came into office through an illegitimate seizure of the presidency and have used its powers to trample the Constitution, spit on the Bill of Rights, wreak economic class war on behalf of a rich and powerful oligarchy against everybody else, turn our national treasury and resources over to the oligarchs' private uses, scorn the rule of law, subject the tools of government to the pursuit of permanent despotic one-party rule, destroy the dreams and lives of thousands of young Americans through foreign war based on blatant and deliberate lies to the nation, unleash agony and destruction upon hundreds of thousands of human beings for no crime other than being Iraqi, and tax our children and their children with endless piles of national debt in the illegal pursuit of foreign empire.
As I stood in the voting booth on the first day of early voting, I thought about...
In November 2000 my wife Rachel and I flew to Palm Beach, Florida to support the Democratic efforts to secure an honest vote count. Rachel served as a recount observer. We spent our time at ground zero, the Palm Beach County counting station.
The enormous usage of lies, spin, intimidation, and subjection of public office to political power to prevent all the votes from being counted was obvious and chilling.
(From earlier in the week, I missed this. - promoted by Karl-Thomas Musselman)
Today, the 3rd day of October 2008, "crisis" enters our minds as a weary word. For most of the last eight years of our lives, we have all faced crisis after crisis after crisis: relentless Constitutional crisis at the hands of the swaggering lunatic chief executive and his leering power-lusting vice chief who along with their sycophantic entourages heap scorn and contempt on our fundamental checks and balances, nonstop economic crisis for the working and middle classes at the feet of unimaginably greedy expanding conglomerations of capital, ongoing crisis of life and death for our uniformed young adults in the sands of the middle east where they were sent by the coldest hearted of colossal lies, seemingly endless crisis of immorality and dishonesty permeating our political and governmental system and stealing democracy from us, and this list is just for starters.
Yet we cannot let the weariness of crisis deter us from confronting, and not flinching from the grim fact that today We the People face a new level of cascading domestic crisis that is yet worse for us as a people and a society than all we have faced before through these long eight years of nightmare.
The new level of domestic crisis of which I speak is not
In the case of Boumediene v. Bush, issued on June 12, 2008, holding that the Guantanamo Bay detainees have a Constitutional right to file habeas corpus petitions in the courts of the United States to question the legality of their detentions, the majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States have done what we expect them to do in times of crisis for our Constitutional rule of law.
This decision will go down as one of those decisive moments in American history when a majority of the Justices realized they had to take stern action to preserve the Constitutional framework of the republic from an aberrant course. The decision is a dramatic repudiation of the whole purported legal edifice of the neocons. Under this ruling, neither George Bush nor any other American president may use threats to national security, either real or imagined, as an excuse to override the Constitution.
Under this ruling, neither George Bush nor any other American president may decide for himself or herself what the president's powers are without the constraint of our Constitutional checks and balances. Under this decision, the Magna Charta is rescued from the Bushite/neocon jackboot.
This decision dispels clouds of gloom. To all of us who have experienced so many discouraging moments during the awful neocon nightmare of recent years, this action of our nation's highest court is the kind of thing that tells us our system may still be capable of protecting us from tyranny. It is the kind of thing that says perhaps the neocon thugs will indeed all get their come-uppance before it's all said and done. It is the kind of transcendental event that restores hope and renders great cheer for all who love the promise of democracy and freedom that our national forebears proclaimed to a waiting world on July 4, 1776.
For a moment, we can allow ourselves to feel genuinely optimistic about how it is all going to finally turn out in the matter of the people vs. the neocons and Bushites. For just a moment, though. The Constitution survived a very close call by a very close margin, a 5-4 vote of the Justices. John Bush III McCain was quick to express disagreement with the decision. Senator Barack Obama agrees with the decision. Senator Obama is already on public record opposing the neocons' bankrupt theories of Constitutional law as expressed by the four dissenters, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. For the sake of my country and all it stands for, for the sake of all that its patriot sons and daughters have sacrificed down through the centuries and decades and years, for the sake of my children's right to grow up as free citizens of a Constitutional democracy, I want Barack Obama, not Bush III McCain, filling the next vacancies on the United States Supreme Court. I am going to put every possible effort I can into making that happen by winning the electoral votes of my state of Texas. I hope you all do the same.
(Anyone who was at the SDEC meeting Saturday understands how important this issue is to discuss. So please do. - promoted by BOR)
Yesterday, January 12, 2008, the state chair of the Democratic Party and the majority of the SDEC disenfranchised me. Yesterday the Texas Democratic Party embraced heavy-handed procedural tactics worthy of Tom Craddick.
My residence is in Senate District 25. Zada True-Courage is one of my SDEC representatives. At yesterday's SDEC meeting Zada's husband John Courage - who has run two inspiring, spirited campaigns against Lamar Smith for U.S. Congress - sat in Zada's place by lawful proxy and served as my representative.
John Courage is the founder of an organization called the True Courage Action Network. In just one year's time, TCAN has taken the lead as a single-minded champion of campaign finance reform. John is of the opinion that the influence of big money in our political system has corrupted the system and is destroying democracy. Does any reader of this blog disagree?
Some postings I have offered on Blogs the last several days have engendered intense discussion and debate. Some of the discussion and debate has concerned how best to judge the credibility of candidates and campaigns.
The best answer to the question is one that hardly any of the comments touched upon. That is, the people themselves, acting democratically through the ballot box, are always the best judge. The people themselves acting through the ballot box are in fact the only legitimate judge. We all do still believe in democracy, don't we?
Many of you received my friend Barbara Radnofsky's Internet newsletter describing the meeting that took place on January 21 between the Texas Democratic Party Chair and some of his staff and advisors, and five of the 2006 statewide candidates, including myself.
With all due respect to my honorable colleague Barbara, her newsletter did not objectively or accurately describe the meeting. To be fair, her description may be subjectively sincere. But it conveys an inaccurate picture.
Every general election cycle, small groups of Insiders secretly handpick which Democratic Nominees who won the Democratic Primaries are worthy of Texas Democratic Party support and which aren't. This practice, euphemistically called "targeting", is profoundly disrespectful to all the Democratic Primary voters who selected the Nominees in the Democratic Primaries. It is the ugliest little secret in Texas politics. If the mass of ordinary-citizen Texas Democrats knew about it they would not put up with it for a moment. They would probably march on Austin and tear the Party office down.
