Posted in2016 election Citizen involvement

Salem Women’s March 2017: photos, videos, my take on an amazing day

Though I'm posting this on my Salem Political Snark blog, there's not going to be anything snarky in what I say about last Saturday's Salem Women's March. The rally and following march through downtown Salem was the most inspiring political event I've ever been to. And that includes Barack Obama's 2008 campaign stop in Salem. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. So rather than blab on about why the Salem Women's March was so freaking fantastic, I encourage you to take a look at a web page I made about the event using Adobe Spark. Click…
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Posted in2016 election Citizen involvement

Facebook post boosts are an Oregon election independent expenditure

Just what I wanted for Christmas: an Oregon election law violation! I've already unwrapped it (by opening an envelope that came from the Secretary of State office) and am "wearing" it proudly. After all, I had no idea that there was a requirement to register as an Independent Expenditure Filer if someone spends $750 or more in a calendar year in support of, or opposition to, candidates or ballot measures independently of those officially involved in a campaign (like, the candidate, a PAC, and so on). So I openly and happily wrote a blog post after the May primary election,…
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Posted in2016 election

Salem is getting even more liberal. Clinton won everywhere!

I just got 2016 Clinton vs. Trump election results for Salem from someone who, as with the 2012 Obama vs. Romney results, shall be known as a "fellow political junkie." There's some positive news for us local liberals/progressives in this Age of Trump. In Salem we're getting increasingly stronger! Here's the overall result -- arrived at by aggregating vote tallies by precinct to get ward totals, which, when summed, provides a result for Salem. Clinton crushed Trump by 11%. By comparison, Obama beat Romney by almost as much, 10%. Note the disparity in the major party percentages: 87% in 2016,…
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Posted in2016 election

Ed Dover’s analysis of the 2016 election made me feel better about Trump’s victory

There's a lot of depression and anxiety floating around, following Trump's surprising victory. (And that describes me on my good days; sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in the scariest nightmare ever, one impossible to wake up from.) But after I raced back to Salem from Portland late Friday morning, desperate to hear Ed Dover's City Club talk, "A Postmortem on the 2016 Election. What Happened?," making it to the meeting just a few minutes after Dover started speaking, I realized how wise it was to break some I-5 speed limits. Dover is a Political Science professor at Western Oregon…
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Posted in2016 election

Millennials need to grow up and vote for Clinton — says this pissed-off baby boomer

Yeah, I admit to being in a cranky mood, what with the election being just four days away and Donald Trump showing more signs of presidential election life than this idiot deserves.  But what I read today in Greg Sargent's Washington Post piece would have gotten me irked at voting-age millennials (who are, roughly, those born between 1982 and 2004, so people aged 12 to 34 or thereabouts) no matter my state of mind.  Here's an excerpt from "Top Democrats say Clinton took a real hit from Comey. But they're cautiously optimistic." Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me that the impact…
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Posted in2016 election National politics

An idealistic ex-flower child has some thoughts for diehard Bernie supporters

Let's bridge a generational gap, Berniacs. Many, if not most, of you are about the age I was in my most revolutionary period: circa 1966 to 1971, my college years at San Jose State (the Berkeley of the South Bay in my decidedly deluded imagination). Here I am, in my 1970 yoga-and-meditation-dude guise. If I look more than a little messianic, that's because I was. I thought I was well on my way to grokking the deepest secrets of the cosmos. Guess what... (as the old saying goes, you've got two guesses, and the first one doesn't count). That didn't…
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Posted in2016 election

Democrats a clear majority in Salem

Here's a good analysis of political trends in Salem from my friend and fellow citizen activist Jim Scheppke, who posted this on Facebook. The days when this town was controlled by an overly conservative, keep-things-the-same, special-interest-favoring Mayor and City Council do indeed seem to be numbered. I look forward to the time when Salem becomes progressive in the best sense of this term: creative, forward-looking, and fair-minded, with a commitment to making our city a great place to live for EVERYBODY -- not just a few. "Salem has an undeserved reputation as being a conservative Republican city. Maybe it's because…
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Posted in2016 election

What $950 bought me in Facebook Page political post “boosts”

Nowadays political campaigns are making good use of social media. Heck, this is a big reason why Donald Trump got the GOP presidential nomination -- he's a Twitter Master.  So when the May 17 election for Salem Mayor and City Councilors approached, I decided to throw about a thousand bucks into supporting my favored progressive candidates -- Carole Smith, Cara Kaser, Matt Ausec, Sally Cook -- via "boosted" posts on my Strange Up Salem Facebook page. This was part of what I thought of as my extra year of Mini Cooper payments effort to improve Salem's political landscape. The five…
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