Harold Titus's Blog, page 5

Elections, 2019--2020. Few and Far Between, December 7, 2019; September 21, October 3, October 5, October 6

I can't resist starting with a joke.

***

An airplane is about to crash. There were 4 passengers on board but only 3 parachutes. The first passenger said, “I am Steph Curry, the best NBA basketball player. The Warriors and my many fans need me. I can’t afford to die.” He took the first pack and left the plane.

The second passenger, Donald Trump, said, “I am the U.S. President, and I am the smartest President in American history, so my people don’t want me to die.” He took the second packet and jumped out of the plane.

The third passenger, the Pope, said to the fourth passenger, a ten-year-old schoolboy, “My son, I am very old and don’t have many year left to live. You have more years ahead of you, so I will sacrifice my life and let you have the last parachute.”

The little boy said, “That’s okay, your Holiness. There’s a parachute left for you. America’s smartest President took my school bag.”

***

I finally had too much of a need to write a letter. This was the result:

***

Intriguing how the mind can flit from one image, fact, or event to another.

I was moved recently by a scene from the HBO drama “Chernobyl.” The entire population of a large area around the exploded core of the Soviet nuclear power plant had been evacuated. Animals had to be exterminated and buried under cement. In one sector three workers had to shoot cats and dogs, craving human contact. Across the TV screen dogs ran toward their destruction.

My mind jumped to the thousands of Latino children that were separated from their parents at the Mexican/American border. We know now that the Trump administration had planned approximately 26,000 separations, despite lacking the technological means to effect reunification.

Another jump. We have Donald Trump’s scheme to accuse Joe Biden of corruption during the upcoming 2020 presidential election, set up by Trump forcing Ukraine’s new prime minister to declare that Ukraine would investigate Biden and his son’s supposed participation in Ukraine’s supposed involvement in the 2016 U. S. presidential election to get Hillary Clinton elected, this to render false rock solid evidence that Russia had interfered to benefit Trump.

Next jump. Trump is supported by at least 40% of the voting public. A good friend of mine years ago noted: ”People believe what they want.” Every day GOP mouthpieces vilify, falsify, incite. Emotion trumps fact. We have a divided country and, alas, Trump, the worst of their worst.

Dishonesty, cruelty, lust for power, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity endanger us all.

Printed December 7, 2019, in The World

***

Then, this one.

***

I need to rant.

Is it stupid to expect those who legislate and administer the law to be honest, caring people?

Is it naive to want our elected officials to represent our values, not exclusively the selfish wants of large corporations and the very rich?

Is it wrong for me to judge as traitors to our country media outlets (Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Breitbart, etc.) and individual commentators (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Levin, etc.) that manipulate the ignorance and emotions of their uneducated audience into believing, fervently, that Democrats are evil and today’s Republican Party and its leaders are America’s saviors?

Is it okay to let pass blatant violations of the law – for instance, the destruction of the postal service -- designed to benefit the political fortunes of a president if you support that president?

If you are white and, especially, male, what gives you the right to believe that minorities are not entitled to the same rights, opportunities, and respect that you yourself are provided?

Is it that easy for you to accept the response “There are always a few bad apples” when confronted so repeatedly with instances of police brutality toward and the murder of African Americans, none deserving aggressive confrontation?

I recall vividly every one of the 14 or 15 Republican Party candidates for President on the stage of one of the Republican Party debates in 2016 not raising their hands when instructed by the debate moderator, “Raise your hand if you believe that climate change is real and caused by human behavior.” Which is more important to you: loyalty to your party’s dogma or the survival of the human species?

Lies, lies, lies! Which you take as fact if they adhere to your political beliefs. Are you that sort of person – believing the present excrement offered by Republicans today, Sunday, September 20, that it is perfectly okay to rush through the nomination and acceptance of a new Supreme Court justice when there are less that 50 days left to the next presidential election when during President Obama’s last year in office (10 months before the 2016 election) Mitch McConnell refused to hold a hearing to consider Obama’s nomination to fill a sudden Supreme Court justice vacancy?

The least among us should never determine our country’s fate. Trump and his enablers would have us be Putin’s greatest accomplishment.

Printed in The World September 21, 2020

***

Election time. Caddy McKeown and Arnie Roblan were retiring. New candidates (both parties) were running to fill their positions. Again, I felt obliged to support the Democratic Party candidates. I submitted the following letter to the Siuslaw News September 29 knowing that Editor Ed would meddle with it. The letter was mild in tone. He did meddle, made several middling changes entirely unnecessary in my opinion, done, I concluded, to rouse my ire. The letter was printed in the Siuslaw News October 3. I sent my original letter (below) to The World immediately thereafter.

***

We Democrats know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.

A minority party nationally and here in Oregon, the GOP will do just about anything to get its way.

Senate majority leader McConnell stole a Supreme Court justice for Trump in 2016 and is doing it again less than 40 days before Joe Biden’s probable election. Trump plans to use the resultant 6 to 3 conservative majority to kill the Affordable Care Act and to have Roe v. Wade declared unconstitutional. Many media analysts predict that after the election Trump will challenge in the courts Biden victories in key swing states and the Supreme Court will declare Trump president.

We who live along the central Oregon coast will be deciding who will represent us in the state house and senate. The recent fires that have ravaged the state should have made blatant to all one major consequence of climate change. In 2018 senate Republicans, by leaving the state, denied Democrats a quorum to pass a cap and trade bill that would have reduced the emission of global warming causing pollutants. In 2019 GOP senators and House members did it again for the same purpose.

Choose Cal Mukumoto (House District 9) and Melissa Cribbins (Senate District 5) – go visit their websites – to represent us. We need visionary, not reactionary public officials, to move this state (and nation) forward.

Printed in The World October 5, 2020

***

I sent this email to the editor of The World October 6.

***

Dear editor,

This is not meant for publication.

I want you to know how much I appreciate your policy of allowing each letter writer, regardless of his educational background, regardless of the discomfort he exhibits selecting words to communicate easily his thoughts, to say his piece without interference. You value free speech.

Not every newspaper editor does this. The editor of the Siuslaw News in Florence does not. He deletes, he rephrases; in so doing he changes the force and tone of your message and he destroys your voice – usually to dissuade partisan division, sometimes to demonstrate his perceived superiority as a writer. I have told him that rather than include my name under any letter that I send him that he should print “Based on a letter submitted by Harold Titus.”

Again, thank you. Excellent newspaper practices should be acknowledged.

Letters, 2018, T'hell with the Editor, September 1, September 8, September 15, October 18

The next episode I had with Editor “Ed” involved my response to this letter written by David Eckhardt.

***

Because letter writers Tom Jackson and Mary DeCeault (“No Cherry Picking,” “Some of the ‘Accomplishments’ of Donald Trump,” Aug. 29) have already covered all the left-wing talking points so eloquently, I would like to provide my own truthful perspective.

First, after eight years of unquestioned far-left policies, it is a wonder President Trump could achieve anything with all the ridiculous policies that had been put in place. But as former President Obama liked to do: If you can’t get what you want through Congress, just use a phone and a pen. In doing so, he left the door open for President Trump to void many of our former president’s bad ideas — and for that, I thank him.

As for the 500 (estimated) children not reunited with their parents, it’s on the parents for committing a crime by coming to the U.S. illegally. They knew what they were doing, just as people who commit crimes here and get sent to jail; they, too, get separated from their kids. Unless we do something worse by putting the kids in jail with their parents.

Yes, Trump’s North Korea plan has not panned out too well. But he did get a couple of prisoner’s back home, along with some of our MIAs’ remains (we hope). And it didn’t cost us a dime.

The jury is out on the tax cuts cost. But what we do know is that the economy is going gang busters. Unemployment among all categories is at its lowest in a long, long time. And the GDP is above four percent after being told, for the previous eight years, that we needed to accept a measly two percent GDP or less as the new normal.

As for downsizing the National Monuments and allowing companies to explore for energy? No problem there. In my opinion, they were getting used for vote-getting and fundraising from the eco-extremists like the Sierra Club and other far-left eco groups. And just where is the pollution and environmental damage from this? Take a look at the EPA’s pollution of the Colorado river. As of last year, it still hasn’t paid the bill. (www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation -now/2017/01/13/epa-wont-pay-claims-mine-spill-released-3m-gallons-toxic-water/96555846)

As for the president’s golfing… Wow, I am amazed that anyone could play golf more than President Obama. When it comes to who golfed more, I really don’t care either way.

I could give a longer list of things I think matter, but then the editor would have to give me a whole page — and that is unlikely. So here is a link to the not right-wing Washington Times article (www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may... complishments-their-due).

That all being said, I would like to see a few less tweets. Personally, I don’t tweet because I think it is silly.
Sept. 1, 2018

***

Below is my response to Eckhardt’s letter. Ed revised it and printed his version without my permission.

***

I saw recently on Facebook a video of a man rescuing six puppies deposited along a desert road somewhere in a Western state. How entirely cruel the owner of those puppies had to have been!

Ah, but the puppies were not human beings; their owner surely would not have abandoned six children.

In that same vein, President Trump and his administration deliberately separated some 500 children from their asylum-seeking parents seeking entrance into our country at the southern border.

His motive? It appears to be to send a message: Come here with your children; you lose them.

How can he and his supporters minimize this horrendously cruel act? Heed David Eckhardt’s words in his Sept. 1 letter. “… it’s on the parents for committing a crime by coming to the U.S. illegally. [Forget the fact that seeking asylum is not a violation of U.S. law.] They knew what they were doing, just as people who commit crimes here and get sent to jail; they, too, get separated from their kids. Unless we do something worse by putting the kids in jail with their parents.”

I am dismayed to suspect that there is a segment of our population that sees Latinos — and anyone else who isn’t “like us” as criminals and rapists, gang members, drug dealers and murderers.

Thank you to our president, Fox News, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the political agitators on the airwaves who have not one scintilla of conscience, reducing “the others” to sub-human status.

That mindset seeks to make it palatable to the general population to separate vulnerable children from their desperate parents in the same way as leaving unwanted puppies to die of thirst and over-exposure.
September 8

***

I sent this email out to several friends.

***

Just so you know. I’ve had it with this guy. He just destroys the heart and soul of a forceful letter. The attachment I have provided illustrates it. He did this to me recently and I called him on it, he apologized for printing his changes without consulting me first. I assumed thereafter that any changes he wanted to make in forthcoming letters that I would send him he would try to negotiate. I said he should leave letters send to him (by anyone) alone. Once again he did what he did previously: print his version of my letter and embarrass me (portraying me as somewhat of a milquetoast that writes awkward sentences) without contacting me previously. I really don’t intend to write any future letters. I would tell him that but I need his good will to print a forthcoming book presentation notice I plan to make.

***

I received two responses.

***

Jenny Velinty: It seems like a lost cause for any kind of balance with the SN and I note letters from Florence are being printed in the RG, [Register-Guard] which is also rapidly stepping right and dumping any opinions but their own.

It looks like a time to circle the wagons, support each other privately, use the Eugene Weekly for print, and get out the vote. The midterms are crucial for derailing this bull on wheels and I hope the fickle Independents have seen the light.

The dems must keep getting background on Kavenaugh and delay the rush to install him and hopefully Obama can make a difference. The news that healthcare costs are contained may help but racism is exploding around the world. People seem ready to throw out all the old guard in their frustration. Only Ruth Ginsberg gets respect.

Rand Dawson: Harold....we know you are not milquetoast....and not nearly as civilized as that letter he printed!! At least he left your name unscathed ....I personally cannot imagine where he gets the time to do that....////Hey--take a break....your talents are too much needed to deny us your wisdom-en-futuro…

***

Here was David Eckhardt’s hissy fit response letter.

***

In response to Harold Titus’ Letter to the Editor “Dehumanizing Others Who Are ‘Not Like Us’” (Sept. 8), which referenced my Sept. 1 letter (“The Real Accomplishments of President Trump”), I am not dehumanizing anyone.

Comparing puppies to children in his letter and then conflating that to what “all” presidents have done to protect our country is contemptible at the least and ignorant at best. As many already know, seeking asylum is not illegal. But crossing our boarder without permission is.

Yet in his letter, Mr. Titus misleads in a way that confuses one with the other.

Following his train of thought, the parents of illegal immigrants have no responsibility for what their actions cause. So, should we just have no borders or laws to deter people from breaking them?

Taking that extreme view to its logical conclusion, we should just suspend all laws that interfere with what a person wants to do.

In his letter, Mr. Titus went on to conflate that members of our brave policing agencies are racist for enforcing our laws, suggesting by way of association that those of us who support policing the laws — including the president — are also racist.

That could not be more wrong, and those who think that way are simply dishonest and, in my opinion, contemptible. To think that all who cross illegally into our country are saints is pure ignorance.

And let’s be clear: No one has said that all illegals are rapists and murders.

But that reality doesn’t fit the narrative, which is to paint those on the “right” as Nazis or Nazi supporters. The intent of letters like that is to stifle dissent through a narrative that accuses those in support of the rule of law as racists.

I, for one, won’t be deterred by that.

In this unperfect world, we are all responsible for our actions and the consequences of those actions. Like it or not, each of us has a responsibility to be aware of — and enforce — the laws that govern us as a republic.

Anyone wishing to come here and become a citizen should be welcomed with open arms. Just one requirement: Do it legally.
Printed September 15, 2018, in the Siuslaw News

***

I emailed Editor Ed the following October 18.

***

Certain practices contrary to the welfare of the vast majority of people and the people who perpetuate them need to be called out for what they are. Taking the heat out of the calling diminishes considerably the message to the point that it is no longer worth the doing. No need to talk any further. Your policy is reducing your number of letter writers, I suspect, from both the left and the right.

***

I vowed not to submit another letter to the Siuslaw News until Ed ceased to be its editor.

I did submitted a long letter October 17. Our state representative, Caddy McKeown was up for re-election. Her opponent had said some nasty things about Caddy at a Republican Party rally in Florence. A Democrat had been at the rally and had recorded her words. I had received a transcript of what she had said. I had always written letters of recommendation for Caddy and Arnie Roblan. I felt obliged to do so again, despite my disagreements with Ed. I doubted that he would print the letter, so I sent him a message along with the letter.

***

This is a long letter. Perhaps it could be used in your “guest viewpoint” feature.

If you want to use it, I do not want anything changed. In my last two letters you made considerable (unnecessary in my opinion) changes without my knowledge, causing me to think that instead of putting my name underneath the printed letter you should have stated “based on a letter submitted by Harold Titus.” You should not get to modify a letter writer’s opinion and pass it off as what he precisely thinks. Same goes for how the letter writer expresses himself.

Consequently, I do not want you to print this letter if you feel compelled to make even one change.

***

This was Ed’s response, October 18.

I appreciate your letter and taking the time to share your perspective. That being said, I think we should talk about the difference between Letters to the Rditor and Guest Viewpoints. Letters have specific guidelines that run in each edition along the side of page A4 (Opinion Page). I do allow a certain latitude when it comes to Guest Viewpoints, primarily because they receive a certain prominence based on the writer’s expertise, particular insight or background on the subject. When it comes to Letters, however, in addition to a preferred length (again with which I have some latitude depending on the number of submissions), the following guidelines apply:

“… Letters are subject to editing for length, grammar and clarity. Publication of any letter is not guaranteed and depends on space available and the volume of letters received.

Letters that are anonymous, libelous, argumentative, sarcastic or contain accusations that are unsourced or documented will not be published.

Our objective is to provide letter writers with an opportunity to share a specific insight or perspective in a way that is as concise as possible and devoid of argumentative, sarcastic or inflammatory language. Whatever editing I did was likely done to eliminate those components while still leaving the message intact, such as the difference between “The candidate is unqualified” and “The candidate is ridiculously unqualified.”

Without question, the attached piece would have to be a Guest Viewpoint because of its length and tone. I will tell you that, if specific quotes are included and attributed for or against someone in the Guest Viewpoint (or Letter, for that matter), I require submissions to include the sourcing of those quotes unless they are referring to a quote that has appeared in our own newspaper (which I can easily verify.) This is just due diligence in the interest of fairness. I receive many letters that reference quotes with no attribution or source, and I don’t run them. This would be the case with your submission, in which you reference quotes “recorded by a registered Democrat.”

I don’t need to include that person’s name in the submission, but I at least need to verify it with the individual or hear the recording myself before attributing words to any individual mentioned in a Letter or Guest Viewpoint.

It’s probably not the response you were looking for. However, I have taken the time to explain my position and reasoning in the hope that it will facilitate more of your submissions rather than fewer of them.

***

Expecting its rejection, I sent my letter, slightly revised, to Coos Bay’s The World.

***
Teri Grier’s high talk about providing “compassionate leadership for our coast” is not meant to persuade me and other long-time liberals. Some sort of sorcery is required to erase the images of Mitch McConnell declaring how much huge tax cuts for large corporations and billionaires are going to provide jobs, the White House’s calculated, cruel separation of immigrant children from their asylum-seeking parents, and GOP Secretaries of State purging from their states’ voter rolls probable Democratic Party voters. GOP candidates like Grier have to dissemble hard to try to reverse the growing disregard many voters harbor for today’s Republican Party.

The GOP has always been the water-carriers of big business and the very wealthy. To attain majority support, Republican candidates must assert that their taxation policies benefit the middle and lower economic classes; they must exacerbate wedge issues; they must exploit citizenry fear of and prejudice toward people easily scapegoated; and they must vilify their opponents. Truth goes out the window. Winning is all that matters.

Red Republican Teri Grier opposes cap and trade, the mildest form of reducing CO2 emissions. On her website, she states: “Cap-and-trade is a system designed to raise tax revenue, not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

She bemoans the poverty so apparent in rural Oregon and blames Democrats. Corporate employee wages across our county have been stagnant for decades while corporate profits have soared. Which political party has supported this? Which political party opposes minimum wage increases while pushing always to cut taxes that benefit almost exclusively the top one percent? Teri Grier takes the Ayn Rand position that the poor must not be helped. Assisting them, she has said, turns them into babies, strips them of their self-esteem, destroys their motivation.

Grier’s website states that she supports right-wing Measures 104 and 106.

Her attack flyers — typical GOP vilification — portray Caddy McKeown as a horrible person. Surprised?

Caddy McKeown is a moderate, business-oriented Democrat. At a recent forum she stated: "I’m much more concerned about voting for this district than I am about voting for or against a party.”

In 2012 I wrote this in The World. "I want representing me a person who is governed not by expediency, and not by moneyed interests that benefit the few. I want that person guided by fairness and conscience.” That is what I got. That is what I will get if Caddy is re-elected.
Printed in The World October 22, 2018

***
Here are comments e-mailed to me by friends.

***

Karin Radtke: Wow Harold! And just when I was starting to think we might have to call on our local "Weroance" [reference to my novel Alsoomse and Wanchese] to start mediating... Thanks, and will pass this around.

Rand Dawson: wowow....honest to god....!!
Ron Preisler: Your article is excellent as usual. Shame more locals won’t be able to read it. Did you send it to … [Ed] as well?

Igor Kusznirczuk: I would forward to .. [Ed] and thank him for being such a jackass. Nice work.
Rosetta Favors: Good job!!!

Heather Rollins: Very nice.

Jenny Velinty: A-HA! More than one way to get an LTE published! Congrats! The World is the best place for a letter supporting Caddy. They know her quiet get-it-done ways. She’s one of them-treading a cautious but determined path and the longer she stays in office the stronger and wider her influence will be.

Letters, 2018, Let People Write What They Feel and Think, March 31, July 21, July 25

Ian Eales and David Eckhardt had a special knack of getting under my skin. Despite the Siuslaw News editor ever ready to edit whatever I wrote, I sent this letter off.

***

Ian Eales (March 24) would have us believe that the revolt of school children against the easy availability of guns is the product of “corrupt politicians, statists and anti-American media” brain-washing. He sees placing restrictions on gun ownership to be the relinquishment of “freedom” to gain “temporary security.”

Anybody shot at – brainwashed or not by ex-teacher liberals like me – will take common sense gun restrictions over the freedom to be riddled with bullets anytime. The school children that marched and protested March 24 are absolutely right. Presumably, Mr. Eales would prefer to have these adolescents shout: “Freedom to have people buy guns that require weak or no background checks! Vote liberals out!”

Printed March 31, 2018, in the Siuslaw News

***

David Eckhardt wrote the following letter that compelled me to respond. Editor “Ed” edited it substantially without advance warning or negotiation. What resulted was a candid exchange of viewpoints between the two of us. Immediately below is Eckhardt’s letter.

***

So, Siuslaw News editor … thinks we have gone the wrong direction ("We’ve Come a Long Way Since the Dixie Chicks — But In the Wrong Direction," July 18) I suppose it depends on which side of the fence you sit, but I disagree.

As a country music fan, to this day I still don’t listen to the “Dixie Chicks.” Not just because they dissed G.W., but their music generally stinks, IMO.

But let’s get to the real problem here.

It seems that we are supposed to believe anything that comes out of our government. Well, I can’t go there, and anyone paying attention should have a hard time too.

Mr. [James] Clapper [former Director of Intelligence under Obama] lied straight-up, then back tracked and no one seemed to care except me. I will never trust another word from his mouth; just because he is an intelligence official means nothing. Mr. Clinton lied on live TV and was eventually impeached for it. The Senate then failed to do its job — because of politics I suppose. If Clinton says the sky is blue, I want a second opinion.

Oh, let’s not forget Mr. Brenner who, if he hated President Trump any more, his look would burn him to the ground.

And finally, how about the past FBI head, James Comey, and his underlings. He and his underlings say they didn’t let their biases affect their work. I say they are lying straight-up and know it.

Just look at Comey’s family, all female and all Hillary fanatics. They even marched in that supposed (liberal) woman’s march. And I am to believe he didn’t have a bias and didn’t act on it?

Really?

Wow.

How about the point man [Peter] Strzok [FBI agent] and his paramour and all those emails on a government phone? If he said two true words in his testimony it was probably his name. And he said he also did not act on his bias.

So, all these folks were just good old boys and gals doing their level best to adhere to our laws and morals?

What a joke.

What we have seen since Donald Trump became president is, in no small measure, a Democratic Party which lost a supposed safe election and is now going bananas. They call themselves the resistance; I call them deranged.

Even President Obama did not receive this amount of negative coverage for all his lies and half-truths. I personally think the Dem’s have lost their party to the Socialists and are going to be pursuing their agenda in the future. This will manifest itself with single-payer medical, guaranteed income and attacks on capitalism.

Make no mistake: the socialists are as much a danger to our Republic as any Russian ever thought to be.

I hope to God I’m wrong.

David Eckhardt
Printed July 21, 2018, in the Siuslaw News

***

Here was the response I sent to Ed.

***

“They can’t be fair! Can’t be honest! They’re biased!” now assert Trump’s defenders, attacking our federal intelligence agencies and Special Council Mueller’s investigators.

There is such a thing as being biased for the truth, for valuing honor, integrity, for being committed to the discovery of facts.

Propagandists like Sean Hannity are paid handsomely to incite, distort, erect fantasies built on tall foundations of far-fetched lies. He and Trump have much in common.

We who recognize Trump and his cabinet appointees for what they are are “deranged,” “duped” – according to local resident Trump/GOP loyalist David Eckhardt (Letter July 21). Indeed, we are angry. Furious. That the GOP works assiduously to make our country a Koch brothers’ inspired oligarchy, that it engenders dishonest elections through gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement, that it lies continuously to ordinary folk about how it has their welfare at heart, that it vilifies, vilifies, vilifies whoever gets in its way, that it places feeding its donors everything they want at the expense of human life is horrific.

Now we have law-breaker Trump: greedy, egotistical, dishonest, dictatorial, cruel, ignorant, stupid. His base loves him. GOP office-holders abide him. Thomas Friedman, in his latest column, (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/op...) puts it accurately: “… what makes Trump even more powerful and problematic is that this president with no shame is combined with a party with no spine and a major network with no integrity.”

We live in perilous times. Mr. Eckhardt, you are so wrong. We are headed definitely in the worst direction.

***

The letter having my name under it in the July 25 Siuslaw News was substantially different from what I had submitted. I had much to tell Editor Ed.

***

I am displeased with what you did with my letter, printed in today’s newspaper. Attached is a comparison of what I wrote and what you printed. You made quite a few changes, most – in my opinion – counterproductive to what I wanted expressed.

I stated in my letter that “we” are furious. You softened my discontent almost to the point that I appear to be a milquetoast afraid to challenge the very people I wish to criticize. You have me writing “in my opinion” “seems to be,” and “what could prove to be.” I wrote a forceful letter. I intended it to be forceful. I wrote: “Now we have law-breaker Trump: greedy, egotistical, dishonest, dictatorial, cruel, ignorant, stupid.” I wanted all of those adjectives included. I could have added other adjectives like “immoral.” You replaced all of them with three nouns. Trump is far worse a human being than what you have me stating. You hare softened considerably what I wanted to declare without my permission.

Second, your altering of my sentence structure in one glaring instance reflects poorly on my ability to write correctly complex sentences. I refer to the long sentence that begins with these words: “That the GOP works …” I used five noun clauses in a series as the subjects of the sentence, which concludes with the two-word predicate “is horrific.” It is a grammatically constructed sentence. You changed it and omitted “that it” in front of “engenders dishonest elections through gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement” to make the entire sentence ungrammatical. Because my name is underneath your edited version of my letter, that mistake reflects on me, retired English teacher, not you.

Because you felt that you had to soften the tone of my criticism, you made changes that both weakened the force of my criticism and the style and tightness of my expression. I am embarrassed to have my name under what you printed. Why cannot you just let people – save for using obscenities – write what they feel and think?

I am being hard on you. I know that your intentions are good. I do believe that your editing goes too far.

***

Ed answered.

***

Hi Harold,

I appreciate you taking the time to write, and for communicating your displeasure. Naturally, I’m sorry you felt the revisions clouded or softened your points. While I certainly encourage letter writers to share their perspectives, I am also adamant that our Opinion page not become an extension of Facebook, wherein name calling and emotionally-charged accusations ("...according to local resident Trump/GOP loyalist David Eckhardt…” "Now we have law-breaker Trump: greedy, egotistical, dishonest, dictatorial, cruel, ignorant, stupid…”) become an accepted part of the conversation. The same for presenting opinion as fact (“...the GOP works assiduously to make our country a Koch brothers’ inspired oligarchy…”)

Don’t get me wrong, Harold. Personally, I agree with every assessment made in your letter. But as editor, my main objective is to facilitate conversation and, hopefully, the sharing of opinion and perspectives in a way that moves conversation forward — no easy feat in today’s highly volatile dialogue.

Again, my apologies. In the future, if I have any concerns, I will send you my suggestions ahead of time and explain why. I will not print anything until we can agree on the final draft. I value your input and perspective, Harold, and want to make sure you continue to be a part of this important conversation within our community.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to call, email or stop by my office any time; my door is always open.

***

My answer.

***

Thank you, … [Ed] for your polite response.

I name-called Trump because he deserves it. How can you make a point about name-calling and blatant falsehood made by the far right and the President and his backers and the dishonesty of GOP practices and policy without being direct in your remarks? I do not want to qualify my remarks. I take your point that you don’t want letter upon letter to be nothing more than name-calling. Mine wasn’t. Eckhardt’s and Eales’s letters are also somewhat more than that. That’s fine, as far as I am concerned. What a letter writer affixes his name to should be what he has written– stupid, inaccurate, insightful; whatever it may be. He should be judged and responded to based on what he actually writes. I believe that most readers recognize that what a critical letter writer offers is opinion, something to think about. Perhaps rebut. If somebody wants to challenge my assertion about the Koch brothers’ intentions, I could certainly give factual evidence to support my viewpoint. My letter’s intention was to rebut the Right’s assertion that having a viewpoint contrary to what the Right wants people to believe disqualifies certain individuals as investigators of the President. A secondary viewpoint was to remind people that the GOP, particularly in recent years, has been consistently dishonest in its pronouncements and policy. I don’t make that assertion lightly. Not providing specifics (that would make my letter too long) does not make the statement false. I could write such a letter (sticking strictly to that subject). I have written such letters in the distant past. That I wanted to make broader points should not prohibit me from making generalizations that readers should ponder.

Yes, in the future we can negotiate what I would like to express in print. I won’t like it. To avoid the aggravation, I probably won’t write. But who knows? Eckhardt and Eales boil the blood.

***

I emailed several friends this message.

***

I am especially peeved at the editor of the Siuslaw News for the neutered letter that he printed in today’s (July 25) edition of the Siuslaw News because it has my name under it. The paper used to have editors that allowed you to write what you thought. … {Ed] wants everything muted, everything polite. I am not the person that today’s letter reflects. Such editorial oversight censors forthright viewpoint. I doubt that I will write another letter to this newspaper.

If you are curious, attached are my actual letter, the letter of complaint I sent to … [Ed], and a comparison of what I wrote and what he changed.

***

Here are several responses.

***

Rand Dawson -- Harold....Congratulations for having joined the multitude of former LTE writers who now write with an understanding that maybe...maybe...with luck....their main intros and punch lines will survive in recognizable form....

Please do not let this defer you from further expressing your rage, opinion and insight. We need it all -- more than ever..... We highly value it.....

Jenny Velinty -- Remember you are in the ‘city of Florence’ – a ‘’where IS that ?’’ kind of town to most people despite all the ‘Visioning’ and ‘Motion” the GOP Mayor likes to broadcast. He makes me sea-sick.

Loved your letter to … [Ed]. A good Golden Rule reminder is always right.

Your LTE is more NY Times level and … [Ed] is our local gossip manager.

I was just telling someone who does not get the local SNOOZ about Eckhardt and how his son was killed crossing 101 with his bike. He yelled at ODOT and must be pleased that 5 safety crossings are getting built a decade after his son died.

He continues to boast his hard right views and gets them printed. I wonder if … {Ed] ‘edits’ his LTE’s. I think … [Ed] dotes on Eales, Eckhardt and Cable.
 
I strongly recommend cooling off at City Lights watching a colorful re-mastering of the BEATLES Yellow Submarine escaping from the blue meanies. It’s simplistic, BP lowering jolly-ness.

Igor Kusznirczuk -- This town is full of weak spineless jellyfish. I would be very pissed if I were you. He is stupid to manipulate letters. I thought there was freedom of speech.

Wende Jarman -- I believe in your outstanding attributes as a great published writer!
Shame on … [Ed]!

Rand Dawson -- Harold...i read your original materials showing what he changed....before i replied...

This is how … [Ed] has worked over the last 2 years....Some of my op/eds on healthcare have gone 10+ 'editing' sessions....as he peels away verbage according to his own style schematic....

I finally sat long enough to realize...i had to work thru it....and i do....but with little enthusiasm and less frequency.....and i send him footnoted info to buttress some statements, etc.....

Which, if one considers we (you) are writing op/eds or LTEs....is absurd....But, alas, he owns the inkwell....

And like I say....stamp your foot and thump the table....and still hang in there....God help us if 'our side' slinks away....

Rand Dawson -- Harold....your followups were essential..

Its what he needs to hear....repeatedly...since this is his style to such an extent that many others I talk to have thrown their pencils away....which we simply cannot afford to do.....
he even takes my satire or irony and changes it....which guts the final sentence....and this is for an op/ed.....

Ron Preisler -- Harold,
I agree your letter was certainly better grammatically. … [Ed] must have spent a great deal of time on the changes, so what was published captured at least 90 % of your intent.

We as a town have changed.  I have been at Rotary where I heard some of our conservative members trying to get business owners to pull their advertising because some of his articles didn’t reflect what they wanted to hear, even though it was the truth.

I would not want to be in his shoes.

Thank you for speaking out.

Hugh Schneider -- Isn't amazing just how much temerity is exercised by print editors. I can readily understand your ire; had you wanted to say what … [Ed] had written, I suspect you would have asked him to write the letter ....

Letters, 2017, Thanks for Working with Me, March 2, March 11, May 4, August 12

The Siuslaw News had replaced their temporary editor with their sports columnist. I had immediate difficulty with the man. I will refer to him as Ed (for editor) because I will be providing private messages that we exchanged. I submitted the following for publication March 2.

***

Ian Eales’s letter March 1 attacks teachers, their unions, public education, the Democratic Party, and the building of a new high school in Florence. He asserts the following:

“Schools are failing because they [teachers] expect nothing of the students – and that is what the students deliver.”

“Spending $40 million on a new school will not improve academic performance. … The building will be a monument to mediocrity.”

“Today’s education system is a bloated bureaucracy. Teachers unions overwhelmingly contribute to the Democratic party; the same party responsible for failing inner cities within Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Washington D.C., et al.”

“Throwing more money at the problem will not solve it. It is time for a change.”

Mr. Eales knows little about teachers and public education. A public school teacher for 32 years, I know how dedicated the vast majority of teachers are in their work. We teachers know the complexities of student learning better than Bill Gates, Mitch McConnell, or any person who is not a present or past educator.

I loathe what our critics say about us! Corporate know-it-alls and their paid political allies excoriate low student achievement test scores. It’s the teachers! they rant. Bad teachers, teacher tenure, the damn unions! Failing schools! Standardized test scores determine best a teacher’s effectiveness, they declare. (Never mind the deleterious societal effects of poverty, especially in inner cities: terrible living conditions, malnutrition, family dysfunction, parental disengagement. Never mind the considerable, widespread underfunding of schools that makes teaching ever more difficult) Clean house! Out with the bad, in with the good! Hail charter schools! (Hello, Betsy DeVos) Tough, uniform curriculum standards! Demand! Drill! Test!

A certain percentage of the general population has always had (and always will have) a negative opinion of the teaching profession. Teaching is easy, these people declare. It isn’t a full-time profession. Teachers are coddled. They’re overpaid. They whine. The old saying “If you can’t do anything else, teach” goes back to when I began teaching in 1957. Teachers have had to battle this perception for decades. How easy it has been for the champions of privatization – who have produced the films “Waiting for Superman” and “Won’t Back Down” and who have never themselves taught -- to rally uninformed, innately critical people to their cause.

Don’t fall for it. Corporate-funded “reform” activists are bent on ridding communities of veteran teachers, privatizing public schools, making education a money-making enterprise for niche businesses, and indoctrinating children with a corporatized, agenda-driven, by-the-numbers culture. A pox on them and their deluded followers.

***

Here was the response that Ed sent to me.

***

Good morning, Harold,

First, I want to say how glad I am that someone rose to the defense of teachers in regard to the Eales letter. Thank you for doing so and, hopefully, sparking a conversation that is going to become increasingly important with the disastrous appointment of Betsy DeVos. I’ll be happy to print your letter in tomorrow’s Opinion page. However, there were a few spots I felt went into a bit of a rant (my guess is that you wrote this very soon after reading Mr. Eales’ letter). Also, the very end “A pox on them and their deluded followers” goes against my rule to avoid sarcasm and name-calling in letters. I think you did a great job of passionately and constructively making your case without the need to add ill wishes and name calling at the end.

Below is a revised version, with some of what I felt were rants removed, along with a re-worked ending.

Please take a look at it. I want to keep your voice and tone while, at the same time, sticking to my objective of maintaining an Opinion page that is respectful in its discourse.

I’m open to discussing the changes if you feel strongly about something I may have cut or revised. I will wait to run it until I hear from you.

Again, many thanks.

***

Here was Ed’s revision.

***

Ian Eales’s Letter to the Editor (March 1) was essentially an attack on teachers, their unions, public education, the Democratic Party and the building of a new high school in Florence. In his letter, he asserts the following:

“Schools are failing because they [teachers] expect nothing of the students — and that is what the students deliver...”

“Spending $40 million on a new school will not improve academic performance. … The building will be a monument to mediocrity...”

“Today’s education system is a bloated bureaucracy. Teachers unions overwhelmingly contribute to the Democratic party; the same party responsible for failing inner cities within Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Washington D.C., et al...”

“Throwing more money at the problem will not solve it. It is time for a change.”

I suspect Mr. Eales knows little about teachers and public education. However, as a public school teacher for 32 years, I know how dedicated the vast majority of teachers are in their work.

Teachers know the complexities of student learning better than Bill Gates, Mitch McConnell or any person who is not a present or past educator.

I loathe corporate know-it-alls and their paid political allies, who excoriate low student achievement test scores.

“It’s the teachers!” they rant. “Bad teachers, teacher tenure and the damn unions are the reasons for failing schools.”

They declare that standardized test scores are the best way to determine a teacher’s effectiveness.

Never mind the deleterious societal effects of poverty, especially in inner cities, where students face terrible living conditions, malnutrition, family dysfunction and parental disengagement on a daily basis.

Never mind the considerable, widespread underfunding of schools that makes teaching ever more difficult.

A certain percentage of the general population has always had (and always will have) a negative opinion of the teaching profession.

“Teaching is easy,” they declare. “Teachers are coddled and overpaid.”

Teachers have had to battle this perception for decades. How easy it has been for the champions of privatization — who have produced the films “Waiting for Superman” and “Won’t Back Down” and who have never themselves actually taught in a classroom — to rally uninformed, innately critical people to their cause.

Corporate-funded “reform” activists are bent on ridding communities of veteran teachers, privatizing public schools, making education a money-making enterprise for niche businesses, and indoctrinating children with a corporatized, agenda-driven, by-the-numbers culture emboldened by the appointment of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Don’t fall for it.

***

My response.

***

Thank you for your consideration in emailing to me your suggested changes. I understand your position and the need for shorter letters. However, I believe that a writer’s passion on a particular subject must not be lost for the sake of politeness. I am fine leaving out condemning words about Mr. Eales’s letter and some other changes. Below is what I would consent to have printed. Otherwise, I would prefer that the letter not be printed.

***

I took out some of Ed’s revisions and put back some of what I wanted. Here was Ed’s response.

***

Hi Harold,

Thanks for getting back to me. I couldn’t agree more with you regarding the need for passion in writing, and in identifying a writer’s voice. I think what you’re saying is important and I especially want those who [read] your message — Mr. Eales in particular — to be reached. However, it’s been my experience that references to “our,” “us,” “they” and “them” immediately causes anyone who doesn’t already agree with you to stop reading. That would be a shame. You’ve already mentioned your years as a teacher. “I loath what our critics say” could just as easily be “I loathe what critics say” with the “our” in there.

The only other sticking point is my aversion to generalized quotes without attribution, i.e., “It’s the teachers!” they rant. Who is “they?” It’s unnecessarily argumentative in tone, and could just as effectively be worded “Critics blame bad teachers, teachers’ tenure and unions as the reasons for failing schools.”

If you’ll meet me in the middle with those points, I will compromise with you on the rest…

***

This was part of his new revision.

***

I loathe what critics say about teachers. Corporate know-it-alls and their paid political allies excoriate low student achievement test scores. They blame bad teachers, teacher tenure and unions as the reasons for failing schools, asserting that standardized test scores are the best way to determine a teacher’s effectiveness. Never mind the deleterious societal effects of poverty, especially in inner cities, where students face terrible living conditions, malnutrition, family dysfunction and parental disengagement on a daily basis. Never mind the considerable, widespread underfunding of schools that makes teaching ever more difficult.

A certain percentage of the general population has always had (and always will have) a negative opinion of the teaching profession. The old saying “If you can’t do anything else, teach” goes back when I began teaching in 1957, along with the perceptions that teaching is easy, that teachers are coddled and that they’re overpaid.

How easy it has been for the champions of privatization — who have produced the films “Waiting for Superman” and “Won’t Back Down” and who have never themselves actually taught in a classroom — to rally uninformed, innately critical people to their cause…

***

Ed ended his email with the following statement: “I’ll leave everything before and after those passages.”

***

My response.

***

I’m fine with your removing the personal and possessive pronouns. I respect your viewpoint. I felt that “they” has “our critics” as its antecedent but no matter. Removal of the quotation marks might have been one way of fixing your objection about the use of the generalized attributed speaker. You’ve reworded that section well. I would like to see the paragraph beginning with “A certain percentage” read as follows:

A certain percentage of the general population has always had (and always will have) a negative opinion of the teaching profession. They believe that teaching is easy and that teachers are coddled and overpaid. The old saying “If you can’t do anything else, teach” goes back to when I began teaching in 1957. Teachers have had to battle these perceptions for decades.

I want the second and fourth sentences included because the statements are true and the general public should be informed of it. Leaving them out weakens the purpose of the letter.

Again, I appreciate the time you have invested in communicating with me about your concerns. I have had no other editor do that. Thank you. Although I think I understand your desire as editor to ensure that letters that the newspaper prints do not incite a political flame war between the left and right, I suggest that times and incidents do occur when strong letters need to be directed at the opposition and absorbed by the general readership. If they are not written, the ideology that does not respect truth, that promotes the welfare of the few, that exploits the uninformed, that denigrates and persecutes, prevails. It’s a fine line you walk.

***

Ed’s response.

***

Thanks for working with me on this. I took your last suggestions into account and included them in this final version (below). Please look it over. If you’re good with it, I’ll get it into Wednesday’s paper.

Again, I appreciate your willingness to work with me, and for understanding that thin line I walk each day.

Be well.

***

My response (March 6).

***

One minor change. Instead of “as a public school teacher for 32 years” I would prefer “having been a public school teacher for 32 years.” Otherwise, good to go.

***
Is this what I am to expect now every time I send a letter to him! I thought. Should we letter writers not be the sole authors of what is printed? I am not interested in sharing authorship. Ed, you are printing an “opinion” page. I don’t want your opinions attributed to me!

***

Here is Ian Eales’s March 11 response to my letter. Curiously, he misidentified me.

***

In response to Donald Frerichs’ Letter to the Editor (March 8), he stated “I suspect Mr. Eales knows little about teachers and public education.” When I hire high school graduates who don’t know that one half and 50 percent are the same, I say the education system is failing.

He went on to say, “Never mind the considerable, widespread underfunding of schools…” when, in fact, Oregon spends 53 percent of its budget on education (Governor’s Budget 2017-19).

The country is on the hook for a $1 trillion in student loans ($966 billion Current Debt, plus $334 billion in Delinquent Debt.)

How much is enough?

We spend ever increasing amounts, make the education system larger and more complex and yet performance still declines.

I think Albert Einstein’s “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” applies here.

According to Mr. Frerichs, began teaching in 1957, two years after Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”

In the ensuing 60 years, Johnny hasn’t learned to spell or do his sums either.

Very sad.

***

Here is a letter I wrote May 4 that was not printed. I don’t remember if I submitted it or if Ed chose not to publish it. I suspect the latter.

***

The Republican health care plan for America: “Don’t Get Sick.” If you do, “Die Quickly.” These quoted words were on a sign that Florida Congressman Alan Grayson presented on the floor of the House to reinforce a speech he delivered in late September 2009. The Affordable Care Act would be passed into law March 23, 2010. The Republican Party’s cruelty to Americans without influence or money was manifest then and is definitely that now.

“How do they get away with it?” you might ask. Appeals to voters’ greed, vilification of both the opposition’s leaders and the downtrodden, smoke and mirrors, lies, exploitation of man’s insecurities and basest instincts. Imagine any Republican member of Congress running for re-election telling the truth about his denial of global warming: “The devil with future generations! I need the fossil fuel industry’s campaign money to get re-elected. I serve corporations. Always. You think I want to be some two bit lawyer in Palookaville?”

His message to his cronies: “Money, money, money. He who gets it deserves more and more. That’s what makes America great. Now, let’s get together to figure out a few more lies to trick the rubes into voting us in again. To the rubes: “Obama Care? Dying on the vine. Our plan fixes it. Trust us.” And when they find out how bad it is, cue Shawn Hannity and Fox. We’ll blame it all, vociferously, on the Democrats!”

***

Too much sarcasm, Ed?

***

Republcian letter writers Ian Eales and David Eckhardt had recently moved to Florence. Over the next several years they were frequent letter writers, their opinions causing me to want to cross swords with them. Here is a letter I wrote referencing Eckhart’s attack on Judy Preisler, the wife of one of my friends, a city councilman.

***

I take exception to several statements David T. Eckhardt made in his August 5 letter critical of Judy Preisler’s August 2 letter regarding the Trump administration’s change of ICE policy that permits its agents to arrest seemingly without exception unauthorized immigrants.

I did not appreciate Mr. Eckhardt’s insult that the Lane County commissioners, the state legislature, and citizens like Mrs. Preisler (and me) are “willfully ignorant of the facts,” that we “make judgments based on feelings.”

“I do not support unfettered and unrestricted hordes of people just coming here,” Mr. Eckhardt declared. This statement infers that immigration across our southern border prior to President Trump’s inauguration was just that: “unfettered” and “unrestricted.” He is wrong. An August 2016 NPR article (http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/4919659...) discussed President Obama immigration enforcement policy, encapsulated in this statement: “The Obama administration says it doesn't have the resources or the desire to deport millions of immigrants whose only crime was entering the country illegally. So, it has focused its enforcement efforts on particular targets: namely those caught near the border, those who've committed crimes and those who appear to have arrived in 2014 or later.”

Justifying his opposition to the sheltering of unauthorized immigrants, Mr. Eckhardt wrote: “… we are a nation of laws. … It is not our duty to ignore the law or subvert the law as is currently being done in our state and cities.” My ignorant-of-the-facts, bleeding heart response is laws are as good or as bad as the politicians who make them. Our country has suffered awful laws that have cried out for repeal -- slavery, Jim Crow legislation, segregation of schools, and voter disenfranchisement to cite several examples. An additional GOP Senator’s vote two weeks ago to repeal Obamacare would have led to millions of people being deprived of their medical coverage.

There is something very wrong about ICE agents in the middle of the night or any time seizing for deportation unauthorized immigrants who entered this country to escape certain death, who have lived here five or more years, who are the parents of children born here, who become contributing participants in a strong American economy, who have never committed a crime other than having entered the country illegally.

In a democracy, high-minded civil resistance to bad laws and executive branch policy must occur. Especially now, with our President fomenting so much hate.

Printed August 12, 2017, in the Siuslaw News.

The editor made two changes. He put quotation marks around “ignorant-of-the-facts” and deleted “bleeding heart” in the middle of the letter and changed the final sentence of the letter to read: “Especially now, with our current President fomenting what I feel is so much hate.”

Letters, 2016, Not Enough of Too Much, February 20, February 22, April 23, April 27, September 10, September 16

Good quotes:

“Greed dies hard, even when the rivers have turned to soot and the tap water catches fire.” – William Rivers Pitt

“How do you poison a cyanide factory [Fox News]?” – Jon Stewart

“If making our economy and democracy work for the many, rather than for a few at the top, is ‘one issue,’ then this one issue is a necessary precondition for achieving anything else worth achieving.” – Robert Reich

“She [Hillary Clinton] is the world heavyweight champion of torquing her comments to please whoever she's talking to.” – William Rivers Pitt

I decided to try to make several political points using humor. The last part of comedian Bill Maher’s weekly HBO show “Real Time” features a segment that Maher calls “New Rules.” In the letter below I emulate, clumsily, his “New Rules” delivery.

***

New rules that Bill Maher has my permission to utilize:

TV political campaign reporters must not use the word “resonate” more than three times in one report.

Fox News must not be allowed to polygraph its political commentators. Doing so would break its budget. At any time it would need at least 100 spare machines. Each week Sean Hannity would blow up half of them.

Chris Matthews needs to stop having man-crushes. First, it was W. in 2003. “He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West.” Then there was GOP primaries presidential candidate Fred Thompson in 2007. “Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Agua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream … after he shaved?” Barack Obama’s speech-making inspired Chris to say, “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” Now Chris is pals with John Kasich.

If Hillary Clinton wants to have Democrats and Independents believe that she is a truthful person, she needs to stop her GOP-style, fact-exaggerated smears of Bernie Sanders, who wants a single-payer medical insurance system. "We had enough of a fight to get to the Affordable Care Act. So I don’t want to rip it up and start over." You don’t have to cancel the ACA, Hillary, before you set about trying to legislate single payer.

Printed February 20, 2016, in the Siuslaw News

***

The Siuslaw News had a new editor, somebody promoted from the ranks of employees. He had changed the wording of my second paragraph, which had been “Any TV political campaign reporter who uses the word “resonate” more than three times in one report must be shot.” I was miffed. I sent this email to him.

***

Siuslaw News Editor:

“Any TV political campaign reporter who uses the word “resonate” more than three times in one report must be shot.” Too strong? Really?

When I write a letter to the editor (I’ve been doing it since 2003), I try to make it interesting. The letter that you printed today was intended to be humorous as well as intended to make two points. Exaggeration is an important element of humor. Surely readers would not have taken “must be shot” seriously. You took the joke right out of that paragraph.

Of course you have the right to edit submitted letters. I used to write quite a few of them, as Bob Serra and Theresa Baer could attest. The last two years I have been less motivated to write. Regardless, when I do write a letter, I want it to be entirely mine, not a collaboration. In the future, if you want to edit anything I submit, don’t print any of it.

He responded February 22.

***

Hi Harold,

I’m sorry you feel that way. After reading your letter, I felt that part was inappropriate — even as a joke — and took it out. Obviously, humor is subjective, so we’ll have to agree to disagree on this issue. But I will take your advice and not print any more of your letters that I consider unfit for the paper. Below is a copy of our letters policy as an FYI.

Sincerely,
...
Editor
Siuslaw News

***

I answered.

***

R...,

First, thank you for responding. Second, I do not question your responsibility to choose what to print, edit, or reject. My only thought is that being too circumspect in what you select could lead to a preponderance of dull letters and, eventually, a decline of letters submitted.

***

The year began to wear. Political debate after political debate. I was not pleased with how both parties’ presidential candidate debates were going. I was no fan of Hillary Clinton; I felt the need to communicate that.

***

Watching the Democratic Party Presidential Candidates debate April 14, I finalized several conclusions.

Early on, Bernie said that he was doing well because he was telling Americans the truth. One of Hillary’s major weaknesses is the perception shared by many that she is shifty, that like her husband she places expediency above integrity. [Her husband] Bill, a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1990s, a “new Democratic,” was a friend of large corporations. He vigorously promoted NAFTA. He signed into law the GOP legislative repeal of Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. Because a majority of Americans now recognize the great injury done to them by large corporations and because Bernie Sanders is her primary season challenger, Hillary has become suddenly a critic of the TPP trade agreement, the Keystone XL pipeline project, big banks, the fossil fuel industry, and Big Pharma. It was expedient for her both to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and to declare in 2007 that that decision had been a mistake. It is expedient for her now to campaign as a progressive Democrat and to wrap herself around President Obama to curtail Bernie’s criticism of certain policies that she asserts she and the president share.

Needing also to separate herself from Bernie, she portrays herself as a pragmatic doer. She agrees with Bernie’s diagnoses (because she has to), but “his numbers don’t add up.” He makes promises; she delivers! (Read Robert Parry’s article about Hillary’s past decision-making http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35...) Her preference of a $12 an hour minimum wage and her declaration that natural gas -- its quantity the result of fracking -- is the bridge to clean energy are examples of Democratic Party incrementalism, a cutting around the edges of a serious problem, for corporations a protective backfire to arrest a raging forest fire. By donating campaign funds and paying speaking fees to Democratic Party enablers, corporations are able to hedge their bets.

Bernie declared that we should be thinking big, not small. His reference to European countries that provide their citizens the health care, work benefits, and education that we do not is a telling indictment of the virulent economic system that controls the levers of American political power. To the argument that Congress would never enact Bernie’s policies, I answer, “They didn’t Obama’s. Why would they Hillary’s?” If we ever break the exploitive stranglehold locked upon us, it will be due to a movement started by a straight-arrow champion of regular people, not by an individual who will do whatever it takes – pander, employ three-quarter falsehood attacks, change policy positions – to win a presidential election.

Printed April 23, 2016, in the Siuslaw News

***

William Rivers Pitt in an article printed April 27 on truthout.com expressed far more eloquently than I the two choices we would have come November.

***

You have the rich braggart with an inferiority complex so large it dwarfs Saturn using racism, sexism, nationalism and a generalized fear of The Other to elbow his way toward the nomination. You have the rich political aristocrat who votes for war, total surveillance and thinks fracking is the greatest thing since glazed donuts trying to pass herself off as some sort of transformative populist while cashing Wall Street checks by the fistful.

It is madness, but it is madness by design. The Republican Party and its media allies have spent several decades fomenting a sense of terror within their voting ranks -- fear of the immigrant, fear of the Black man, fear of a woman's power to choose, fear of the terrorist hiding under the bed. They have diligently trashed the basic functions of government so they can go on the Sunday talk shows and blather about how government doesn't work. The Democrats, for their part, have been in full moral retreat over those same decades, fleeing the legacy of FDR and their own alleged principles to such a vast degree that a candidate who voted like a conservative every time the chips were down is about to grab the brass ring.

This is the best we can do, really? This is what we have become. The only reason people will vote for Trump in the general election is because they have been trained to be afraid. The only reason people will vote for Clinton in the general election is to thwart Comb-Over Mussolini and his dreams of glory; once again, people will be voting against instead of voting for, because "she can win," allegedly.

***

The Presidential candidate of both parties established, I remained silent. Unlike presidential election years past, I was not canvassing door-to-door for anyone, nor was I making political phone calls. I stapled several economic charts on a wall in the FADC’s campaign office in Florence, but that was the entirety of my contributions. Two club members were in the main room of the office when I was leaving, the club’s chair Karin Radtke and a woman probably in her seventies who was forever politically active (Seemed she always had a petition in her purse that she wanted people to sign). As I exited through the threshold of the door, I heard her voice declare: “Isn’t that man going to do anything?!” I heard Karin respond,” He will write letters.” I wrote Karin this letter September 10.

***

Karin,

I feel I need to write this letter to clarify my limited involvement in this political campaign. I would not communicate this to any other person. I do so because of my respect for you and my realization of the burden of responsibility that you bare.

I decided after I stepped down as chair that I would no longer canvas or make telephone calls. I had done more than enough, especially in 2008, 2010, and January 2011 (Measures 66 and 68). I did it out of a sense of responsibility. It does not matter whether the calls are easy ones or calls to non-affiliated or Republican spouses of listed Democrats. I won’t do them. Opinionated, judgmental individuals like … [my critic] “Is that man going to do anything?!” … can complain all they want.

Besides not wanting to, I won’t because making calls, etc. would take away time I need to write. I am 82. I have been researching and writing a novel [my second] since 2013. I am 28 chapters into the first draft, approximately 400 pages. I am getting near the end of it. Then I will need at least a year to prepare it for publication. This project is particularly important to me.

I am amazed how my scheduled writing time gets co-opted by other things. Ideally, I would write between noon and 2 pm and between 4 and 6 daily. Going to the store, meeting medical appointments, writing and posting something on my blog site, doing household chores (I have 9 windows I have to wash before October), doing other things not foreseen but that matter continually interfere. I had planned to write a 15 page chapter by the end of this week. As I write this letter, I have written only 2 pages.

I regret not being of much help. I will try to write two or three letters others can claim. Having been in your place, I know the displeasure of having to recruit people to do unpleasant work. I also know that it is human nature to believe that those who take on unusual responsibility love doing it and should continue to do it until they drop. I am certain you feel the pressure from Eugene and elsewhere that you must continue to produce results. Most unfair!

Please know that I appreciate immensely what you have done and what you continue to do. When you finally decide to stop doing this, do not be surprised that nobody will volunteer to replace you. I cannot blame them. They had better recognize fully, however, your service.

***

Did I not have the right to determine how I used my time and energy. Who was this woman to determine what I should do? I did write a letter, the one below, Mitch McConnell in particular the target of my wrath.

***

We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.

“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.

How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?

The first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. By the end of 2014, the GOP Senate had used the filibuster rule over 500 times.

Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.

When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.

For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars.

Printed September 10, 2016 in the Siuslaw News

***

The following letter, written September 16, never got printed.

***

Are we going to elect again the worst the Republican Party has to offer?

We had eight years of George W. Bush. Wars in the Middle East that continue unabated. Significant tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Substantial deficit spending. Whatever corporate America wants it gets leads to 2008’s Great Recession. Destruction of the environment. Insufficient revenue, the slashing of social programs and economic aid benefits for the underclass but pork for the military/industrial complex. Leave No Child Behind. The death of class action law suits and labor unions. Bankruptcy protection for corporations but not students. No-bid contracts. Privatize, privatize. “Mushroom clouds,” frighten, lie. Rig elections. Show the world we are quite willing to elect an ignoramus. "Rarely is the question asked: ‘Is our children learning?’”

Now, Trump. Bellicose. Selfish. Dishonest. Disgusting. A “liar, liar, pants on fire” just about every sentence. Racist, sexist, fear-inducer, inciter of hate. Egotist. Uninformed. Unstable. Manifestly dangerous. Heading the party that Harry Truman called the Guardians of Privilege. Therefore, a Geo. W. redo. This time, show the world we are quite willing to elect a fascist.

***

At our club’s October meeting my critic, seated across the room from me, everybody attending, complimented my September 10 letter. I took it as an apology.

***

How did I feel about Trump’s victory? I wrote the following, not to be sent to any newspaper but to document my opinions.

***

Banjo-strumming ignoramuses crawled out from under their back-woods and back-fields rocks to be the difference in electing as our President the most noxious, dishonest, selfish, despicable public figure imaginable.

The Republican Party’s strategy of obstructing every Congressional Democratic Party legislative attempt the past eight years to improve the lives of all Americans (including the ignoramuses) and of blaming the lack of such improvement on Obama and Hillary Clinton’s supposed “status-quo” agenda worked fantastically! Selfishness, dishonesty, callousness, vindictiveness, ignorance – Fox News well knows -- are formidable allies.

But Trump?!

The elites and financial backers of the mainstream Democratic Party must also be blamed. “Yes, let’s bring back the 1990s” when Bill Clinton helped create the corporate-friendly New Democrats. We got from them NAFTA, the end of traditional welfare, cops on every corner, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Clinton’s presidency looked good because the existing technology bubble was generating better jobs, increased tax revenue, and a deficit surplus. Those better years were illusory. Everybody who has bothered to read knows that Hillary has had ties with Wall Street. Bill and Hillary have profited handsomely from Bill’s presidency and concomitant connections and Hillary’s anticipated ascendancy. The Republicans hammered Hillary about this and her apparent lack of trustworthiness -- they the epitome of corporate-bought subservience! Would she have quelled the doubts of liberals like me? She might indeed have tried to accomplish all that she had promised. We will never know. Would Bernie Sanders have been a better candidate? Yes! His genuineness was palpable. He did not have heavy baggage burdening him. His adamant message of large-scale, constructive, principled change appealed to the disaffected.

Now we may see Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie Attorney General and Newt Gingrich Secretary of State and heaven knows what additional stupidity, cruelty, and vindictiveness that could result. Trump has brought out of a majority of the electorate the worst of human fallibilities. We must fight this fiercely the next four years hoping all the while that the Democratic Party, or an alternative party, produces an excellent candidate that can win and that corporate dominance will subsequently be destroyed.

Letters, 2015, Clashes with Republican Letter Writers, July 28, August 19, November 20

The zealot ex-chair and his wife had moved out of state by the time I started writing letters in 2015. My first was in May. It supported the re-election of my friend Nancy Rickard to the Port of Siuslaw Board of Supervisors. I then wrote this brief letter to the Eugene Register-Guard.

***

As evidenced by his recent column in this newspaper’s commentary section July 24 regarding the starvation of women and children in the South Sudan, Nicholas Kristof is a remarkably compassionate American. On the other end of the human spectrum are presidential hopefuls Scott Walker and Ted Cruz.

Printed July 28, 2015, in the Eugene Register-Guard

***

Two letters written by Florence Republicans got me going locally. First was Boomer Wright’s letter. He was upset that the Obama administration had negotiated an agreement with Iran to stop its development of nuclear weapons.

***

I appreciate reading the thought-provoking and well-supported letter titled “Gamble Worth Taking” (Aug. 5). God bless America and free speech! If we were down at Three Rivers Casino playing “Texas Hold‘em,” I might agree that that is a gamble well worth taking. However, I believe we should call this treaty what it is: appeasement.

The gamble here concerns appeasing a radical Muslim theocracy that has professed in more than “scurrilous profanity” that they hate America, have called for a Jihad against America and have threatened Israel and its people with extermination.

Iran is recognized by our state department as a main contributor and supporter of terrorism around the world. What happened to the administration’s stand on not negotiating with terrorists? Are we betting on the age demise of the hardliners Mullahs (there are no young hardliner Mullahs to take their place?), the threat of mutual self-destruction, the good will of moderate Iranians (the term “moderate Iranians” might be a bit of an oxymoron), and on the Koran’s commandment to love thy infidel neighbor?

Are we gambling that Iran will not make or use the bomb they profess the right to create and have threatened to use against Israel and America because they have a paper treaty with the Great Satan? If we are to believe what our present administration says about our foreign policy, why don’t we believe what Iran has and is saying about their foreign policy?

Their words and actions have been very clear. I think the well publicized Iranian state-supported rallies where hard-liner Mullahs preach hatred toward everyone and everything not of their religion, then encourage mobs of people to carry “I hate American” signs and then burn our flag message seems pretty clear.

Is appeasement the best we can do?

Boomer Wright

***

Jimmie Moe was upset about Democrats, abortion, and Planned Parenthood.

***

Abortion on demand is the law of the land. So why all the fuss over body parts of Americans that did not quite make it to that first breath?

Abortions came into vogue during the 1920s, when a woman, Margaret Sanger, started the movement in our country to eliminate or reduce the number of less-advantaged children being born in America. Eventually, she was shunned by society for her beliefs of and in a pure race.

In the modernization of America some time after World War II, her ideas were given new berth, and in Roe v. Wade, her dreams became a reality.

So many individuals of color are being denied life that eventually the race will be reduced to be inconsequential in the scheme of life in America. In some of the latest stats available, twice as many African Americans are denied life through abortions as compared to all other means (murder, accidents, etc.).

So, is this a liberal cause or just women’s rights? How did someone so lacking of compassion and so biased become the heroine of today’s liberals? I ask this because individuals like Nancy Pelosi in 2014 and Hillary Clinton in 2009 are both recent recipients of the “Margaret Sanger Award” for their contributions to her cause. In their acceptance speeches, they both praised Sanger’s coverage and devotion.

Today, the liberals, through slick media campaigning and effective slogans, make Planned Parenthood into a compassionate and caring alternative to childbirth. Is this really the easiest solution for some of our economic problems?

Jimmie L. Moe

***

I had to respond.

***

Praise be that we don’t have August 15 Siuslaw News letter writers Boomer Wright and Jimmie L. Moe running our country.

Boomer declares the administration’s proposed nuclear arms deal with Iran to be appeasement. The Iranians are such awful people. We intrepid Americans are so antiseptically pure. (When in mankind’s history was any large group of people such?) It’s either them or us. Bomb the tar out of them. That’s the ticket!

Jimmie believes that men such as he know better about women’s reproductive practices than women. The straw-person in his attack on Planned Parenthood is the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger. Jimmie alleges that Sanger “started the movement in our country to eliminate or reduce the number of less-advantaged children being born in America. … Twice as many African Americans are denied life through abortions as compared to all other means (murder, accidents, etc.)” because “the latest stats” show it. Whose stats? Jimmie’s final hammer blow of condemnation is his statement that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi have “praised Sanger’s courage and devotion.” Jimmie has paraphrased comments made by the crazy-minded neurosurgeon and GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson.

NPR posted August 14 on the internet a fact-check article about Carson’s allegation that Planned Parenthood (PP) was started to “control the black population.” Sanger believed that people regardless of race should have the children they want. Her focus was on birth control. In 1921 she wrote: “The almost universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves today possess the divine spark of regeneration.” It was Sanger’s support of birth control that motivated her in 1946 to write: “Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair."

Carson has said, “One of the reasons you find most of their [PP] clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population.” In 2014, the Guttmacher Institute revealed that 60 percent of all known abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood clinics, are in majority-white neighborhoods. In 2013 Planned Parenthood stated that “14 percent of its patients nationwide were black … nearly equal to the proportion of the African-American population in the U.S.”

But, then, I am a liberal. Jimmie knows. “Liberals, through slick media campaigning and effective slogans, make Planned Parenthood into a compassionate and caring alternative to childbirth.”

Printed August 19, 2015, in the Siuslaw News

***

By now I was ready to attack first, not just respond.

***

Whenever I read letters in the Register-Guard written by ultra conservatives condemning liberals and pleading victimization, I am tempted to ask them these questions:

Have you no concern about global warming and regard for your children’s and grandchildren’s future?

How would you like conservatives to be deprived of the right to vote like college students, minorities, and the elderly – disproportionately Democratic Party voters – are, being systematically deprived by state voter-identification and voter registration restriction laws?

Since when did millions of dollars contributed to political campaigns by single, very wealthy individuals become a hallmark of “the greatest democracy in the world”?

Why is it good to be on the side of large corporations that have kept the wages of their workers stagnant for decades while the income of their CEOs increases from 20 times the average income of their work force to 300 times?

When did Fox News become the citadel of truth and “all major media commentators” become, in the words of Keith O. Comstock (letters, Nov. 16) “far-left Democratic sycophants”?

Why do you suppose that institutions of higher learning -- in which highly educated instructors teach and which ultra conservative critics like Francie Duggan (letters, Nov. 16) accuse of sanctioning “radical leftist indoctrination” – don’t regurgitate the current Republican Party’s anti-equal opportunity, pro-virulent capitalistic, anti-social, anti-women, anti-science, and anti-civil rights doctrine?

Printed November 20, 2015, in the Register-Guard

***

The following are two of 31 Register-Guard website comments that followed the printing of my Nov. 20 letter. The first commentator sought to answer my questions.

***

1. If global warming was REAL, yes, I would be concerned.

2. No, I would not like to be deprived of my voting right. However, no one is being asked to cr@p diamonds in order to legitimize our democratic voting process. A simple, easily obtained, inexpensive, government issued photo ID will suffice. That's all.

3. One recent date comes to mind; January 2010, when a democratic process set in motion by voters (who likely had ID) concluded with the SCOTUS deciding that a business had personhood. This might only illustrate that the playing field is even, no matter which side you're on, which, I understand really isn't your point, but it does ensure its fair.

4. No one is on the side of the companies CEO's, we're advocating for capitalism. Capitalism can create scenarios, such as you've described, but it can also turn a determined, single mother into a small business owner who makes a name and place for herself. I like that side!

5. This happened around the time Obama became president and we witnessed the great migration of all media, except FOX, to his backside.

6. If said ultra-conservative comments were actually being made, which they are not, these institutions and their staff would not regurgitate those comments simply because it doesn't fit their agenda. Besides, they have a busy schedule convincing everyone to continue sucking on the government teat, while crying victim from a safe zone.

Mmmmmmkay?!

ChiefJustice101

***

Here is the second message.

***

The problem that Mr. Titus either doesn't understand (like most ultra leftwing democrats) or doesn't believe is that the market for successful CEO's is different than the labor market for front line production grunts. The influx of illegal aliens has killed wages on the low end of the scale ...thank you prog dems. but since none of these illegal aliens are cut from the same cloth as the ceo's their wages continue to rise based upon the results they have gotten vs some govt edict

JdunthropeMD

Letters, 2014, Mostly Silent, January 11; February 2, 3, 4, 24; September 24

I returned to the Florence Area Democratic Club in January. The new chair was a friend. Last year’s chair had stepped down. I wrote three letters during the year. The first one, written in January, was a response to three letters printed in the local paper.

***

Several interesting letters appeared in the Jan. 6 edition of the Siuslaw News.

Jenny Velinty [a FADC member] deplored observing in 2013 “a fast-spreading contagion with no antidote, no cure and no remorse” -- hate. She advised: “Learn all about an issue before voicing an opinion based on rumor and false facts.”

Tony Cavarno regurgitated lies about Benghazi, “Fast and Furious,” and the IRA investigations of Tea Party groups that Fox News repeatedly states as fact. Anything to attack the President.

George Goldstein fulminated that the Florence Area Democratic Party (FADC) and State Representative Caddy McKeown have co-conspired to deprive local non-Democrats the opportunity this Saturday (today) to hear her speak. “She apparently thinks that she only represents select Democrats and doesn’t want people to know what is going on in the legislature or to listen to them.”

In her editor’s note Theresa Baer explained the reason for the meeting’s different location. She clarified that the public is invited (FADC meetings are always open to the public), and informed that the FADC business will follow Rep. Mckeown’s presentation. Anybody may leave the meeting at any time.

I was Chair of the FADC, minus five months, from 2007 through 2012. We sponsored many town halls at which our elected Democratic state legislators spoke and took questions from their constituents. Occasionally, we invited these legislators to attend our club meetings. Why? We liked them, they were interested in what we were doing; we enjoyed their input. The get-togethers were as much social and informational. Non-members could attend these meetings; they were not excluded. Saturday’s meeting is that kind of meeting. It is not a town hall. It was never advertised to be a town hall. (Not every appearance by a public official here in Florence needs to be a town hall!) It is to be a quick (one hour, probably) stop by Rep. McKeown to say hello, say a few things, and answer several questions on her way to an actual town hall in Yachats. Rep. McKeown holds town halls. She had one in Florence last April. Expect another here soon.

Printed January 11, 2014, in the Siuslaw News

***

Our new chair emailed club members an article about the Trans-Pacific Partnership bill that President Obama favored and that many Democrats did not. He received back a number of messages. I recorded those comments that addressed whether the FADC should become an issue focused advocacy pressure group. I have not included names in most instances because the emails were private messages, not intended for public perusal.

***

from the Wife of the Zealot Ex-Chair to Another Club Member February 2, 2014

The TPP is clearly a travesty. Time to pull our heads out of the sand.
How do we get back on track? Not by being submissive and crawling back into our 'boxes' thereby allowing elected leadership to dictate. We elect people to represent us, we pay their salaries ~ they need to work for us. Grassroots action comes from outrage ~ not 'political convenience' to elected officials.

From Arnie Roblan’s Head Staff Member to the Current Chair February 2, 2014

Thank you .... My hope is that folks will not use the email forum to send their unnecessary spew in the hope of trying to convince us that Democrats need to have a monolithic voice. I certainly do not vote for an individual to represent all my views.

From Harold Titus to the Chair and Club Members February 2, 2014

The last thing I want our club to be is a pressure group. It has been primarily an organization created to support Democratic Party candidates for public office. It has been an organization that seeks to educate itself about issues – national, state, and local – that it deems important. It has done public service work. It has not been an organization that publicly states: ”The FADC supports ...” (this, that, etc.) Individual members have acted publicly in defense of or in opposition to various political actions and viewpoints. It is not that we members have been timid, quiescent. (I’ve had over 100 letters to the editor printed in Oregon newspapers)

The issue for me is not whether I am for or against a particular issue (I am definitely against the TPP agreement. I would be happy to send Senator Wyden a letter to that effect, or authorize my name to such a letter written by somebody else who bundles names of individuals also in support, providing I approve of the tone and content of the message) Using our club name to represent all of its members in any such public announcement or correspondence implies that everybody in our club agrees with whatever has been written. I believe that disagreement within our club should be respected, not ignored, not demeaned.

If we go the pressure group route, we will lose membership. The makeup of the club would likely become more monolithic, less objective, more zealous. We could become a stove-pipe organization like Citizens Democracy Watch, whose members, in my judgment, reinforce each others’ viewpoints, frustrations, and need to communicate anger. I certainly witnessed that at Arnie Roblan’s town hall last May.

Grass-roots activism can be a lot of things. Indeed, our public officials need to know what each of us wants. Beating Democratic Party office holders over their heads with angry assertions and self-righteous declarations demonstrates, in my opinion, an intolerance toward any viewpoint different from one’s own, an arrogance that presumes that one is best qualified to determine the legislative decisions that one questions, and a nastiness akin to what we have witnessed of the Tea Party Right. Being courteous and respectful in our expressions of concern and opposition is vital. It is not a weakness. It is not submissiveness. Zealotry and rage are counter-productive.

Responses to My E-Mail

Wow. Harold. Thoroughly well said. This why you are a bonafide author. Maybe we need a purpose. Statement. One that is inclusive along the line stated below.
Arnei Roblan’s head staff member (2-2-2014)

Harold,
So far I have responded to two people who asked what was the purpose of our group, supporting like minded Democrats or a discussion group. I responded that the club was founded on the principle of electing democratic representation.

While I agree with you that we should sign as individuals to causes we feel strongly about, I would like to drop the issue now. I will not sign as chair of FADC on any letter to our representatives, I will sign and write letters that I am in agreement with as an individual. We are fast approaching the first primaries and need to focus our energies on the best approach to work with Dawn & Brad. I also was in communication with … [Roblan’s lead staff member] and thanked her for her contribution of a different perspective and the time she spent with us. Frankly I enjoyed the exchange .…
The current Chair (2-2-2014)

Well said Harold!

You are responding to something for which I am not in the loop. Sometimes
I wish I were an active dedicated FDC member, but something about it just
does not compel me enough. Sometimes I am frustrated that I don't know
what others are supporting, or whether they are aware of issues that might
benefit from their support.

But I sit here at my computer and do my best, and like, you, if the
groups that provide a format for me to sign, and I am on board with the
issue, how it is presented, etc. I will sign on.

Thank you for bringing this information.
A Member Who Would Be Very Critical of Me in 2016 (2-3-2014)


Harold, First, I want to thank you for your heart felt statements. Having said that I want to respectfully disagree with the premise of your communication. I believe it is our obligation to hold elected officials accountable for their actions or in actions, as the case may be. When I belong to an organization one of my obligations is to observe the rule that majority rule is the order. I don't believe you disagree. I agree with your comments about what we should not do to our Democratic office holders. I however would observe that if a majority of our members would agree on a subject that should be of interest to an elected official, we not only have the right but the obligation to communicate our positions. I really believe Harold that if you take away our ability to take positions on issues, we weaken our Club's usefulness. Harold, you are probably the best qualified to write letters to the editor but not all of our members have the same capability. Harold, on a personal note I want you to know that I respect your opinion very much, I just disagree with you on this subject.
A Member with Whom in Late 2012 I exchanged F-you’s because He Challenged How I Had Chosen to Conduct a Discussion and Resented My Curt Response (2-3-2014)

My Response to This Individual

Thank you, ..., for your response. I do believe there is very little (if anything) we disagree about. We should hold public officials accountable for the actions they take. If the majority of our members wish to do something, they should do it. Public officials should be informed of what their constituents believe and think. (You and I and … [another person] did that nearly 6 years ago) My concern is the manner in which Democratic Party officials are informed. With certain exceptions, most of them deserve, in my opinion, courtesy. And we should be open to hearing their points of view. I don’t want to see our organization become an “If you don’t agree with us, you’re the frickin’ enemy” type group. It’s that mind-set that bothers me. Least there by any misunderstanding, ,,, I want you to know that I respect your opinions just as much and if we have any disagreements (I’m not certain we do) I’m fine with that. (Why should I or any one individual get to determine who is wrong or right?)
Harold (2-3-2014)

From an Independent-Minded Member to the Chair Feb. 3, 2014

I agree with Harold's opinion on this topic:

1. 'Stove-pipe' style organizations have no credibility. Their correspondence rarely makes it to the desks of the real power brokers. Staff tosses it into the circular file first.

2. Real letters written by individuals carry (huge) actual weight: Conventional political wisdom has determined that one actual (properly written) business letter sent via U.S. Mail "speaks for" up to several thousand voters (depending on the density of the district).

The technique of getting that letter published in a newspaper, while simultaneously sending it under separate cover to the elected officials is the most effective means.…

A second, but still effective technique, is the writing of an actual personalized e-mail letter to the elected officials.

A distant third approach is the "signing on" of chain/organizational e-mails.

The absolute dead "loser" is anything resembling 'hate mail' from organizations tagged as stove-pipers.…

3. Civility is key. Any and all communication to elected officials has to adhere to conventional business protocols - or the message will be lost.

4. I also agree that the Democratic Club is, in fact, a club that honors diverse opinions, encourages education, and exists primarily for the purpose of electing Democrats to public office. In facilitation of this perspective, I read the club By-Laws - and I encourage all of us to do that before the next meeting. …

Let's brainstorm some broad policy commitments that can appeal to new voters and help build our Party.



From a Leading Club Member to the Chair February 3, 2014

I apologize for doing this over the internet, but I wanted to let all of you know at the same time that I am resigning from the FADC, both as an officer and as a member, for health reasons effective immediately.

The hate, anger and negativity that is being generated by … [the ex-chair and his wife and another member] is not something I want to be around. After Saturday, I could not stop thinking of what happened in January with the three of them and that fact that it is continuing and will continue as long as they are members. I did not sleep well Saturday night, waking up and thinking about what needed to be done and how we might change the tenor of the meetings. Sunday, I started getting another angina attack, and decided it was not worth it to me.

I am taking this year off from every stress I can possibly manage, and the FADC is one I don't need right now. I am sorry to leave you in a bind, but I will not put my health at risk. ...

… [The three members mentioned above] are poison to the club.


From the Ex-Chair to the New Chair February 3, 2014

I respectfully disagree with Harold's message to you regarding "What do we want the Club to be?" I think we should express our position on an issue to our legislators if there is membership consensus. We did so last year. If you remember, we sent a letter to Senator Merkley praising his support for and effort on filibuster reform.


The New Chair’s Response

That was a letter of praise and support. In my mind different in the tone and substance of HT message. I prefer the letters with as many signatures as possible rather than from the Chair or FADC. Also more in the tradition of our club.
(2-3-2014)

From a Member Friend to Harold Titus February 3, 2014

No, Harold, we want you just to be there,...and once in awhile on the sidelines, maybe to let us know when we break from our foundation. But,we want you there. I'm willing to ride this attempted "cout de tat'"? out, and we'll be a better club,when we're through it. I think when … [the zealot and his wife] can't take over the club, they'll find a place with the Citizen's Democracy Watch, where they belong. It's good for any project to take a good hard look at itself, and make sure it's on track, eh?


From a Good Friend and Former Chair to Harold Titus February 4, 2014

RE the club meeting;
… [The new chair] is learning ‘’The Impossible to Herd Cats, both genders, Syndrome’’ that was in strong evidence with … [the guy I had exchanged f-you’s with in 2012] starting off in full volume. …

...
 
Thirty members and some new younger blood is what we wanted for FADC, and our hope is to guide them when they appear to us to be too zealous.

That’s our job and you expressed it well.


From the Independent-Minded Member to the New Chair February 12, 2014

After a recent coffee, some of us came up with a thought that can help cut through the slow-downs at FADC:

Have people with their "important issues" come thirty minutes early before each meeting. They can congregate into their "mini-groups" (aka "committees" if necessary). They can have one person summarize their consensus on that issue and report to the whole FADC in a one minute presentation. Rather than "open up" the floor for time consuming commentary, the Chair can instruct members that they are free to contact each "summarizer" AFTER the meeting.

…

It will also have the net effect of removing the "obstructionist capacity" that has run rampant and allowed various individuals to try and turn the Club into a stove-pipe lobby group.

Frankly, to quote one of the coffee drinkers: "I am so sick of water district stuff and the GMO stuff....We need to help those folks help themselves in a venue that is appropriate to their personal cause(s)."

… I have heard this complaint from several of the Club's key members. It's time to clarify that we are NOT a lobby/stovepipe organization.

...

The coffee drinkers had a procedural thought on this topic: When people contact you basically demanding that you push their agendas onto the Club: Pause and simply suggest that they contact the members directly. That will give the rest of us the opportunity to decide whether or not we want to receive further communication from them.


***

I wrote a long, boring letter in April that supported a liberal candidate to replace our district’s libertarian, incumbent county commissioner, Jay Bozievich. In September I wrote this letter in support of our replacement FADC chair, who was running for a position on the Florence city council.

***

I am particular about whom in public office I want to represent me. I abhor discrimination. I detest exploitation. I want an honest, informed, strong-minded, empathetic person who values “the level playing field,” who sees injustices and works to eliminate them. I want to witness fairness. I want my public official to say by his actions: “This is who I am. This is what I believe. I will look for merit in opposing viewpoints. But I will not sacrifice my principles. Public service is my sole objective. If you agree with what I stand for, elect me. If not, don’t.”

Peter DeFazio and Jeff Merkley are such public officials. So also would be [the name of the person], running for Florence City Council.

... is a friend of mine. I met ... maybe six years ago when he and his wife moved to Florence. He lives down the street from me. He joined the Florence Area Democratic Club when I was its president [chair]. He immediately volunteered to become a Lane County Democratic Party precinct person. He served three years as our club treasurer. He is currently our president. I know well his political and societal values.

I also know how well he works with people. I have witnessed this during his tenure as president of our neighborhood homeowners association. He led us through two contentious years. He is soft-spoken, polite, well informed, open to others’ viewpoints, diligent, and forthright.

He rolled my garbage barrel up my driveway to its pick-up place in the street when my back went out.

I champion {his name] in his quest to serve on the City Council. I have no doubt that he would prove to be an excellent councilman.

Printed September 24, 2014, in the Siuslaw News

Letters, 2013, I Quit the FADC Part Two, May 8, May 23, November 2, November 21

Several days passed. I decided I would no longer be a member of the FADC. On May 8 I sent the following message to all of the club members and to the Citizens Democracy Watch leader who had hung the offensive signs on the library room’s walls. I also sent the message to Senator Roblan’s head staff member.

***

Attached are my notes of Arnie Roblan’s town hall conducted May 4.

I feel compelled to address a few things that have bothered me considerably. Here goes.

I took my audio recorder to the town hall because I sensed I would need an accurate recording of what I thought might transpire. After experiencing the meeting, I knew I had to produce an accurate rendering of what was said. I put in a day and a half doing so, time I would much rather have spent doing things I want to do rather than dwelling on things that make me angry.

The older I get the more annoyed I become with people. We are a flawed species. All of us. I saw Saturday human weaknesses in friends, acquaintances, and people I hardly know or don’t know at all. Weaknesses that I know I am also guilty of. For instance:

knowing so much about a subject that you begin to think you are an expert and anybody who has a shade of difference of opinion has to be wrong,

being so strongly committed to an ideological point of view that anybody who isn’t as strongly committed is looked upon as the enemy, regardless of the fact that the individual has unselfishly devoted his time and energy for the benefit of us all in other areas -- areas that we all agree are important,

a tendency to interpret what a person says to corroborate our opinion of that person,

a tendency to value our own viewpoint so much that we won’t fairly consider a different viewpoint,

an unwillingness to tolerate somebody’s genuinely-held, opposing viewpoint after having considered it,

remembering what you think you heard (which is actually what you subconsciously wanted to believe you heard) rather than what was actually said.

For me, Saturday’s town hall was the ugliest of any town hall I have attended except for a DeFazio town hall in Coos Bay in 2010 when tea partiers had their say. I was especially offended by the signs that were put up over the windows and the one up front. You would have thought that Mitch McConnell was to be the speaker. These were signs put up by friends of mine! The message delivered was “FU, Roblan! You’d better wise up!” I also took them as “FU, Florence Area Democratic Club. We don’t care that you are sponsoring this event. We came in here to create a hostile environment to serve our purposes. Too bad.“

I saw too much of what I’m going to call “ideological intolerance.” God knows there is plenty of political behavior and dishonesty on the right and the selfish, criminal conduct of large corporations to be angry and intolerant about! I saw a man that I have followed and supported for 8 years, a man who genuinely desires to serve and benefit the broad public as he did school children first as a teacher and later as an administrator, a man who is diligent about listening to all sides of issues, who seeks to bring differing people together, a man who is not bought but who makes decisions based, after careful consideration, on his own assessment-making, a man who was remarkably patient over a standing, two-hour ordeal, made the target of ideological hostility.

So I have attached my rendering of what was said Saturday, as accurate as I could make it, soft voices, coughing, dropped voices at the ends of sentences, cross-talking, and rapid talking handicapping me. I hope you find it beneficial.

I’m absolutely weary of politics, what it does to people, and what it is doing to me. I don’t like becoming angry at people who carry on the necessary fight against conservative policies and greedy corporate rule. I don’t need that. You don’t, either. I’m stepping away from political activism. Ten years has been enough. Stepping away also means I’m leaving the FADC. Please know that I wish it good fortune and success.

Harold Titus

***

I received some kind email message from friends.

***

[Filed May 23]

WOW!!
Harold, I can understand your position as I get jaded with ‘friends’ turning out to be on the ‘wrong side’ and I had heard from others that feelings were running high over the GMO bill at the meeting.

The democrats have been getting scorched over the past 8 years just as much as the GOP, by people who are ‘independent’ and can swing with the tide. I’ve heard it for a long time.

I’ll settle down and read your recording and comment if appropriate.

Just wanted to you know I support your decision and agree it’s time to sit back and see what the hotheads can come up with.

It will be full of the ‘Unintended Consequences‘ I rail about because people can’t see all sides.

Enjoy more of your time with Janet and helping your family get set on the better path.
Please take care of you.

Jenny


Harold, please don't step away from the Florence Democrats. I was also disturbed by the signs, I came home and told Bernie when I saw Stew taking them down, I wondered if he had asked our group, permission to hang them.
Harold hang in there with a great, dedicated group. Let's talk soon.

Lu


Thank you for taking the time and effort to attempt to bring clarity to a challenging situation. I appreciate you. I, also, am taking a few steps and three months away to consider how I can best helpfully contribute to various issues of mutual concern.

Thank you again, and I look forward to sharing a coffee in August....

Shalom, Mary



Harold - Thank you for this synopsis of the meeting that I could not attend. It's most helpful and I can just hear the discord that happened at that meeting. I'm sorry that you must leave the club. You've kept it going in the most respectful way - sorry that it isn't what happened Saturday.
 
Again, thanks, Nancy


Yes harold, I am sick of polotics and all that seems to drag along
with it but I'll read your commentary and notes in detail and give you
some of my thoughts of the general sad state of political affairs and
the many turn offs that go along with it. I will not be as explicit as
you since I have not been as deeply involved over the years as you.
Wish politics was an easy read (a little more like it has been in years
gone by) but it has become unrecognizable with the impregnated
crazyness that is now commonplace. Sad, very sad. Talk again with
you when I can settle in for a intelligent (?) response.

Lou


Thanks for providing this, Harold. I’ve heard a few comments from others who attended. I’m usually sorry when I miss a meeting, but maybe not this one.

Garry


Harold,I'm so sorry to hear we're losing you for good?I know I agreed with a few of the comments made by those who were confronting Arnie..but,I too was embarrassed and thought the CDW was overboard,even dictatorial.I had written an email to him,earlier that week,and said,even tho I,too fear the effects of Monsanto,and altered food,I respected his work and his opinion.Joanne Henderson is the most up in arms.I told her,they should have had an investigation into this matter with results on his desk a lot sooner than this. If we are to educate out statesman,we have to get up early in the morning to be ahead of the incoming corporate powers!I think alot of people are at the end of their rope,and I know we have a national pandemic of paranoia,everyone wants their issue out front.I will truly miss your comradry,friend.I think we'd better have one goodbye coffee for you and Jan.I think,too,that when Arnie stated,he'd have to leave after a few questions,that Hank should have picked up on that,and we'd have given a hand to Arnie,he could have taken leave,and THEN,the candidates for Port could have introduced themselves to us all.I hope Hank gets sharper,and our club lives on under Pat Reno's new design,but I'm not sure l,myself am very tired,as I have stated to you.Never thought I'd lose hope for democracy but,I'm borderline.Thankyou for all your good guidance,good jokes,your friendship.Sincerely,

Wende


Dear Harold,
Sharon Stiles forwarded your email to me and I greatly appreciated your precise of the meeting. I too thought that Arnie was remarkably patient and forbearing.

I am saddened to hear that you're dropping out of active participation in local politics. You have been such a staunch defender of the good guys! I also find that as I get older, I have less and less patience for the follies of the human race. Thank you for all you've done for the local Democrats.

Annie


Harold,
Apologies for not following up with another phone call last week. I just wanted to thank you for getting the Roblan TH on paper, so I can try and follow what is going on. Since returning from our recent travel, I have talked to a few people on this Oregon seed issue. It (Monsanto and genetically modfied seeds) is obviously a huge subject, but I believe Arnie is being misunderstood, and a lot of people are "talking past each other".
Anyway, thanks again for your incredible way of talking straight!

Karin

***

On November 2 I wrote for myself my existing thoughts about the May 4 town hall event.

***

I had thought a bit about going to the meeting today and eventually decided not to. I would like to have heard the two speakers, one from Food Share and the other a candidate to oppose [County commissioner Jay] Bozievich next year. But, no. I’ll wait until January or February. Call me irrational or unforgiving or anything else but I cannot (will not) let pass … [the zealot’s] ideological intolerance.

I believe a person who serves as a true public servant, who strives to do what he considers right, who listens to all sides of issues, who makes his decisions based on what he considers fair and just, deserves to be respected. [The zealot] … disrespected Arnie Roblan. As the club’s chair he sent repeatedly to the club members email requests by anti-Monsanto organizations that citizens send messages to Arnie’s office demanding that he stop supporting SB633, a bill that would prohibit local municipalities and counties putting ballot measures up that if passed would regulate the use of GMO seeds. These email alerts were one-sided propaganda pieces designed to arouse public furor. Roblan was deliberately linked with Monsanto. I emailed … [the zealot] that I didn’t like what he was doing after he had forwarded the first email, but he continued doing it. At Arnie’s town hall May 4, … [the zealot] did not moderate the meeting, which caused Arnie to have to suffer listening to accusatory questions and condescending tutorials about GMO seeds all the while insulting signs put up by Citizens Democracy Watch looked down on the proceedings.

I’ve never inquired but I suspect that … [the zealot] probably knew about the signs to be put up and approved of their use. Whether this was true or not, he definitely was anti-Arnie. (As was his wife and at least two of the club members who attended) I’ve seen nothing in his excessive forwarding to members of email messages send by various activist organizations that indicates any moderation of his views or behavior. The bottom line is I am probably as angry today about what was done in May as I was then. (Also, having been the chair, I find fault in how he conducts meetings. How petty of me!) It makes no sense to me that I should sit through any of his meetings all the while angry)

According to the minutes of the last club meeting, … [the zealot] doesn’t intend to stay on as chair next year. If somebody (hopefully a person who respects different points of view) steps forward, then, yes, I’d consider coming back to be a passive member. I like most everybody in the club and miss seeing them. If nobody steps forward (a distinct possibility), then the club will cease to be.

***

I wrote one letter to an editor of a newspaper during 2013 after the town hall meeting. It was printed November 21.

***

The history of mankind has always been a tale of greed and lust for power versus promotion of the public good. You would think that the vast majority of ordinary citizens would value the latter objective when they make judgments about government policy. But no. Such is the power of media manipulation of fact and the GOP’s exploitation of humankind psychological hang-ups.

Case in point is Shari Parker’s letter to the editor Nov. 18. Living in the manufactured Republican/Fox News bubble, she gives us hackneyed GOP talking points: Obama is inexperienced, he is a liar, we need a business person to be president, “Obamacare” adds to (not subtracts from) the national deficit, we already have “the best health care system in the world,” and government should leave us alone.

She comments: “It’s a travesty that we’re saddling our children and grandchildren with a debt that can only impact their lives negatively.” Debt is not our problem. Humongous income inequality and the reasons for it are the problem. Debt is a smoke screen, an excuse to abandon responsibility to meet societal needs that would necessitate the rich having to pay increased taxes.

My concern for everybody’s grandchildren stems from corporate America’s continued pollution of our air (carbon emissions especially) and water (spills, dumping of waste, fracking) and the poisoning of our food (Monsanto, etc.) and the ultimate consequence of corporate, GOP misinformation and greed: human extinction (irreversible global climate change).

Printed November 21, 2013, in the Register-Guard

Letters, 2013, I Quit the FADC Part One, April 10, April 19

The zealot that was our Democratic Club chair was now forwarding to all club members brief email attacks on our state senator Arnie Roblan, messages spread on the internet by special advocacy groups like Food Democracy Now, determined to thwart Monsanto Corporation’s attempts to force upon independent-minded farmers its genetically modified seeds.

Here is information (provided by Snopes.com) that you need to know to understand better the issue that caused such criticism of Roblan and the events that took place at Roblan’s town hall event May 4.

***

On 26 March 2013, President Obama signed into law a bill passed by the House and Senate earlier that month known as the “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013” to provide funding for various federal agencies through the end of the 2013 fiscal year. One of the provisions included in that bill in the section for “Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and related agencies” was Section 735, variously dubbed the “Farmer Assurance Provision” or the “‘Monsanto Protection Act,” an inclusion which reignited a clash between the agribusiness industry and food safety groups. The former maintain that the Farmer Assurance Provision prevents activists from manipulating the court system to force farmers to abandon or destroy genetically modified (GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) crops that have already received U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) safety approval; the latter assert that Congress kowtowed to big business by sneaking into an appropriations bill a provision that allows large biotech companies like Monsanto to do an end run around the court system and avoid legitimate legal challenges to the safety of their products.

…

The provision directs the Secretary of Agriculture to grant temporary deregulation status to allow growers to continue the cultivation of biotech crops that had previously been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) while legal challenges to the safety of those crops are underway, and it prevents courts from interceding in the review process — a situation which critics contend unconstitutionally bars the court system from taking part in ensuring the safety of food products.

…

Dozens of food and consumer groups opposed the provision on the grounds that it was unnecessary and undermined the judiciary’s authority to regulate the growing of genetically engineered crops.

…

The provisions of this bill (including the “Monsanto Protection Act”) were originally to remain in effect for six months, until the end of the fiscal year on 30 September 2013. The bill was later extended to expire on 15 December 2013 (Mikkelson 1-3).

Work cited:

Mikkelson, Fred. “Monsanto Protection Act.” snopes.com, updated September 13, 2013. net. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mon...

***

Fireworks were set off in Oregon when the state senate passed a bill (SB633) that opponents dubbed the “Oregon Monsanto Protection Act.”

“SB 633 appears to be in response to local efforts to protect farmers and consumers from genetically modified (GM) foods. …

“Efforts in Jackson County have led to a measure on the ballot for May 2014 that will let voters decide if they want to ban GM crops in the county, and people in Benton County have been working on a community rights initiative to protect the heritage and vegetable seed industry there. GMO Free Oregon has discussed putting forth a similar measure in Lane County. …

“Melissa Wischerath and Mary Beth Williams of the newly formed, Eugene-based Center for Sustainability Law are concerned about SB 633. Wischerath says the bill is based on corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) proposed legislation from 2007.

“Williams says a Monsanto attorney came to Oregon to testify for the bill. She says that the vague language in the bill that calls for regulation of seeds and “products of agricultural seed, flower seed, nursery seed and vegetable seed” to be done by the state could lead to local governments not being able to do simple things like dealing with invasive species and could ban county-funded local food initiatives. …” (Mortensen 1-2).

Work cited:
Mortensen, Camilla. “Will Oregon Protect Monsanto?” Eugene Weekly, May 16, 2013. Net. http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2013/05/1...

***

A biased description of SB633 and why and how it came about is provided by Common Dreams.”

***

Last week, SB 633, a bill that strips all local control of agricultural seed and seed production and replaces it with a “one size fits all” policy dictated by the state passed out of the Rural Communities and Economic Development committee by a vote of 3 to 2 in favor. SB 633, known as Oregon’s Monsanto Protection Act, earned the support of the committee Chair, Arnie Roblan (D-Coos Bay) whose office has cited the passage of Section 735, known as Monsanto Protection Act, of H.R. 933, as justification of the dangerous new seed preemption bill that is now awaiting a full vote on the Oregon Senate floor.

Under current Oregon law, local citizens have the right to make democratic decisions concerning local agricultural practices and Oregon’s Monsanto Protection Act is seen as a corporate handout to agribusiness to protect biotech seed and chemical monopolies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta from the growing number of American farmers and citizens who have become concerned about the flaws of genetically engineered crops and the undemocratic lobbying method these giant multinational companies use to deceptively garner growth in the marketplace.

"Barely two weeks after sneaking into U.S law, the Monsanto Protection Act is being cited as an example to strip Oregon’s family farmers of their basic democratic rights," said Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now! "By siting Section 735, better known as the Monsanto Protection Act, as a reason to subvert the citizen-led ballot initiative process, Oregon Senators have proven that the Monsanto Protection Act is a part of a well-coordinated effort by Monsanto and the biotech industry to undermine simple protections from GMO crops that a growing number of farmers and citizens across the U.S. are demanding."
...
Oregon’s Monsanto Protection Act is a direct attempt to silence farmers critical of genetically engineered crops who are looking for a reasonable democratic solution to protect their organic and non-GMO seed supply from genetic contamination.

In an effort to protect local agriculture and farmer’s economic livelihoods, on January 2nd of this year, GMO-Free Jackson County, led by a local farmer, submitted nearly 6,500 signatures to get a ban on genetically engineered crops on the ballot. The initiative will appear on the ballot May 2014, if not sooner and Monsanto, Syngenta and other biotech seed companies are working behind the scenes to make sure that SB 633 strips Oregon residents of their right to make local agricultural decisions at the county level.

According to Oregon farmers, SB 633 is a thinly veiled attempt to silence the growing concern over genetically engineered foods and gut all county efforts to address the real problems that growing GMO crops can have on seed purity and the economic livelihoods of family farmers.

Last week Senator Roblan was joined by Herman Baerschiger (R-Grants Pass) and Betsy Close (R-Albany) in voting in favor of SB 633. The bill must now be assigned to a committee in the House and then be voted on by both chambers of the Oregon legislature.

This vote comes barely two weeks after Congress passed the Monsanto Protection Act and President Obama signed it into law, over the objections of more than 300,000 Food Democracy Now! members who signed a letter to Obama and Congress to the stop the provision from becoming law. Now in Oregon, state senators are hiding behind the precedent of the Monsanto Protection Act undermining efforts in Jackson County to pass a countywide ban on GMO crops, a ballot initiative that qualified for the May 2014 ballot (Food 1-3).

Work cited:

Food Democracy Now. “Monsanto Protection Act” Spreads to Oregon in New Bill Passed That Will Ban Local Control over Food and Farms.” Common Dreams, April 18, 2013. Net. https://www.commondreams.org/newswire...

***

I was not aware of the federal legislation nor the proposed state legislation. I was seeing messages spread across the internet mostly by Food Democracy Now lambasting Arnie Roblan courtesy of the current Florence Area Democratic Club (FADC) chair. Here are two examples.

***

Unfortunately. Senator Arnie Roblan (D-Coos Bay) and other senators in the Rural Communities and Economic Development committee are determined to do the bidding of biotech seed and chemical giants Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta by working to pass a law that pre-empts local county authority over seeds and seed production.

--- posted April 10

Already, Monsanto’s lobbyists are crawling through the Oregon capital trying to
round up votes before the truth can come out publicly that they’re working
overtime to undermine America’s basic democratic rights once again. But we
won't let them get away with it.

Ominously, the Monsanto Protection Act, Section 735 of the continuing
resolution, H.R. 933, that passed last month in Washington DC and prompted
endless controversy is now being cited as supporting evidence for the Oregon seed preemption bill.

In an email to an Oregon constituent from Senator Arnie Roblan (D-Coos Bay)
the bill’s chief sponsor and chair of the committee that the bill just passed out of, makes clear he’s doing the bidding of Monsanto and the biotech seed industry.

– posted April 19

***

Arnie Roblan and the FADC had been close allies since 2004 when he ran for state representative. Both of us having been educators, he and I had a natural regard for each other. Over the years he frequently appeared before our club to provide information about legislative bills. I always wrote and sent synopses of his presentations to our club members, a practice that he appreciated. During election years I always commended him in letters I wrote to the local and Coos Bay newspaper editors. We had similar values. He valued all my efforts on his behalf; I appreciated how he served his constituents. The assertion by Food Democracy Now! that he was a creature of Monsanto was both offensive and absurd, and our clueless, zealot chair was enthusiastically promoting it.

We were to hold our next club meeting on May 4. When the zealot had replaced me as chair in January, I vowed to myself that I would not advise him how to do any aspect of the job. I would do so on request, but I wanted to respect his independence. I knew that the May 4 town hall meeting at the local library began at 1 p.m. That was the time that the library opened. I arrived about ten minutes early, and already a crowd was waiting in the hallway outside the library’s rooms. Roblan was also waiting. No chairs had been set up inside the room where he was to speak. I had to alert one of the librarian’s inside her office to unlock the door to where we were suppose to gather, and, hastily, I, the chair, and several other people arranged the chairs.

While we were doing this, one of the leaders of Citizens Democracy Watch, a very progressive group not a part of but an ally of the FADC, started putting up along the walls of the room very large signs attacking Monsanto and demanding that Roblan reverse himself. His facial expression indicated apprehension. We, the FADC, were the sponsors of the event. He hasn’t gotten the permission of the library to do this, I thought, or permission from us! I wanted to tear the signs down.

At most all of the town halls that the club had sponsored, I, the chair, had introduced the speaker and afterward chosen whom in the audience to recognize to ask questions. Our chair introduced Senator Roblan and then took a seat in the audience. Roblan had to select the questioners. A majority of the questions asked were in varying degrees hostile. He had nobody to step in to tone things down or to admonish. At least three people gave tutorials – each at least 5 minutes in length – information about GMOs and Monsanto Corporation as if Roblan had no clue about either. I would have stopped each person after 30 seconds with the reminder, “What is your question?” and if receiving push back, “People came here to here Seantor Roblan speak, not any one of us.” Senator Roblan was facing a tough crowd, and our chair, I was certain, was reveling in it.

I audio taped the meeting, so what I have written below is not based on memory.

On the issue of SB633 and Monsanto seeds Senator Roblan made these points.

“When I make a final decision, it is based on what I believe is the right thing to do for Oregonians.”

“When people actually talk to each other, and listen to each other, surprising things happen.”

SB 633 is about seeds, not GMOs, is about “who has the responsibility for deciding and making the statues and rules regarding the growing of different kinds of seeds” in Oregon.

The ballot measure sponsored by people in Jackson County would “preempt the use of any GMO seeds” there. “Not one county in the state of Oregon wants this responsibility.” They “believe it will bankrupt them” if passed. “We have another law in the state that is called Right to Farm.” It “gives farmers the rights that they need to do the common practices of being a farmer.”

He talked to scientists at Oregon State and Portland State and other people and asked, “Who has the expertise to make those kinds of decisions?” The answer he got was “Probably the best is the federal government: they have more scientists than anybody else. Next would be the Department of Agriculture; that’s part of their job.” Who has the expertise? Arnie was told, “Probably, right now, not many. It’s a fairly new industry.” The place that has the best chance of making good decisions … is the Department of Agriculture. “Now we need to fund them, which we haven’t done very well.” Woefully underfunded.

Two major industries looked at the bill and said, “Oh my gosh, they are going to start regulating our seeds, county by county, 36 counties?”

Nursery Associations: “We think we have genetically engineered plants that we grow and sell all over and we’re kind of concerned now what we’re going to do with this.”

Forest Industry: “We’re doing a lot of stuff now with our trees that are growing and … we don’t think that having this regulated” is good.

Obama just signed a bill that prevents some of this GMO from being regulated. “There is a lot of stuff happening on this issue. To have it decided county by county made absolutely no sense to me.”

“In the valley we have a penning system for most of our seed production that allows people to know within two or three miles who else is growing whatever, so that we can avoid the conflicts that happen.”

“If you do the science and pen so that they are away from each other, do other kinds of things to prevent it, you don’t get that problem.”

“With respect to the long-term viability of this agricultural industry, … I think it [SB633] is the right thing for our state to do. People can differ with that. I’ll gladly hear from other people who show me examples about where it’s been a problem.”

“When I get frustrated in elections and this kind of stuff, [it’s because] the same people who are really anti-bullying employ bullying techniques.”

A number of questions that were asked were about subjects other than GMO seeds: guns, education, coal trains, mental health, forestry, industrial farms. The following is representative of a greater amount of argumentation that occurred between critics in the audience and the Senator.

***

GMO drift doesn’t stop at two-and-a-half miles.

Roblan: Monsanto has won few lawsuits about farmers using their seeds that drifted onto the farmers’ properties. “I understand the concerns … I think we are more frightened than we need to be.”

Scientists are being bought and sold by Monsanto. Cattle being fed chips of corn foreign to the bodies of the cattle that are laced with antibodies. Cattle should be grass-fed. We are poisoning ourselves. Monsanto is making trees that are resistant to bugs but are killing all the trees around them. We are in trouble. Our planet is in trouble.

Roblan: “I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I don’t agree with the indiscriminate spraying of pesticides. Most farmers out there are using the least amount that they can. ..[interruption] More pesticides may be coming into our water systems from our urban areas than ever come from our farms. [interruption] If we ban them, we have to be prepared to acknowledge that a whole lot of people in the world are going to die of starvation.

“But that’s not true.” Somebody else jumped in. “People farm for themselves in other countries. Monsanto and other companies took over their lands.”

Roblan: “I’ll get some other books to read on that one, but I will guarantee you right now if we only had organic farming and no pesticides in this world there would be a major loss of life in this world and poor people would be the ones that would take the biggest brunt of it.

[Somebody else spoke.] “The problem with Monsanto is that they prescribe the seed … that are not viable the next year. [voice became too soft to hear well] … The Department of Agriculture does not look at independent studies.” They look at Monsanto and similar GMO studies. The Department of Agriculture is headed up by a former Monsanto official. The reason Obama signed that bill was because it was on the tail-end of the appropriations bill to keep the government running. He didn’t want that in there. Obama said that if any changes are to happen in this country, it has to come from the grass roots. People have a right to organize and to say what they need. “SB633 undermines home rule. It is essentially favoring the farmers that want to plant GMO. It takes away the right completely of other farmers that [couldn’t make out what was said].” In Mendocino County in California they passed a GMO ban that was quite successful. “If you take the right of protest and the right of organizations and the right of making change away from the people who are not doing GMOs, then you are just cutting them off at the knees.”

Roblan: “I understand your position. I don’t necessarily agree. … There are other ways in which laws can be important. If you have drift of your pesticides on other people’s farms, … you will have to pay for that. I look at this group here. 40 years ago most of us would not be here. We wouldn’t live this long. If you look historically at our country to other countries, our food production and safety is better than most every country in the world. I understand people’s belief structures around organic [mumbled words]. I keep asking for studies that show me. Show me the studies that show it’s going to be a problem and not going to be a problem. I will continue to read the [?] from everyone.”

[Another person] Talking about seeds sounds very benign, but how those seeds are altered in a way to resist some of the pesticides, ”the only reason that is being done – we are killing ourselves, hurting ourselves … only to kill weeds.” The person continues a tutorial giving information about farmers’ use of stronger pesticides to eradicate more pesticide-resistant weeds, cross-pollination, drift, storage of unused chemicals, the European Union 2-year ban on pesticides that apparently are killing bees, the EPA looking at the effects on children’s brain development because of use of pesticides around schools. At this point several people in the audience declared that they wanted other people to have the opportunity to speak and ask questions.

Another person spoke.

You mentioned earlier that there is no science regarding GMOs.

Roblan: “No, there was science.”

Okay, you went to Oregon State. They didn’t know …

Roblan: “I said, they’re saying that the fears that people have are not founded enough in science. Because there is science that’s been done.”

Money going into the colleges is not supporting science. It’s not supporting the research and development. The governor is not supporting it. The federal government is not supporting it. All the money we suspend for growing our children are also growing our society now seems to be going to different places, mostly corporations.

Roblan: “I agree that corporations don’t pay what I think they should pay. … What I’m saying is, I want reputable science. So I don’t care if Monsanto does it, or if the University of Oregon does it, or whoever.” I want to see how they did it “and I take that same science and I can replicate it over here and I get the same results. If you can’t do that kind of science, then I don’t think it is real science. … So I don’t care if Monsanto does it, and I don’t care if the University of Oregon does it. For me, it’s show me the science. And then let’s make some decisions about it.

Another person, with a low voice, hard to decipher: “None of the science that they’re putting out there … [something about genetic change, “GMO stuff “]

Roblan: “One thing I will say about science. They don’t ever really have the final answer. … Their answer is, ‘Here’s the best we know now. Give us some more time and we’ll tell you the next thing is. I agree.

***

I immediately left the room after the town hall had concluded. I was furious, not because I believed that accusations leveled at Monsanto were not true but because Senator Roblan had been accorded so little respect.

Letters, 2013, Always Something that Aggravates, January 16, March 8, March 9, March 12

I had appointed an active Democratic Club member in November 2012 to attempt to find other members who would volunteer to be club officers for 2013 and 2014. I had made it clear that I would not serve another two years as the club’s chair. If nobody would step forward, then the club might cease to exist. At the December 2012 club meeting my recruiter announced that no one wanted to be the chair. “All right then.” I guess this is the club’s last meeting” I said, or words to that effect.

“Nobody asked me,” a voice spoke up, from a new member. He and his wife had attended the November meeting and had joined the club afterward. Yes, he would do the job. “Then you’re the chair starting January,” I more or less said. So much for nominating candidates and then having a vote. Nobody objected. I was off the hook.

The new chair was an ex-forester, an extreme liberal I would soon find out.

I wasn’t done writing letters to newspaper editors. So much was wrong with the state of our country due mostly to Republican Party self-interest and right-wing media gas lighting. Fracking for natural gas was now the supposed solution to oil and coal CO2 emissions (never mind the methane gas that was released).

***

My wife and I recently attended the movie “Promised Land” at our local theater. Matt Damon plays the role of an up-and-coming sales representative of a large natural gas corporation intent on obtaining leases on property owned by poor, small-town farmers. Growing up on an Iowa farm, Damon’s character had seen how the inhabitants of his rural community had suffered after the local Caterpillar factory had ceased its operations. He is empathetic toward the people he seeks to persuade. Profit from your good fortune, he advises. Permit my corporation to frack the subterranean rock beneath your property to reach your natural gas. Opponents point out what fracking does to the land, livestock, and drinking water – scare stories spread by environmentalists, Damon’s character wants to believe; probable facts she should ignore, his female co-sales worker, dependent on her income, has decided.

I left the theater reflecting on certain truths.

Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

We are all so willing to tolerate a widespread threat to safety and health if we are not ourselves inconvenienced.

This attitude held by many: If profit is to be had, it’s no skin off my nose if I benefit and you get hurt.

How do you feel about liquid natural gas being piped to and exported from Portland and Coos Bay? About coal trains from Montana passing through Lane County? About tar sand oil from Canada being pumped to Texas through the Keystone XL pipeline?

How about global warming? The end of human existence as we have known it?

Printed January 16, 2013, in the Siuslaw News

***

Always aggravating is the Fox News loyalist who believes that we deluded liberals need to be educated as to the real facts.

***

It annoys me to read letters to the editor written by people who continue to live in the Fox News bubble, especially now when the Republican Party has brought our country to its knees and will cause yet greater adversity by rendering Congress inoperative.

Jerry McCall (letters, March 3) blames President Obama for what ails us.

Yes, we are back to paying the higher payroll tax, but that is because Congressional Republicans refused to permit its continuance when the so-called “fiscal cliff” agreement was reached.

Yes, gas prices are up, but how can the president be blamed for that? Ah, Sean Hannity, master purveyor of false clarifications, says so.

Yes, “slow growth, limited consumer spending, high unemployment and shrinking paychecks have all contributed to the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression.” (Obama again!) Job flight overseas, the destruction of labor unions, the benefits of accelerated worker production going to top corporate management while worker wages drop below 1990 levels: these are outcomes of corporate policy that maximize profits by maximizing reduction of costs.

Mr. McCall also wrote: “Maybe Obama should rethink his plan in his second term and get Americans back to work …” How? Do what House Republicans demand? Tea partiers want to destroy the federal government. Republicans not bat-guano crazy march to their corporate pay-masters’ drummer. Any extreme measure to thwart representative governance is fair game.

Republicans, we aren’t as callous and dim-witted as you think.

Printed March 8, 2013, in the Register-Guard

***

The editor removed “not bat-guano crazy” from the letter. The following letter appeared four days later.

***

I applaud Harold Titus of Florence for his wonderful letter in the March 8 Register-Guard.

I am positively fed up with the governmental “anchor” called the Republican Party. A recent editorial page cartoon was right on the money. It showed President Obama climbing a fiscal cliff, and attached to a rope tied around his waist was a dangling elephant. How appropriate.

The Republican Party has been nothing but an albatross around Obama’s neck since he took office. Isn’t it time to at least try to support him, help get this country back on track, and stop the “us-vs.-them” attitude?

After all, the Bush clan dragged us into this hole, and I think Obama deserves the respect and support from all of us to help to fix it.

Bruce A. Smith
Eugene
Printed March 12, 2013, in the Register-Guard

***

What House and Senate Republicans, in essence, were declaring: Oh my gosh! The federal debt! We are [once again] doomed! We must cut entitlements! (Now that the Dems are in charge) We must stop their unbridled spending! We are the party that is fiscally responsible! GOP! GOP! Remember that! (We blame, do not own)

More fodder for letter writing.

***

In a recent column Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman made an excellent analogy to emphasize how dishonest the Republican Party’s argument is about cutting spending to reduce our annual federal deficit. He compared the Bush administration’s fear mongering about “weapons of mass destruction” with the current prevaricators of fact that proclaim how dire our financial footing will become if we don’t immediately cut, cut, cut!

To achieve their entirely unnecessary objective – overthrow Saddam Hussein – the Bush/Cheney team had to scare the daylights out of the American people and enlist as stenographers the mainstream press. We are seeing now the use of the same tactic: frighten the not particularly well-informed public into believing that slashing social programs and wrecking further havoc with how government attempts to protect the majority and regulate the amorally powerful is completely necessary.

With national attention diverted to this false crisis, public groundswell for a vital jobs stimulus that would require the closing of tax loopholes and special deductions for large corporations and the wealthy remains shackled.

I watched today a 6 minute video put together by Daily Kos entitled “Wealth Inequality in America Illustration.” Please Google this and see for yourself what our political protectors of America’s 2 percent have wrought. And what sequestration, debt ceiling hostage taking, and threats to close down the government are designed to make worse.

Printed March 9, 2013, in the Siuslaw News

***

Our new chair was proving himself to be a far left zealot.

He kept sending to the members via email a seemingly unending series of ultra progressive literature. We can do our own reading about issues, fellow. You are insulting us, I was thinking.

Also, he was maintaining a somewhat hostile attitude toward our state house representative, Caddy McKeown, and our state senator, Arnie Roblan. Both were moderate Democrats. Both were high-quality human beings. He didn’t know them and, seemingly, didn’t want to. I e-mailed to him positive personal information about Arnie Roblan. The zealot did not acknowledge having received it.

At the April club meeting, Caddy McKeown was answering questions from the people attending. One man, clearly a rabid Republican, was lambasting her. Our leader was seated in the back row of chairs. I looked at him from a distance. He was smiling, enjoying what he was hearing and seeing. So this is what we are going to have to suffer for two years, I thought.

We in Florence had an election coming up in May. One of the races was for three seats on the Board of the Port of Siuslaw. The Democratic Club supported a slate of three individuals, one of whom was Nancy Rickard, a club member and one of my good friends. I agreed to make phone calls to registered Democrats and non-party affiliated residents. The position of board member was considered a non-partisan office.

When you make canvassing phone calls, you find that a lot of residents are not home. Their answering machines asked you to leave a message. Mine was pretty much like this. "Hello, my name is Harold Titus, a local Democrat here in Florence, asking residents to vote for Nancy Rickard for board member of the Port of Siuslaw. I know her personally. We couldn’t have a better person on the Board. Thank you."

I spent a good three hours one day making calls and leaving messages. Late in the afternoon I received a phone call from the Siuslaw News editor. She warned me that a woman from Dunes City (10 miles south of Florence) was irate about the phone message I had left on her machine and that I should expect to receive a phone call from her. Maybe a half hour later I received the call.

She informed me that the Port of Siuslaw Board race was non-partisan and I was making it partisan because I had identified myself as a Democrat. She felt strongly about keeping partisanship out of election campaigns. I was doing a terrible thing. (Never mind that all but one Port board member were strongly partisan and “good-old-boy” Republicans and their policy actions definitely reflected that) She wanted to know how I had got her phone number. “Off a list of Democrats provided me by the Nancy Rickard campaign,” I answered. I explained that such lists were available for sale to people running for public office. She didn’t like that either.

She issued another complaint or two. I thought that I had managed to wait her out without being rude. She ended the conversation then with a threat. She would look into having me sued.

I decided afterward that I had had it with door-to-door and telephone canvassing. No more of it. I have held to that intention. I entered the month of May disgusted with zealot Democrats, not knowing what would really set me off at the forthcoming May club meeting.