Welcome to Democracy by Zip Code

 

This site is dedicated to the preservation of democracy against the assault of authoritarians and the enablers that support them.


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“How easy it is to exercise your right to vote depends on your zip code in this country.” - Kim Wehle  - Author, What you need to Know About Voting and Why

August 1, 2023

As Gary Bass put it in the New York Times:

Donald Trump openly flatters foreign autocrats such as Vladimir V. Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and in many ways Mr. Trump governed as authoritarians do around the globe: enriching himself, stoking ethnic hatreds, seeking personal control over the courts and the military, clinging to power at all costs. 

Donald Trump was indicted today as the first loser of a presidential election, accused of an illegal plot to stay in power despite losing an election, to deprive the American voters of the leader they chose, who happened to be Joe Biden, not Donald Trump.

Trump and his supporters represent a major threat to the solid majority of Americans who have not fallen under the spell of the grifter Mr. Trump. An alarming percentage of the American public, and a majority of Republicans are just fine with ending democracy and backing a man with a clear contempt for democracy and the rule of law.

George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what “we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”

Until Mr. Trump came along.

...

While he failed to keep his grip on power, Mr. Trump has undermined the credibility of elections in the United States by persuading three in 10 Americans that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, even though it was not and many of his own advisers and family members know it was not.

Bringing the case to court, of course, may not restore that public faith in the system. Millions of Mr. Trump’s supporters and many Republican leaders have embraced his narrative of victimization, dismissing the prosecution without waiting to read the indictment as merely part of a far-reaching, multi-jurisdictional and sometimes even bipartisan “witch hunt” against him.

...

The most essential facts of the case, after all, are not in dispute, nor did he deny any of the assertions made in the indictment on Tuesday. Mr. Trump was astonishingly open at the time in declaring that he wanted to overturn the election. Since leaving office, he has even called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reinstall him in the White House immediately.

The question is whether the facts add up to crimes as alleged by a federal grand jury at Mr. Smith’s behest. Just as no president ever tried to reverse his defeat at the ballot box before, no prosecutor has brought charges for doing so, meaning there is no precedent for applying the statutes on the books to such a circumstance. 

- Peter Baker, New York Times, August 1, 2023

 

November 2, 2022

The midterm elections are near. Election denialism is a growing cancer in the Republican Party.

Their attempts at voter suppression may or may not deliver them a victory. Whether those who lose will accept defeat should be interesting. 

If Democrats win in a district where their vigilantes were keeping watch, will they finally drop the bullshit fears of a stolen election? Or will they turn their conspiracy theories to electronic voting?

What feeds this craziness is our increasing isolation from people who think differently from us.

Where I live, nobody supports Trump so it's not at all hard to imagine that he lost.

If you live in deep Red rural America, you probably only see Republican neighbors, and forget that rural America only makes up 20% of the U.S. population. And chances are, your only view of big cities is through the distorted view of the Koch Brother's Fox News propaganda service. 

So the Big Lie he spreads makes sense to those folks.

And Democracy may not survive, as a result. 

The most important thing you can do to help this election is to VOTE! Please vote! If you don't vote, they win.... 

June 28, 2022

In the words of John Batiste,  "WE HOLD THE HAMMER 🔨
LETS GET TO WORK ‼️✊🏾."

Anyone who is not watching the January 6 hearings should be. It is chilling.

America and its experiment with democracy may soon be coming to an end in the midterm elections, if a political party run by a sycophant and acolyte of Vladimir Putin, and an admirer of autocrats like Viktor Orban of Hungary, takes charge of two of three branches of the federal government, and threatens to hijack the vote to capture the third, the executive branch, in 2024.

If that happens, then American democracy, as we have known it since the Civil War, is all but done. And we will enter a new, unknown era.

What would happen then? Well let's not borrow trouble, but one can imagine that the majority of diverse Americans on the coasts and in big cites across this land are not going to be pushed around by the fearful rural minority, who are fed nightly dystopian, soda-straw views of cities, that focus on isolated acts of mayhem and misery and balloon them up to portray them as widespread, to inflame fear and mistrust.

How many people watching Fox News realized that 99.99 percent of Portland, Oregon was not at all like the 4 blocks they relentlessly focused on? I'm a photographer... I can make any city look like a hellhole -- or paradise -- if i choose my shots right. And Fox News is a master of the "soda straw" reporting of selective facts to make reality fit their narrative.

The Fox News of today, reporting on cities like Chicago and Portland, remind me a lot of the reporting of Pravda (the Russian newspaper), which I used to read while learning Russian as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in forty years ago. I would read Pravda off the rack of world newspapers in the graduate library (this was before the internet) to practice my reading skills in Cyrillic.

The only America they portrayed was one of the horrors and miseries  of capitalism. The only Americans you saw were the homeless people on the streets of New York to show what a miserable failure capitalism was. How people are just left to die on the streets in America, because that's what the "other side"  of Capitalism (i.e. not the "winners" side) is all about... 

The isolated facts Pravda were reporting were not "fake." The homelessness was real. The lack of a safety net is real.

But the reporting was also a "soda straw."

Those of us who live in America know that, capitalism, brutal as it is, has NOT left the the vast majority of us homeless.

But you would never know that reading Pravda back then.

Likewise Fox News reporting of BLM protests in Portland, etc.

I can guarantee you there were far more people in cafes and restaurants in various peaceful neighborhoods of Portland every night than there were rioters in the town square, and I can guarantee you that all those folks glued to Fox News would have no idea of that important fact.

And Fox News made sure that the narrow, dystopian narrative was the only view you'd ever see.

States like California and New York will not stand by if a fearful, white rural minority decide its a good idea to hand this country over to thugs and oligarchs, because their fears of diversity are stoked by the skilled hands of propagandists like Fox News and Russian-fed facebook groups, who are old hands at this...

They have done the same in country after country in Eastern Europe  -- The orange menace, knows this, and has studied their methods. He will never win a majority of votes in this country and he knows that. And neither will his party.

It is only through gerrymandering (and the New Supreme Court's "hands off" approval of it) combined with archaic Senate rules, and spineless Senate Democrats — who will not even go so far as to restore the filibuster to its original procedure purpose — that democracy is being allowed to fail.

In the words of John Batiste,  "WE HOLD THE HAMMER 🔨
LETS GET TO WORK ‼️✊🏾."

A majority of Americans embrace diversity.

A majority of Americans do not embrace the fear spread by Fox News.

A majority of Americans do not think that every disgruntled, hormone inflamed, angry, pissed off 18 year old male should have an absolute right to be able to buy enough ammo for their machine gun to wipe out a school yard, even if paranoid right wingers in Texas think that's just awesome...

A majority of Americans do NOT fear their neighbor even if their skin is a different color or their customs are different or they listen to different music.

God bless THAT America.

That's the love that Jesus talked about in Bible.

Not the false god worshiped by so-called "christian" right, who shamelessly disgrace the true message of Christ to suit their ideology, prioritizing things that Jesus never even mentioned, while ignoring the vast bulk of his message... Don't take it from me... the Vatican said it better....

"Being for life, always, also means defending it against the threat of firearms, which unfortunately have become a leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the U.S." he wrote.

"Being for life, always, for example, means being concerned if the mortality rates of women due to motherhood increase," he wrote.

He cited statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing a rise in maternity mortality rates overall and that the rate was nearly three times higher for black women.

"Being for life, always, means asking how to help women welcome new life," he wrote, citing an unsourced statistic that 75% of women who have abortions live in poverty or are low-wage earners.

He also cited statistics from the Harvard Review of Psychiatry showing that the United States has much lower rates of paid parental leave compared with other rich nations.

-Andrea Tornielli, Vatican Editorial Director

This site will be working hard in the next few months to do everything we can to preserve democracy!

In the words of John Batiste,  "WE HOLD THE HAMMER 🔨
LETS GET TO WORK ‼️✊🏾."

May 4, 2022

With the leak of the proposed reversal of Roe v. Wade, it is clear that the right-wing super-majority of the Supreme Court believes that the U.S. Constitution confers no inherent "right to privacy" to individuals.

No right to contraception, no right to marry the one you love, no right to be the person you are.

Under the view of the Supreme Court today, if your way of life violates the religious views of the majority, a State government can  interfere in your personal life -- even to the extreme case of interfering in your doctor-patient relationship, and forcing you to have a baby against your will, to satisfy the religious opinions held by the majority.

If a State decides to do that, the Supreme Court says that's just fine. Because, nothing in the Constitution that speaks to any of that. They insist there is NO inherent "right to be left alone" in embodied in the spirit of the Constitution.

The only thing relevant to them is that in the original constitution, no rights of any kind were conferred to women, including reproductive rights, so we should not infer any such rights today.

To the new right-wing supermajority on the court, the Constitution was meant to freeze forever what people thought was the proper structure of society as it existed in the 1700s, and it should never be expanded, except in only very limited ways as written in explicitly in Amendments to the constitution....

...unless of course, it involves the "rights" of corporations, in which case the Constitution should be loosely read and expanded to maximize and preserve the wealth of existing private property owners.

That is the state of democracy today.

Be sure to exercise your right to vote!

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January 6, 2022

One year ago, supporters of defeated ex-president Donald Trump stormed the capitol in failed attempt to prevent the Senate's certification of the 2020 presidential election that day.

On the anniversary of this traitorous insurrection, I am writing again because the fight for democracy in America is, sadly, not over. The supporters of the defeated ex-president continue to show contempt for democracy and truth.

The work of this site is not over. In the coming year we will continue to work toward keeping the experiment of democracy alive for another 200 years — and not be destroyed by the deranged ravings of the defeated ex-president and his deluded enablers.

My father fought in World War II against authoritarianism. The proud decent people of this nation have fought these kinds of forces before. 

On this anniversary of the attempted insurrection led by the defeated ex-president, I vow to continue to fight for democracy to honor my father's memory.

----

January 20, 2021

This website was started four years ago, on the day Donald Trump took office, to fight his frontal attack on democracy. 

Four years later i am in tears and proud to be an American to see that democracy has prevailed, and we can consign the name and lies of the 45 POTUS to the dustbin of history. 

It is time to move forward with the task of making this nation great, and inclusive, and fair, and just, and and for us to seize the opportunity to tap into the great talent that this nation has to offer, if we just get the crushing weight of economic hardship off of the hardworking men and women who go to work every day and truly make this nation great.

I hope you can use this site to make your elected officials -- of whatever party -- accountable to you and the issues you care about. 

Use this site to keep track of:

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For now... I am preserving what this page said on various historic days in the past when our fragile democracy was most under siege. 

Here is what I wrote the day after the 1/6 insurrection / coup attempt.

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As of this writing, January 7, 2021,

I am sad to say i was right about Mr. Trump and his enablers. Fortunately, democracy has survived his assault, but only because YOU voted this man out of office. 

Democracy is a living breathing thing that requires our continued participation. Keep voting. Stay informed.

Mr. Trump and his enablers are a disgrace to the American flag. He is a traitor and should be tried for treason, and removed from office as a threat to this nation. 

God bless America, and all of you who voted. This is a great nation. 

Here is what i wrote July 2020:
===================

Politics has always been a dirty business. But for the first time in our generation, our democracy is on the verge of falling into chaos and dictatorship, because of one man: Donald Trump. He has now vowed to end democracy after the next election, saying he will not leave office even if the agreed-upon facts say he lost.

Donald Trump has a demonstrated willingness to ignore facts and call them fake.  

Now has said he will do the same with election results. We know he says what he's going to do and then he does it.

He has made false claims that the election numbers could be off by as much as 20%.

A ridiculous claim. Yet with the power of the presidency, as interpreted by WillIiam Barr and his bizzare "unitary executive" theory of the constitution, he may assert the power to ignore election results, as one of his powers of chief executive.

There is a lot at stake. Powerful people care a lot about the result of the next election. And our democracy is under threat more than ever before. Russian hackers and Roger Stone are working hard to take your vote away or convince you not to vote, because they know they can't win an open and fair election. 

Those in power have made it clear that they are willing to destroy democracy if that's what it takes to stay in power. They claim to love the flag but by their actions, they defecate on it daily, and treat the Constitution as toilet paper. Anyone who cares about the rule of law is alarmed and outraged at the utter lawlessness and disrespect this corrupt president shows for every American institution that our fathers, mothers  and forefathers fought for in WWII. 

This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is an issue about whether one cares about democracy or not. That's why no Republican ex-president can endorse this man for another term in office. The former chairman of the Republican party can't even endorse the undemocratic, dangerous tendencies of the mobsters that currently hold the keys to power.

This anti-democratic gang has demonstrated their utter contempt for the checks and balances that have made our country different from banana republics and authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world -- the kind of regimes my parents fought against in WWII.

But we can fight back.  We MUST fight back. Americans must VOTE in overwhelming numbers to defeat those who have made it clear that they will do ANYTHING to stay in power. As Greg Palast says, "They can't steal every vote." 

We do not need to sit idly by and let enablers of authoritarianism destroy our democracy. The mission of this website is to do everything possible to preserve our fragile democracy, to preserve the rule of law, and to make sure every vote is counted

We offer these tools to help address your questions about voting, and government in Bucyrus, OH, and offer tools to help you be a better informed citizen, and preserve your precious right to vote.

Remember, THERE ARE PEOPLE TRYING TO PURGE YOUR REGISTRATION. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ARE STILL REGISTERED.

Don't let mobsters like Roger Stone choke the life out of our precious American democracy in the 2020 election. Democracy will survive only if we work hard to defend it, and if we VOTE!





Jurisdictional relevance: SU