democratic party

I attended my first Thom Tillis town hall and am still recovering. I feel as if I have just discovered that aliens walk among us, aliens with very big sprayed helmets of bubble hair, polyester instead of skin and very angry red faces. Please see a somewhat censored description of my experience at http://www.progressnc.org/2011/10/its-time-to-stand-up-and-demand-some-a... and, I beg of you, attend any Tillis town hall meetings that come to your area then stand up and make him answer to you. Enough of a free ride for this man! Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll a feel-good, pre-election, re-election tour which ignores them.

When I was younger, I always admired people who got the job done the first time, and didn't make excuses. Didn't pass the buck - the buck stops here!

I first learned about Admiral Hyman Rickover when reading a book about the voyage of the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. Rickover had a reputation as a perfectionist and a hard task-master. But he needed to be - nuclear energy did not not (at that time) allow for mistakes or short-cuts. That's why USN nuclear reactor techs were in high-demand in the civilian nuclear energy area. But when businesses decided to cut corners to save money, not even the best trained people could stop the short-cuts from creating havoc and destruction.

How do we build the progressive brand and create demand for our policies?

The New York Times ran a piece recently about a study of pop song lyrics and other studies suggesting increasing narcissism in America since the 1980s. (Big news, huh?) They found "the words 'I' and 'me' appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in 'we' and 'us' and the expression of positive emotions." This must make the Randians proud. Their world is all about them, and it's a view they have sold successfully for decades. Progressives will not change that outlook just by promoting programs people don't want to pay for, sponsored by a government they distrust, with benefits they would rather do without than see help neighbors they see as parasites.

A progressive America is less about me and more about we.

This resolution received via email from Harnett County, where grassroots party members and leaders are stepping up to remind elected Democrats not to behave like Republicans.

The Harnett County Democratic Party is and always has been an organization that has valued and championed the hardworking citizens of our county. Among those hardworking citizens we recognize and include the public servants that provide services we all need and depend on. In these difficult times we urge all our county officials, when considering measures to insure financial stability for local government, to strive to protect the jobs of those employed by them.

Yesterday's meeting of the N.C. Democratic Party State Executive Committee was an encouraging event for several reasons.

Now that 2011 began mere minutes ago, please visit my brand new campaign Facebook page (I hope you'll "Like It" and recommend it to your Facebook friends!) and also take a short stroll through my completely revised, new campaign website which is linked on the site and in this very sentence.

Both the website homepage (www.WayneGoodwin.org) and the Facebook wall have a short intro video from me on them.

Happy New Year, friends and visitors ... Onward to 2012!

Voting against extending tax breaks to multimillionaires is easy to explain, as Representative Louise Slaughter does below in exactly 118 words. On the other hand, justifying a vote for "the deal" takes more than 2000. Just to say it, I can see that going along with Republicans is anything but a lose-lose strategy. It's destroying the Democrat's political base, and it's destroying the U.S. economy. The House of Representatives didn't just blink in the face of this Republican shakedown, it totally caved.

Conventional wisdom, both at the national and state level, suggests that progressive Democrats will stick with the party no matter what levels of corruption, incompetence and compromise we are asked to swallow. And when it comes to marking the ballot, that's may very well be true.

But before a person can mark that ballot, he or she has to get to the voting booth. But the reactionary path that Obama and Perdue are currently pursuing suggests that 2012 will not be especially inspiring. Unless something changes dramatically, which seems unlikely, the consequences for my own personal activism will be dire.

With the mid-term elections over the Monday morning quarterbacking has begun. Many within the Democratic Party are looking for answers as to why so many blue dog Democrats were swept away in the Republican tsunami of 2010.