The Democratic Party Rules & Bylaws Committee, a roughly 45-person committee responsible for setting the Delegate Selection Rules for nominating a presidential candidate, is quietly proposing banning the use of ranked-choice voting (RCV) in the 2028 presidential primaries. This recommendation is not yet final. It is still subject to approval by the entire 450-person DNC body at its next meeting on August 15.Maine fought long and hard to bring RCV to our state. Mainers love using it, and national groups shouldn’t direct how states conduct their elections.
Below is a link (1) for background about the proposed ban and how it would affect Democratic voters and state parties. It’s important for Maine’s DNC Delegates to become aware of this proposed rule and commit to protecting ranked-choice voting at the August 15 meeting. Want to take action with us? We will send a collective letter to the delegates, and you can add your name to that letter. We will send the collective letter on behalf of those who sign it. The deadline to add your name is Friday, July 31. Click on the following link to add your name.https://www.lwvme.org/TakeActionDNC (1) https://fairvoteaction.org/the-democratic-partys-proposed-ban-on-ranked-choice-voting-in-2028-presidential-primaries/
Background: So you think it can’t happen here, or can’t happen to you, or someone you care about? A few weeks ago, a young US citizen on her way home to Brooksville (where she has lived since birth) was detained for 24 hours in Atlanta. There was no reason given. Her mother is from the Philippines, but her father is a descendant of one of the original European settlers of Brooksville. arriving in the 1760s and living here ever since, generation after generation. She was on a business trip, and had a set of specialized tools with her. She eventually got her tools back, but ICE did not return all the clothing that was in her suitcase. This hits too close to home! You may know of similar cases!
Action: The Maine Democratic Party has published an advisory which appeared in the Washington County party email newsletter. I have edited the contents and present it below in Q and A form. The links are in blue, and should work if you share it online. Or, it prints out on two pages, double sided is best. You could print it out, and discuss with your local Dem committee. Maybe there are some actions you as a group decide to undertake. Resist!
To fill the rest of this page: the following sign also came from the Washington County Democrats’ email. Just about every Republican friend I have has un-enrolled by now. Share freely.
ICE Out!
From the Maine Democratic Party – “As we continue to monitor ICE activity across the state, we know how important it is to find ways to support our communities. Included in this email is vetted guidance and a comprehensive list of resources that you can use and distribute amongst your networks. Please know that this crisis is top of mind for all of us at MDP and we will continue to share updates and additional resources as they become available.”
Q. What information should I share on social media?
A. Please do not share information that will cause needless fear for immigrant communities at this already-stressful time. As always, only share verified, accurate information. ILAP, the ACLU of Maine, and the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law have put together this resource if you are looking for accurate Know Your Rights and other materials to share with your networks: https://www.aclumaine.org/preparingforice/
Q. What rights do immigrants have? A. All people in the United States, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution. These include:
The right not to open the door to your home to ICE, unless the agent has a signed judicial warrant.
The right to ask an ICE officer, “Am I free to leave?”
The right not to answer an immigration officer’s questions and to tell an immigration officer, “I choose not to say anything.”
Importantly, even if someone exercises their rights, ICE may ignore them and still detain them. If ICE tries to detain someone, they should do their best to stay calm and not run away or resist arrest. Learn more: https://www.aclumaine.org/preparingforice
Q. What do I do if I see immigration enforcement officers? A. Some or all of the following:
Complete this form if you believe an immigration officer has violated someone’s rights. It links to ACLU legal assistance.
Make sure you know your rights regarding filming an ICE arrest or encounter: Filming Immigration Enforcement in the U.S. Use visuals and photos and amplify on social media and the press. However, please be cautious about sharing photos of people’s faces without consent and take other steps necessary to protect each other. Remember that just being an innocent bystander can result in being profiled and indiscriminately targeted.
Report what you’ve seen to Maine’s ICE Watch Hotline at 207-544-9989. Try to remember the SALUTE acronym when reporting:
S: Size (How many agents?)
A: Actions (What are they doing?)
L: Location and direction
U: Uniform or clothing
T: Time and date
E: Equipment, including vehicles and license plates
Q. How do I make sure my business, school, or place of worship is prepared for ICE enforcement?
Q. How can we encourage Maine businesses not to serve or welcome ICE agents? A. Talk to them. Encourage them not to serve ICE agents, and to post signs of solidarity with immigrant communities in business windows. Know Your Rights (KYR) materials can be posted in public places and left at businesses and other locations with permission. Take care not to draw particular attention to places where noncitizens might be.
This is a long one, friends. It was written by Mary Hennessy, a retired attorney living in Maine. After you read it, you will be deeply informed on the issue and ready to write a letter to the editor and/or convince Collins’ staff that we are watching her every move! It’s OK to first read the Actions, then backtrack to the Background for info.
Background:
The “slush fund”: The Judgment Fund is a permanent appropriation created by Congress in 1956. The fund allows the Treasury Department to pay judgements on lawsuits or settle pending claims, generally with judicial approval, without a congressional vote on individual payments. This January, Trump, along with his sons and The Trump Organization filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. They alleged the IRS failed to safeguard tax records leaked by a private contractor. Career lawyers at the IRS recommended Treasury contest the suit, setting out their legal reasoning in a 25-page memo. The Justice Department, under the control of acting A.G. Todd Blanche, who is aggressively pursuing appointment as Attorney General (henchman-in chief ) never sent attorneys to appear in court to respond to the suit or to dispute any of the claims.(1) Recognizing that Trump, in suing the government he controlled, was on both sides of the case, Presiding Judge Kathleen Williams ordered Trump’s personal lawyers and the Justice Department to brief the threshold question of whether a genuine case existed and scheduled a hearing for May 27.(2) In response, Trump dismissed his lawsuit against the IRS and the Department of Justice established the Anti-Weaponization Fund (colloquially the “slush fund”). It requires that the Judgment Fund transfer $1.776 billion to the slush fund to benefit President Trump’s allies, including, apparently, Trump family members and the January 6th insurrectionists who attacked U.S. Capitol police officers. The U.S. Attorney General would be responsible for appointing a five-person commission to administer the payouts. The commissioners would be subject to removal by Trump at any time. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said in a statement Monday that “President Trump, his family, supporters, and countless other America First Patriots were illegally targeted by the Democrat-led law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice, and the IRS.” (3)
Further corruption: The following day, Todd Blanche expanded the settlement agreement to completely bar the IRS from pursuing tax claims against Trump, his family and his businesses. The text of that expansion is attached below the references, as an image. This amounts to quite a windfall. In 2024, The New York Times calculated that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million, and this does not even include the Trump’s crypto currency shenanigans in tax year 2025. (4) What is Trump trying to hide? Would this provision survive in some form if Trump drops his slush fund plan?
Reaction to Settlement: A significant number of republican senators, clearly concerned with the optics, have come out against it. Mitch McConnell – “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” Thom Tillis – “Imagine that, a fund that is set up to compensate people who assaulted Capitol Police officers and other responding agencies. People that had pled guilty to physical acts against the president may actually be able to get compensated. How absurd does that sound coming out of my mouth?” Senate Republicans were scheduled to vote last week on a $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement. After a heated meeting with Todd Blanche, and under threat by Democrats to raise the slush fund issue as an amendment, they hightailed it out of town for the Memorial Day Holiday. (5) The House Judiciary Committee by a 18-17 vote blocked Jamie Raskin’s motion to authorize subpoenas against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others. See Raskin’s 10-point fact sheet which clearly sets out why the slush fund and the bar to tax audits of the Trumps are unconstitutional, illegal and fraud on the court. (6) There have been a number of federal lawsuits filed to block the funding, including by two of the victims of the January 6 rioters. In another suit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a federal judge in Virginia (Brinkema) issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Department of Justice from taking any actions to create, fund, or issue payouts from the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and has set a hearing for June 12. (7) Then, a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges on Wednesday asked the judge in Miami (Judge Williams, who oversaw President Trump’s remarkable lawsuit against the IRS) to reopen the case and consider if the deal was an act of fraud. Judge Williams did reopen the case. She asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud” and whether Trump had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.” (8)
Action: Despite the expressions of outrage, as with all of Trump’s criminal, unconstitutional and dictatorial actions, we predict Congress will not act. Likewise, though the lower federal court judges may do the right thing, the Supreme Court will not. Our current government is not going to take any meaningful action. There will be no impeachment of Trump, Blanche, or the rest of the accomplices, no special prosecutors appointed.
We have to take back the House and the Senate. This illegal settlement of a bogus lawsuit is an issue that everyone who honestly prepares and files their tax return, every law-abiding citizen, every person who values the efforts of law enforcement, and everyone struggling to pay for gas and health insurance should be livid about. And, they seem to be. Write a letter to the editor. Then write another. Talk to your neighbors and any friends who may be on the fence. Knock on doors. Put out signs. If you can, donate to candidates whose campaigns are not financed by corporations.
We need a record. If we do prevail in the mid-terms (and we must), we need to be ready on day one to ensure that those who have orchestrated this travesty are dealt with appropriately. And, that any payouts are clawed back without delay. Predictably, Susan Collins has expressed ‘concerns’ about the slush fund. She “had some questions” on the issue for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at a May 19 hearing on the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. Also predictably, her questions were not particularly tough and there was no follow-up. For the full hearing, See PBS News (9); for the Collins snippet, See CBS News (10). Collins, as chair of the Appropriations Committee, is uniquely positioned to use her powers of oversight to address this outrage. The diverting of tax money to insurrectionists and the Trump family is truly in her wheelhouse. This includes broad constitutional and statutory subpoena authority to compel the production of documents, records, and witness testimony. (11) Other Republicans on Appropriations include Mitch McConnell and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom strongly object to the fund, and John Kennedy from Louisiana, who just lost his primary bid to a Trump endorsee. The majority of the other Republicans have expressed at least some misgivings. So, for Collins, properly fulfilling her responsibilities should not be that difficult. One of her major claims for reelection is how she can wield that power and experience for the benefit of Mainers. Make sure she does her job. And, shine a bright light if she doesn’t.
Background. On December 19, 1776, Thomas Paine, who in 1775 had published the widely read pamphlet Common Sense. started publishing another series of pamphlets on The American Crisis, opening with the famous phrase “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
The outrages being perpetrated by the Trump administration are breathtaking. We read about them every day, as the Overton window (1) moves perceptibly in the direction of dictatorship. The latest outrage deserves special attention: “Under Donald Trump’s NSPM-7 (National Security Presidential Memorandum 7), our right to dissent faces an existential challenge. Now, Trump is asking Congress to fund an NSPM-7 “Joint Mission Center,” explicitly aimed at identifying and targeting Americans for their beliefs. Under NPSM-7, any form of dissent against the Trump regime — attending a rally, organizing locally, even expressing political views online — could be defined as “domestic terrorism.” (2). Clearly, this is an effort to compile a list of people the Trump/MAGA administration would like to persecute, given the chance. Ask Congress not to fund it.
We are not, at least thus far, being asked to defend our democracy with our lives. We cast about for actions we can take that will make a difference, that will be effective in stopping the abuse. It used to be that there was, or at least seemed to be, influence to be had by contacting our Congress critters. In Maine, we have two legislators who are reliably on board with positions that defend democracy (King and Pingree), and two who have proven to be hopelessly out of touch and hardly worth our time to petition (Collins and Golden). Legislators in other states are mostly insensitive to our pleas (because we don’t vote for them). Large, organized rallies like the “No Kings” protests are effective in waking people up, but they are infrequent. Small weekly standouts don’t get the media attention they deserve. Most people in Maine go on with their lives, trying to make their pay cover their increasing costs thanks to Trump’s economic blunders. What can we do in the few remaining summer months?
Action. I propose that each one of us adopts a Personal Resolution in support of Democracy and the Rule of Law. This Resolution will not be as difficult to fulfill as those you probably adopt every New Year (losing weight, getting more exercise etc.). Here is my own list: if you want to respond with yours, I can publish your suggestions.
I will not obey in advance. (3)
I will vote every time, but I will not vote for any Republican until the party turns away from being the MAGA party (4). This includes any local race for a seemingly politically insignificant office. I will encourage others to do likewise: vote at every opportunity but not for any Republican even if they are the only candidate.
I will stop being afraid to speak my mind, even in social situations. (5)
I will attempt to write a letter-to-the-editor at least monthly. (6)
I will attend protests and rallies whenever I can, and make or carry a sign that defends my values. (7)
If we all resolve to defend democracy, we may succeed in preserving freedom for ourselves and our progeny.
(2) quote from Robert Reich, Inequality Media Civic Action, May 26, 2026. There is no specific federal law that defines “domestic terrorism” https://extremism.gwu.edu/need-specific-law-against-domestic-terrorism but, as an add-on to another criminal charge, it can result in penalties ranging from a few years in prison to life imprisonment or the death penalty.
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGA_movement See also Robert Hubbell, Today’s Edition Newsletter, 29 May 2026 “Trump is writing the narrative that we must amplify in the 2026 midterms: Republicans are the party of war, inflation, corruption, and cultish worship of a man who is a convicted felon, civil fraudster, sexual abuser, sociopath, protector of pedophiles, malignant narcissist, and existential threat to democracy.”
Background: On August 7, 2025 Trump issued Executive Order 14330 (EO 14330) to grant owners of self-directed 401K retirement plans access to “investment alternatives” (1). On March 31, 2026 the US Department of Labor published proposed regulations to comply with EO 14330 (2). The “Designated Investment Alternatives” listed in EO 14330 include:
Mortgage-backed securities and derivative contracts, the very instruments that almost collapsed the entire world economy in 2008.
Private loan partnerships which many economists think may bring about the next collapse.
Hedge funds, which have typically charged extremely high fees, are generally illiquid and have historically produced low risk-adjusted returns.
Digital assets including crypto currencies, which most serous economists consider to be a variety of Ponzi scheme and in which the Trump family are major stakeholders.
Commodities, the granddaddy of speculative vehicles.
All the “investments” on this list are speculative in nature (forms of gambling) and not real investments in productive assets. Also, in comparison to publicly listed stocks and bonds, they are opaque: that is, information available to investors to assess relevant risks and rewards is limited, or known only to promoters (3). Often the promoters of investment options available to the owners of “self-directed” 401K retirement plans are also the fiduciaries of those plans. The proposed regulations would relieve those fiduciaries from any liability for offering speculative investments to clients, so long as certain proforma procedures were followed.
Extensive economic research over the past 30 years, including that of 3 Nobel prize economists, has concluded that information asymmetry of this sort typically leads to market failures, as happened in 2008. The impacts of such market failures can be systemic, but more often they leave individual investors holding the bag. Rich investors can usually sustain such losses. Individual pensioners usually cannot, and face retirement in poverty.
A sensible change to the proposed rules would limit speculative 401K investment to “qualified investors”, defined as those with more than $1 million of investible assets. However, EO 14330 instead promotes a “get rich quick” scheme for small investors, putting the imprimatur of the federal government on the kind of con with which Trump has been fleecing his followers for decades – think Trump University, Trump steaks, vodka, sneakers, watches, cell phones, and Trump crypto.
2) Contact Angus King’s office: 207/945-8000 or senator@king.senate.gov to ask if they have commented.
3) Contact the Maine Department of Professional & Financial Regulation – Office of Securities to urge them to comment on the proposed regulations: 207/624-8551
4) Call your union rep to urge them to weigh in.
Urgency: The comment period ends June 1, 2026 at 11:59 PM.
Extra Credit:
(1) Executive Order 14330 of August 7, 2025:Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors
(2) Proposed Rule: Fiduciary Duties in Selecting Designated Investment Alternatives. Posted by the Employee Benefits Security Administration (US Department of Labor) on Mar 31, 2026 https://www.regulations.gov/document/EBSA-2026-0166-0001
Background: The radical right has been making noise about “voter fraud” since Trump came on the scene, with bogus canards about illegal aliens voting, ballots being changed electronically, ballot boxes being stuffed, etc. ad nauseam. In Maine, this sort of nonsense hasn’t had much traction, because we know better. Too many of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, have been involved as volunteer ballot counters, election observers, poll watchers etc. to fall for this crap. Nonetheless, it does no harm to bone up on exactly how our elections are made secure, before the fascist operatives make their move to skew elections in their favor through gerrymandering and voter suppression, such as removal of legitimate voters from the rolls through “interstate cross check” or “address confirmation notice”, spreading the meme that your vote is insignificant, and spreading the lie that elections are not secure.
Action: If you are near Blue Hill, attend this informational presentation next Friday.Have your questions answered and be prepared to debunk the conspiracy theories with facts! Timely info for canvassers!
https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/108824/documents/HHRG-116-JU00-20190129-SD020.pdf You can trust your “friends” at the Heritage Foundation to look into every instance of voter fraud. They have come up with a total of 1,176 instances since 1982, which they say (without evidence) is “just a sample”. There are only 30 “outcome determinative” cases, where the election was overturned when the fraud was adjudicated. These are all local elections, often primaries – and Heritage conveniently doesn’t list the political party involved. The descriptions do make for interesting reading! The same reference cites only TWO instances in Maine, both in 2010. In both cases, the individuals involved had property in two towns and thought they could vote in both towns because they pay taxes to both, and they were voting on local issues on the same ballot as national elections.
Background: The Wicked Witch of Oz had her Flying Monkeys. (1) Trump has his. They include the cast of incompetent sycophants within the Executive Branch who are enabling the deranged Trump agenda to benefit both the Russians, and homegrown grifters including Trump and his family. Note there are Trump Flying Monkeys all across the country, even in Maine, at least one of them running for Governor on the R ticket. Fortunately we are onto them.
How Trump and his Flying Monkeys are benefitting the Russians
For example, here is an article from Thom Hartmann this week, titled Trump Is Making Khrushchev’s “We Will Bury You” Real for Putin. (2) It’s worth reading. In the article, Hartmann describes “a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend.” He goes on to list the highlights of what these Flying Monkeys have been doing, calling their actions “an operational blueprint [that] a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot”.
Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work (RFK Jr)
Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars (Hegseth)
Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned (Rubio, Gabbard)
Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America (Lake)
Defund the agencies Congress created (Vought)
Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously (Wright, Zeldin)
Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks (Bondi/Blanche, Patel)
Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while conditioning the rest of us to accept our neighbors disappearing into massive concentration camps (Miller, Noem/Mullen)
Abandon our allies in Europe by withdrawing our armed forces, starting with Germany right after Trump’s nearly two-hour phone call with Putin (Witkoff)
The above-named Flying Monkeys are only some of the characters mentioned in Hartmann’s article. In pure Flying Monkey fashion, they do what they do in an effort to please Trump and carry out what they think are his “orders”.
The Grifters
Remember the completely unsubstantiated, bogus Republican whining about the “Biden Crime Family”? Well, in November of 2025, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee issued a blockbuster report on Trump family corruption, and unlike the Republican whine, this one is full of details. (3) In January 2026, Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued another report on the same subject (4), along with a Trump digital grift tracker (https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov) that now stands at about 2.5 Bn. Most (but by no means all!) of the exponential increase in what was already a shocking level of grift is due to cryptocurrency speculation. But there are too many other examples of grift to list here.
Actions:
1) Tell Senators Collins and King, and your favored candidates for election to replace Susan Collins and Jared Golden, that you want hearings, subpoenas, and roll-call votes on the troop withdrawal from Germany, the lifting of Russian oil sanctions, the anti-American behavior of every Trump official named above, and the Trump grift machine. 2) Check your voter registration and VOTE in the June primary and the November general election. Volunteer to help your local or county Dems and your favored candidates to Get Out The Vote! 3) Support independent journalism. Did you know there are no embedded journalists in the current Iran war? We have no clue what is really going on unless we are reading foreign and independent sources. 4) Publicize the Trump Digital Grift Tracker! https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov at the top of the page
Background. Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, has shown what true national leadership is. He is relaunching Canada on the world stage, independent of a domineering US, building new trade relations across the Pacific and Atlantic, strengthening defense alliances with Europe and Australia, articulating a vision of shared prosperity for all Canadians rooted in the country’s shared history and acting boldly to advance that vision to reality, including establishment of a national wealth fund. Most importantly, he is bringing the Canadian people along with him through regular public addresses that relate specific government initiatives to a cohesive vision of the county’s future in which all Canadians play a part, and in which all stand to benefit. Tellingly, while rationalizing Canada’s heretofore liberal immigration policies around its economic priorities, the country is encouraging support from Canadian descendants living abroad through liberalized access to dual citizenship by descent, causing many U.S. citizens to take a second look north.
It would be impossible to find a person in the Trump administration with the education, experience and just plain competence of Carney. His credentials include: Economics PhD (Oxford), 13 years at Goldman Sachs including as director of investment banking, 6 years as Governor of the Bank of Canada during the international financial crisis, 7 years Governor of Bank of England during Brexit and Covid, various business and government leadership roles (Brookfield and Bloomburg), Prime Minister of Canada…
So what can we do to be more like Canada? For starters, identify better leaders.
Action. We can attend the upcoming presentations of our candidates for office, both before the primary, and after. We can ask some broad, open ended questions in public, that will require thoughtful and original responses, such as:
(1). What is your vision for the future of the U.S.? What are the big, transformative ideas that you will advocate to make that vision a reality? So far, nothing of this sort has been clearly articulated by the political establishment, with the possible exception of Medicare for all.
(2). What process do you envision for building such a vision and growing the public consensus toward achieving it? What will be your leadership approach?
Expect that the first time they are asked such questions, most candidates will fumble, reverting to talking points with little substance. But if they start to think we care about the future and not just about the issues of the day, they might develop some useful concepts. At least, we will be able to judge whether they have thought deeply about anything but raising campaign funds!
Extra Credit.
(1) Carney’s address to The World Economic Forum at Davos:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=flsgJe8mN-
(2) Access to all of Carney’s public addresses as Prime Minister://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches?page=1(3) Carney’s profile on Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney for further details.
Background: We started these Action Items in December of 2024, when we had hopes that Susan Collins, Angus King and Jared Golden would listen to us. Time has proven that Angus King is largely allied with our values and doesn’t need a lot of convincing, Jared Golden has been a huge disappointment and anyway is a lame duck, and imploring Susan Collins to do the right thing is a useless exercise because she and her staff have proven to be duplicitous. If you have been paying even a modest amount of attention, you know that it is imperative that we overwhelmingly defeat the MAGA/Trump/Authoritarian/Fascist regime this November. Look, Hungary did it. We can too.
Here is a quote from a woman living in Hungary about HOW they did it: well, specifically, how Péter Magyar, their leader, was able to galvanize the population to get to the polls and make the right choice:
He also did something that sounds simple and is extraordinarily hard: he showed up. Over two years, he visited more than 700 settlements, some of them six times. Exhausting just to watch: the energy he put into it was extraordinary. He went to places the opposition had never reached, and talked to people who had never heard an alternative from someone standing in front of them, looking them in the eye. You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview. But presence, over time, creates the conditions where doubt becomes possible. That is slower and less satisfying than a viral moment. It is also what actually works. (From Zsofi in her blog “Life Eventually” quoted by Martin McSweeny in Truth Matters.)
Note her phrase “You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview”. I believe she is saying that all the analysis, all the charts and the experts explaining conclusively how our current regime is corrupt to the point of insanity, will not move the ignorant and gullible out of their stubborn position – they only listen to Fox and read rightwing screeds, if they read anything. What we must do is use the power of our own empathy and conviction to convince the persuadable voters to go to the polls and vote, in overwhelming numbers. We need to quit “doomscrolling” and get out there.
Action: We can all be mini-Magyars! Ask your local Dem leadership to come up with a specific plan for knocking on doors and talking to people about why elections matter and what’s at stake. Volunteer to BE one of the people going door to door, “canvassing”. Initially, you might want to tag along with someone experienced as you develop your skill and confidence. If your town Dems feel a need for some formal training, request it from the Hancock County Dem Committee. (Contact chair@hancockdems.org ). There are people nearby, willing to come to your local meeting to explain “how-to” and to answer questions. It’s not rocket science. You just have to care enough about your country’s future to give it a try.
Contact: your local Dem committee. If you don’t already know your contact person, send an email to jkschelling@gmail.com
Urgency: Absentee Voting starts May 11 (Monday), assuming your town clerk receives ballots by that date. The primary election is June 9. The time to start canvassing is NOW, continuing through November 3. We can do this! In the word of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, “ENGAGE”.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world” (1) “If not me, who? If not now, when?” (2) “Think globally act locally” (3) “All politics is local” (4)
We grew up with these slogans and many of us try to act on them every day of our lives. We volunteer, we vote every time, we are kind to our neighbors and defend them from injustice.
We need to stick to these principles, no matter what the rich and evil people keep throwing at us in their quest for world dominance.
Right now, the most important thing for us to focus on is getting those rich and evil people out of the drivers’ seat. As a practical matter that means defeating every single Republican in every election. Neither party is perfect. Both can be criticized as two halves of a single “money party”. But one of the parties is not only motivated by greed: it’s awash in corruption and immorality and every single current member is complicit. The time has come to “throw out the old rascals and put in a fresh new crop of rascals”, as my dad used to say. Then go about the work of reforming the Democratic Party back to its roots.
Current opportunities:
1. You can now request an absentee ballot for the June 9 primary. They aren’t printed yet, but you can get one as soon as they are available. Go to https://absenteeballotrequest.sos.maine.gov
2. In Hancock County: We will be able to write in someone for probate judge who is not a Republican crook! Our candidate, BRIAN THOMAS, is both a lawyer and an archaeologist. Memorize the name because you will have to write it in. With enough write-in votes in June, he can become the Democratic nominee in the general November election. (5)
3. Your town Democratic Committee may be starting up a canvassing effort to GOTV – Get Out The Vote! Join the effort! If you are hesitant to do the door knocking, you can always be the driver, an essential task in rural towns! Want to make contact with your local Dem Committee? Contact Joyce Schelling at jkschelling@gmail.com
4. Join or start a postcarding campaign locally. For info on how to do that, see Action Item #220. Send an email to abbiemcmillen@mac.com if you need a copy.
5. Take advantage of the candidate forums that are happening (with increasing frequency) to listen, question, and make your selections. They are announced in the local papers and posted at
