Author: North Coast BBQ

Submitted By: rkinor@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

Manzanita will keep monthly water billing. The story behind the election results however  is the 204 voters who registered their disapproval of this Council decision.
The Referendum provided an opportunity to lay open a process marked with contradictory explanations by City officials, violation of an existing City Ordinance and real experience with the financial impact of these changes on household budgets that were at odds with promises by the City.
Were those 265 voters who voted to keep monthly billings willing to overlook the process and explanations really convinced that this decision was in the best interests of residents?  I can not answer that question. 
What I do know is that when you have a Councilor admit that he could not find citizens willing to talk with him about their concerns on this matter, you have a problem. Those 204 voters are not a noisy minority but rather citizens who have witnessed years of Councils who believe unanimous decisions on all city business is the sign of a healthy governing process, avoid whenever possible appointment of citizens to Committees who may ask unwanted questions and ignore and label those citizens who dare challenge the status quo.
Maybe what those 204 voices were saying to you Councilor is entertain some skepticism on what you are being told by staff and your consultants, be confident enough in your policy positions that you can appoint citizens to committees that may have opinions that differ from you and be willing to ask more questions before you make a decision.
Finally, thank you to all who voted. Think about that, you got the opportunity to directly have a say in an important community decision.
Randy Kugler

Submitted By: dixiegainer@icloud.com – Click to email about this post

In the analogy about ducks and rabbits, I see there is a second part: the duck turned into an eagle, but unfortunately the rabbits remained rabbits. This was caused by the rabbits making a poor choice as to where to get their information. It is understandable in a way, as the media the rabbits watched flashed subliminal carrot images ever three of four seconds onto the screen. Let us all pray for the rabbits, so that they may receive better information in the future.
Or perhaps get into the Oregon deflection program for carrot addiction treatment.

Submitted By: dwieb1@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

Should there be any confusion about my recent posts, I’d like to offer an analogy:

Suppose there’s a duck and a great many wabbits. Some wabbits take a liking to the duck and how it quacks. Others are repelled by the quacking and think those who like the duck are confused or crazy. Nature guides complicate the matter by referring to the duck as just another wabbit, and this drives the others nuts. Yet the nature guides keep doing this even after two game wardens identify the quacker as a duck.

Here’s my point: there is nothing inherently evil or stupid about the wabbits who like the duck, and the others might stop twisting their tails in a bunch if the guides could bring themselves to call it a duck.

To push this tortured analogy out a bit further, if the wabbits decide to put the duck in charge it will just fly off and feather it’s own nest.

-Dave

Submitted By: bill.brayman@icloud.com – Click to email about this post

In Europe not many people would vote for Trump, mostly only authoritarian countries. And only one country even gives him a majority. If you watch Fox News this may come as a surprise, to put it politely.

Submitted By: babbles@nehalemtel.net – Click to email about this post

To the BBQ readership,

this message came to my email this morning from “Project 2025 Take-Down.”

IF YOU HAVE NOT YET VOTED, PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU VOTE.

TRUMP’S HATE-FILLED RALLIES ARE PROJECT 2025 IN A NUTSHELL

The racist, misogynistic, anti-Black, anti-trans rhetoric will be the new normal if Trump Wins.

by TIFFANY TORRES WILLIAMS
NOV 4

I spent an entire dark and lonely weekend in April dedicated to nothing but reading Project 2025. I joke, but it’s not really a joke, that with the help of anti-anxiety meds and lots of long walks, I made it through the dystopian document.

Project 2025 is the conservative playbook dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican president. Though Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, it mentions him by name more than 240 times and references his administration more than 300. More than half of Trump’s allies, advisors, and administrators are among its 307 authors.

There is no way around it: Project 2025 is Trump’s plan for presidency if he prevails in tomorrow.

My methodology in reading and researching Project 2025 was simple: I used a notebook. Each page had a title: Women. Families. Workers. Unions. LGBTQ+. Racial Minorities. Educators. Academics. Climate. Every time I would come across one of those categories in the 920-page document, I wrote a quick summary of what it said and the page number where I could find it later to do more research.

I’m not saying all that work was for nigh, but I AM saying Donald Trump’s ties to Project 2025 are obvious — taking center stage at his rallies. Take his Madison Square Garden rally, where speakers disparaged everyone from women to trans Americans to racial minorities.

Trump and his surrogates are not just saying the quiet part out loud. They’re screaming it. Into microphones.
Here’s a sample of groups and American ideals Trump and his speakers are taking aim at that are also targeted in Project 2025:

IMMIGRANTS
Perhaps the most obvious link between Trump and Project 2025 (and Hitler) came from speaker Stephen Miller, who said “America is for Americans and Americans only”. Compare that to remarks made at a 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, when a speaker promised to “restore America to the true Americans”.

Miller, who runs America First Legal, contributed to the section of Project 2025 that speaks of weakening the system of checks and balances and rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants.

Trump’s opening act at Madison Square Garden was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who continued to repeat Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets.” Schools in Springfield faced more than 30 bomb threats in the aftermath of Trump’s lie.

At every rally he’s hosted, Trump has bragged about “mass deportations at a level never before seen” and Project 2025 validates that terrifying future if he’s elected.
According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “Project 2025 calls for allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use ‘expedited removal’ — a process normally only used near the border, and one that raises significant concerns about due process — against immigrants found anywhere within the country. It would enable raids in sensitive zones like schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.”

Project 2025 dreams of militarizing our border, expanding immigration detention centers, criminalizing sanctuary cities, eliminating protection for dreamers or children whose parents crossed the border illegally who have been living in immigration limbo all of their lives, and forcing local law enforcement to work with federal officials to identify and deport people.

BLACK AMERICANS
Hinchcliffe also took aim at Black Americans, pointing to an audience member whom Hinchcliffe identified as Black and making fun of his hat. Then he pivoted, calling the man “one of [his] buddies. “We carved watermelon together,” he said, referencing a longstanding trope about the food Black Americans supposedly eat.

Project 2025 threatens civil rights gains for Black Americans. It will abolish affirmative action, weaken anti-discrimination laws, and dismantle the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It would remove health care protections, threatening to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and do away with social programs that benefit Black Americans and increase policing and remove civil protections. Black Americans are already disproportionately incarcerated. It even targets education that informs about the plight of slaves and the historical affect of racism.

LGBTQ+ Rights
During Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, Tucker Carlson took aim at trans people, claiming that the ability to transition genders was a “lie” perpetuated by Democrats.

Republicans have spent more money attacking trans Americans this election cycle than any other group, which is ironic considering that trans people make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. Trump’s campaign alone has spent more than $65 million on anti-trans ads. Not the economy. Not housing. Not lowering crime. Most of the ads end with saying, “Kamala is for they/them, but Trump is for you.”

He’s singling trans people out and endangering them. His presidency will be one where trans people cease to exist peacefully in all corners of the U.S. He is leveraging people’s hate to get more votes.

But if Trump gets his way, LGBTQ+ people will be threatened by more than Trump’s harmful rhetoric.

It would destroy non-traditional families like single-parent or same-sex households and prioritize families “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children.” It takes aim at federal policies that promote LGBTQ equality or that assist single parents. It wants to gut hard-fought protections for gay couples and eliminate the anti-discrimination laws that allow them to live in peace.

Trans people would be kicked out of the military, and calls trans human beings “ideology.” It also wants to criminalize pornography, and the document states that the federal government will define that however it wants. This is devastating not only for LGBTQ+ Americans, but also for teachers, librarians, school administrators, authors, artists, publishers, and parents.

The Media
Trump used a rally in Pennsylvania to wish it was members of the media who were shot instead of him.

“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said, adding the press were “seriously corrupt people.”

Trump has always taken aim at reporters. Remember this moment this moment from a 2016 rally when he mocked a disabled reporter?

If members of the press weren’t in danger before, they certainly will be if Trump wins on Tuesday. Project 2025 argues that a new Trump Department of Justice should surveil journalists’ phones and emails to keep government officials from leaking information to the press. This happened during the last Trump administration when DOJ officials secretly seized the phone and email records of multiple journalists as they attempted to discredit the Russia investigation. Project 2025 wants the practice, which was banned under the Biden administration, to be even more vigorous the next time around.
The document even muses that reporters shouldn’t be allowed in the White House, complaining about the longstanding relationship between the president and the fourth branch.
“No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”
Project 2025 also calls for defunding public broadcasting and ending publicly supported educational media like Sesame Street.

WOMEN
Perhaps some of the most vile rhetoric at Trump’s rallies have been aimed at Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris calling her “the devil,” “the anti-Christ,” and claiming the person vying to become the first female president had begun her career as a prostitute.

But Trump’s threats have been toward women at-large in equal measure. He has said he will “protect women whether they like it or not.” I wrote for the Huffington Post about how the word “protector” is often used in evangelical culture to soften the patriarchal oppression that exists there.

As if we would EVER believe that the predator who infamously boasted to Billy Bush on “Access Hollywood” about forcefully groping and kissing unwilling women will protect us. Trump bragged to Howard Stern about strolling into Miss Teen USA dressing rooms to get a glimpse of the half-naked underage contestants. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and another jury heard the testimony of Stormy Daniels, who said Trump cheated on his wife, Melania Trump, with her before covering up their affair with a $130,000 hush money payment.

We’ve seen enough of Trump’s history to know that he is no protector. And if it comes to pass, Project 2025 will mimic the sexism and discrimination that have marked Trump’s relationships with women.

Project 2025 will remove anti-discrimination laws that have helped women advance in the workplace. In fact, the document frequently demonstrates nostalgia for the halcyon days when women were barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen before the existence of no-fault divorce.

More dangerous still, the document states that Trump should force the FDA to declare abortion pills are unsafe. Medication abortion has been used safely for two decades and have been legal throughout Republican and Democratic presidencies. Medication abortion is the only way for many rural Americans to end a pregnancy.

Project 2025 will abolish abortion in the military for any reason, meaning women who are raped by male service members will have to give birth to their rapists’ babies.
Reproductive rights are under attack throughout Project 2025, which promises on page 6 that “the Dobbs decision was just the beginning.” So much for letting the states decide.

Fortunately, women are responding with the largest gender gap in voting history (or at least the last 100 years since women have had the right to vote). If recent polling in Iowa showing Harris with a 3-point lead over Trump is any indication, women will save this country from the devastation Project 2025 will cause.

The polling in Iowa looks good, but we don’t have a single laurel to rest on. This election is close enough to be decided by a few hundred votes. If you know someone in a swing state who is still undecided, please call them and warn them about the danger Project 2025 is to all of us.

Let’s wake up to a new dawn of U.S. democracy, one where we know that we brushed up against authoritarianism, and we prevailed.

Onward, Democracy Defenders!

Submitted By: dwieb1@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

I value fairness above most things so in my effort to find out how much mainstream media knew, but didn’t report to us, I found an interesting counter-point on fascism as it pertains to the GOP candidate for president.

www.newsweek.com/its-time-stop-calling-donald-trump-fascist-opinion-1975888

The value in recognizing his rhetoric as fascist is in understanding what he and many of his activist supporters are saying, rather than just passing it off as crazy talk. That perception has driven us nuts questioning the sanity of his broad support. That’s clearly wrong and divides us.

So while this is an excellent opinion piece and nails his character, I think it’s a distinction without a difference.

-Dave

Submitted By: babbles@nehalemtel.net – Click to email about this post

this “Letter from an American” needs no introduction.

November 3, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
NOV 4

I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.

If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives.

Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national.

America would become a slaveholding nation.

Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal.

South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them.

But that’s not how it played out.

As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.

The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans.

But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.

The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.

In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.

By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence.

In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.

Now it is our turn.

In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power.

And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong.

On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.

I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom.

As always, the outcome is in our hands.

“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”

Submitted By: NTCWA1933@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

Join us for on Tuesday Nov. 5, 12 – 2:00 at the Pine Grove Community House in Manzanita. Meetings are open to the public. Or come for the program at 1:00: Jeff Warren will discuss a wide range of honey topics, including what to look for in labeling, fake honey, and more. We’ll taste different honeys. As it’s election day, we’ll vote on our favorite honey! www.ntcwa1933.org/ ntcwa1933@gmail.com

Submitted By: mkuestner10@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

“Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself”

Tillamook County continues to grapple with efforts to pressure our libraries, schools, our elected leaders and our neighbors into banning books and limiting discourse in our schools and public institutions.

A recent letter this time, focused on the LGBTQIA+/Gay Agenda as harmful to our youth and our society, and exhorted local leaders to respond.

“Gay Agenda” was coined by right-wing Christian groups in the United States in the 1990s. The term represents a pejorative effort to encourage harmful legislation and hateful speech towards minority groups. It is a form of Christian bigotry.

Our LGBTQIA+ youth are already under siege in this country. It is estimated that 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQIA+; many are on the streets having been thrown out of their homes by parents due to their queer identification.

If there is an actual “Gay Agenda”, it is for our Gay friends and neighbors to be allowed to stay alive without persecution.

I urge Tillamook County officials throughout all levels of our institutions to not only encourage acceptance of all of our residents, but to go further and to advocate for all of us, regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation. All of our stories are worth hearing.

Mark Kuestner