Author Archives: Solivita Democrat

Posted Tue, Nov 29, 2016

Many people have questions about the Women’s March on Washington. Please see the information below to help them.

Thank you!
Dr. Maureen McKenna
President
Democratic Women’s Club of Florida

Dear DWCF members,

Hello my name is Lakey Love. I am writing as the volunteer state outreach coordinator for the grassroots Women’s March on Washington DC to be held on January 21, 2017. Inside this email I hope to provide you with all the information you might need for the March. My email address is butterflylake@gmail.com
Emma Collum’s is the state team captain and is the one most directly in contact with national. Her contact information is:

Emma Collum, Esq. Florida Chapter State Administrator
for Women’s March on Washington
845 430 0848 florida@womensmarch.com

The mission statement for the march can be found on the National Facebook Event Page. The Florida team organizing our state is an eclectic and diverse group of 17 individuals of all colors, religions, ages, and orientations who met online when they offered to step up and volunteer when the march was created the day after Donald Trump was announced to be the President Elect.

The Florida team has worked to streamline busing by organizing with Rally Bus. Here is the link to Rally Bus’s page for the march where you can purchase tickets for a bus departing near you.

The organization of the march has taken place completely at a grassroots level. Each state is organizing and within each state there are local districts. The Florida Facebook Event Page has information for all 17 districts of Florida. Contact information for the 17 team captains, including emails and names can be found HERE.

If you would like to make a donation or support someone who would like to attend but cannot attend for financial reasons all donations can be made either 1) by directly supporting an individual through purchasing a Rally Bus ticket in their name online, 2) individual donations through your local chapter or 3) by donating to the Florida Team’s fundraising campaign. All funds raised by the Florida Team’s campaign are being used to sponsor individuals who would not otherwise be able to attend because of financial hardship. The link to donate can be found HERE.

Please also follow THIS LINK to see the most recent statement on PERMITTING for the event.

For information and answers on the Florida specific Frequently Asked Questions sheet please follow this LINK.

My number is 850-345-0018. Please call anytime. I look forward to talking to you soon.

Lakey Love
Tallahassee/Panhandle Team Captain
Women’s March on Washington 2017
850-345-0018
@mariposalake

At the urging of Poinciana community leaders and Polk County Democrats,
Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards established an early
voting location open in Poinciana.

Previously, residents residing on the Polk County side of Poinciana were compelled to
drive to Haines City to vote early, while the Osceola early voters could cast their
ballots at the Osceola Library branch right in Poinciana. This was a big
factor in the Osceola side out-voting the Polk side by a 40% to 15% margin in the 2014
elections.

The Poinciana Community Center at 395 Marigold Ave. will now be the site of early voting
for Solivita and all Polk County residents.

Contributing Editor: Ronald Hill

Government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Government is Good: An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution is a web project of Douglas J. Amy, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. The project is a response to the increasingly extreme anti-government movement in the USA and its distorted depiction of government.

According to Professor Amy, “right-wing forces in this country have engaged in a relentless and irresponsible campaign of vicious government bashing for decades. Conservatives and libertarians have demonized government, attacked basic safety net programs like Medicare, and undermined vital regulations that protect consumers, investors, workers, and the environment. We need to recognize that despite its problems, government plays an essential role in promoting the good life for all Americans. Most government programs are working well and are actually improving the lives of Americans in innumerable ways. When we recklessly reduce and underfund this institution, we are hampering our ability to improve people’s lives and to effectively address our pressing social, economic, and environmental problems.”

This Project takes on this anti-government movement and shows that most of its criticisms of this institution are highly exaggerated, misleading, or just plain wrong. Organized into three sections, the project explains:

• The Value of Government. How government acts as a force for good in society.
• The War on Government chronicles the unrelenting assault on government being waged by conservative forces in this country; and
• How to Revitalize Democracy and Government describes the flaws in government that need to be addressed if we are to restore Americans’ faith in this institution.

For more information on this important Project, visit the web-site at governmentisgood.com

On December 6, 1865, the U.S. ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

On December 6, 2015, President Obama reflected on its importance, and the history of our progress — hard-fought, hard-won, incomplete, but always possible.

As many made clear at the time of its ratification, the 13th Amendment was not a final step, but rather the first step in making real the promise that all men are created equal. Read the letter that Annie Davis, an enslaved woman living in Maryland, wrote to President Lincoln asking if she was free after he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He never replied, but the answer was no. It would take an amendment to Maryland’s constitution — and the 13th Amendment — to ensure that she and all enslaved people in the U.S. were free in the eyes of the law.

Click Image to Enlarge

• Florida’s Republican lawmakers continue to waste thousands of taxpayers’ dollars in self-serving efforts to protect their own jobs through repeated attempts to redraw unlawful congressional districts.
• Their most recent attempt cost taxpayers $651,435 in an unnecessary special legislative session in June.
• One would think that even budget-conscious Republican voters would denounce their futile attempts to redraw congressional maps at taxpayer expense.
• It appears that non-partisan groups are more attuned to taxpayers than the legislators who control the purse strings.
• Non-partisan groups like The League of Women Voters have challenged the duplicity of such blatant redistricting.
• Join voting rights groups in contacting your legislators. Tell them to stop wasting money on redistricting to protect their own jobs, and focus on protecting Floridians:

Kelli Stargell (R) State Senate (850) 487-5015
John Wood (R) State House Representative (850) 717-5041
Mike LaRosa (R) State House Representative (850) 717-5042

To read more on the taxpayer waste, click here.

1. Conservatives opposed the Founding Fathers, the American Revolution and a lot of other righteous stuff as well.
By definition a conservative is one who wishes to preserve and/or restore traditional values and institutions, i.e. to “conserve” the established order. No surprise then that 18th century American conservatives wanted no part of breaking away from the British Empire and the comforting bonds of monarchical government. Those anti-revolutionary conservatives were called Tories, the name still used for the conservative party in England. The Founding Fathers? As radically left-wing as they came in the 1770s. The Boston Tea Party? The “Occupy Wall Street” of its day.

Some of the other “traditional” values supported by conservatives over the course of American history have included slavery (remember that the Republican Party was on the liberal fringe in 1860), religious persecution, the subjugation of women and minorities, obstacles to immigration, voter suppression, prohibition and segregation. Conservatives started off on the wrong side of American history, and that’s where they’ve been ever since.

2. The United States is not a Christian nation, and the Bible is not the cornerstone of our law.
Don’t take my word for it. Let these Founding Fathers speak for themselves:
John Adams: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” (Treaty of Tripoli, 1797)

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.” (Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814)

James Madison: “The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State.” (Writings, 8:432, 1819)

George Washington: “If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.” (Letter to the United Baptist Chamber of Virginia, May 1789)

3. Long before the United States even existed, it was drawing “problem” immigrants.
After being pretty much run out of England as anti-government radicals, the religious dissidents we know today as the Pilgrims settled in Leiden, Holland, where they set about making themselves that nation’s immigrant problem. Sticking to themselves and refusing to “blend in” with their new homeland, the Pilgrims grew alarmed by the unpalatable ideas to which their children were being exposed, such as religious tolerance (good for the Pilgrims, bad for everyone else) and national service (like all Dutch residents, the Pilgrims were eligible for the draft). When their children began picking up the Dutch language, the Pilgrims had had enough. By then the Dutch had, too. Next stop: Plymouth Rock.

4. Roe v. Wade was a bipartisan decision made by a predominantly Republican-appointed Supreme Court.
The landmark 1973 ruling that conservatives love to hate, was decided on a 7-2 vote that broke down like this:

Majority (for Roe): Chief Justice Warren Burger (conservative, appointed by Nixon), William O. Douglas (liberal, appointed by FDR), William J. Brennan (liberal, appointed by Eisenhower), Potter Stewart (moderate, appointed by Eisenhower), Thurgood Marshall (liberal, appointed by LBJ), Harry Blackmun (author of the majority opinion and a conservative who eventually turned liberal, appointed by Nixon), Lewis Powell (moderate, appointed by Nixon). Summary: 3 liberals, 2 conservatives, 2 moderates.

Dissenting (for Wade): Byron White (generally liberal/sometimes conservative, appointed by JFK), William Rehnquist (conservative, appointed by Nixon). Summary: 1 liberal, 1 conservative.

By ideological orientation, it was an across-the-board decision for Roe: conservatives 2-1, liberals 3-1, moderates 2-0; by party of presidential appointment: Republicans 5-1, Democrats 2-1. No one can rightly say that this was a leftist court forcing its liberal beliefs on America.

5. Reagan raised federal taxes eleven times.

Okay, Ronald Reagan cut tax rates more than any other president – with a big asterisk. Sure, the top rate was reduced from 70% in 1980 all the way down to 28% in 1988, but while Republicans typically point to Reagan’s tax-cutting as the right approach to improving the economy, Reagan himself realized the resulting national debt from his revenue slashing was untenable, so he quietly raised other taxes on income – primarily Social Security and payroll taxes – no less than eleven times. Most of Reagan’s highly publicized tax cuts went to the usual handout-takers in the top income brackets, while his stealth tax increases had their biggest impact on the middle class. These increases were well hidden inside such innocuous-sounding packages as the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987. Leave it to a seasoned actor to pull off such a masterful charade.

6. Barry Goldwater was pro-choice, supported gay rights, deeply despised the Religious Right, and – gasp! – liked Hillary Clinton.

It’s a measure of just how much farther right contemporary conservatism has shifted in just a generation or two that Barry “Mr. Conservative” Goldwater, the Republican standard-bearer in 1964, couldn’t buy a ticket into a GOP convention in 2014.

There’s no debating Goldwater’s deeply conservative bona fides, but check these pronouncements from the man himself:

“I am a conservative Republican, but I believe in democracy and the separation of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don’t hurt anyone else in the process.” (Interview, Washington Post, July 28, 1994)

“A woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right.” (Interview, Los Angeles Times, 1994)

“The big thing is to make this country… quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay. You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. … They’re American citizens.” (Interview, Washington Post, July 28, 1994)

“Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know; I’ve tried to deal with them. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’” (Congressional Record, September 16, 1981)

7. The first president to propose national health insurance was a Republican.
He was also a trust-busting, pro-labor, Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist. Is there any wonder why Theodore Roosevelt, who first proposed a system of national health insurance during his unsuccessful Progressive Party campaign to retake the White House from William Howard Taft in 1912, gets scarce mention at Republican National Conventions these days?

Excerpted from the Daily Kos.

FL Gov. Rick Scott

 Welcome to the Red State HIV Epidemic
Excerpt from “Republican governors face tough decisions as the disease spreads in middle America.” By ADAM WREN 2015

• It wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not in Austin, a one-doctor-and-an-ice-cream-shop town of 4,200 in southeastern Indiana, nestled off Interstate 65 on the road from Indianapolis to Louisville, where dusty storefronts sit vacant and many residents, lacking cars, walk to the local market. But it did.

• “This is an HIV outbreak in a rural setting that is linked to an injection drug use,” says Jennifer Walthall, Indiana’s deputy state health commissioner. “That hasn’t been seen in the U.S. to date.”

• As she travels the town, Brittany Combs, Scott County’s plainspoken public health nurse peers into the faces of the new rural red-state HIV epidemic: They are predominantly white, economically disadvantaged, and in their 30s. (Cases have been reported in adults as young as 18 and as old as 64, according to the state’s Joint Information Center).

• And they are often related: For some families here, shooting up Opana, a legal painkiller, has become something of an intergenerational pastime. “Sometimes two, or even three generations will all be IV drug users,” Combs says. “That’s one of the ways it spread so quickly: [People will say] ‘I only share [needles] with my family.’ They trusted them and shared needles with them. It’s pretty shocking.”

• This year, state legislators in Florida and Texas introduced pilot programs for needle exchange bills. In Florida, a pilot needle exchange bill that would be run by the University of Miami appears to be stalled as lawmakers enter a special budget session, and such legislation has never made it to the governor. The Miami area has seen some of the nation’s highest rates of new HIV infections in recent years, according to the CDC. Asked about Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s position on needle exchanges, a spokesperson said the governor would review any legislation that comes to his desk.

• “Over the last several years, people started injecting these painkillers and increasingly switching to heroin,” says Daniel Raymond, policy director for the Harm Reduction Coalition, which supports needle exchanges. “So a lot of red and purple states are now confronting rising hepatitis C rates and potential HIV outbreaks like the one in Scott County.”

“That will create an awareness that the HIV epidemic is not over.”

Editor’s Note: Many of these newly infected are part of the working poor in service and retail industries with no access to affordable health care.

Read more at Politico.

Solivita’s  Marti Kara Named Polk County Democratic Woman of the Year!

Marti Kara received recognition as the 2015 Marlene Duffy Young-Polk County Democratic Woman of the Year at the                                             Democratic Gala March 28th in Winter Haven.

Marti was president of the Solivita Democratic Club for the past three years, which
boasts the largest club membership in the county. She was Chair of the Polk Co.
Democrats’ Gala for the past two years. This year’s event set the attendance record
and was a financial success for the Polk DEC. She also chairs the DEC Membership and
Precinct Committee.

David Jones was awarded the 20015 Lawton Chiles-Polk County Democratic Man of the Year Award. David is extremely active in the Rainbow Ridge LGBTA Causus, both on the county and state level. He is a member of the Lake Wales Democratic Club and a strong advocate for equal rights for all individuals.

Solivita Democratic Club President Ellis Moose III, who is also chair of the Polk County Democratic Executive Committee, stood up for all Democrats at a recent meeting of the Tiger Bay Club.

Moose told the group that Florida Democrats concentrated too much money and time to the governor’s race and left Democratic candidates in the state without enough support to win.

“There was way too much time and money on the governor’s race and not enough on others,” he said.

Moose shared the stage with the chairman of the Polk County Republican Executive Committee, Jim Guth. The pair had been asked by the group to assess the 2014 elections in the state.

Interestingly, both Moose and Guth are residents of Solivita.

A good-sized contingent of Democrats attended the meeting to support Moose including several members of the Solivita Democratic Club.

The Polk County Democratic Executive Committee will open a year-round office in Haines City beginning February 3, 2015. The office will be staffed by volunteers five days a week at the OK Arcade, 651 E. Main St., Suite 10.

“Polk County Democrats have traditionally opened offices across the county only during campaign periods,” said Ellis Moose III, chair of the Polk County DEC. “This year, with the growing numbers of Democrats in the county and the upcoming switch of Haines City and much of eastern Polk County to Congressional District 10 from District 9, we felt a permanent location in Haines City would help us get out the vote in 2016.”

Ruth Ann Eaddy, Democratic State Committee Woman who will manage the office, said “We will have an emphasis on helping provide photo ID cards to citizens who have been disenfranchised by the new laws.”

The new Democratic office will be open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2p.m. Staffers will provide voter registration information, volunteer services and campaign materials to support Polk County Democratic candidates.

An open house and reception will be held in the new offices later in February.