FINAL EDITION - La Crosse for Bernie News #52

It’s been a little more than a year since we started reporting on La Crosse area efforts to elect Bernie Sanders as the Democratic party nominee for president. What a long strange trip it’s been, to quote the Grateful Dead.

This is our last issue of La Crosse 4 Bernie News. Last Tuesday, about thirteen per cent of eligible voters turned out to give pro-TPP corporatist Ron Kind another term in Congress. Challenger, Myron  Buchholz received about 18.7 per cent of the vote total (unofficially fewer than 41,000 votes total).

We will try to keep information about local, regional, state, and national progressive events going at couleeprogressives.org. If you would like to blog there, please email Cathy.

In the meantime, here are some events coming up that you may be interested in:
Tonight the La Crosse County Democratic Party is meeting at their HQ (117 Fifth Avenue South).  Socializing begins at 6:30 and at 7 p.m. Ismael Ozanne, District Attorney of Dane County, will speak on recent Federal Court decisions on redistricting.

Wednesday, August 17 – CNN Town Hall with GREEN PARTY candidate, Jill Stein. Streaming live on CNN and online (CNNgo). Some communities are hosting watch parties – is there one in La Crosse? I don’t know.

Now that they’ve done away with Bernie, the corporate media is turning on Dr. Jill Stein, according to this Counterpunch article. “Jill Stein, the Green Party’s nominee for president, has been the sudden target of attacks from all corners of online media since the official end of Bernie Sanders’ campaign at the Democratic National Convention. Outlets like the Washington Post, New York Magazine and Gizmodo have assaulted Stein by using out-of-context quotes to assail her, wrongly, for being anti-vaccination and anti-WiFi, which is a code for being ‘anti-science.’ This allows us a unique opportunity to confirm the structural role of the media as hypothesized by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent: that the media is a propaganda arm for the elite and powerful, and is used to condition us to accept the bounds of socio-political discourse as set by the ruling class.”

Don’t expect to see any third party candidates in the “debates” either, since the Dem/Rep parties control who can get in.

Wednesday, August 24 – Bernie Sanders live stream – OUR REVOLUTION kick off. The Vernon County Dems are hosting a watch party.

Friday, August 26 – La Crosse City Clerk will offer TRAINING FOR SPECIAL (VOTER) REGISTRATION DEPUTIES at 10 a.m. in the 3rd floor conference room at City Hall.  There will be more trainings in early fall, but this is the only one set so far. Please RSVP to lehrket@cityoflacrosse.org or call 608 789-7556 with questions.

The League of Women Voters is seeking SRDs to help register students during move-in week at UWL If you are an SRD and available, please email Mary.

• Friday, September 2, from 11-3 at Cartwright Port-O-Call
• Saturday, September 3, from 11-3 at Cartwright Port-O-Call
• Sunday, September 4, from 11:30 – 1:30 at Whitney
• Monday, September 5, from 11:30 – 1:30 at Whitney

Saturday, September 17 – Fighting Bob Fest in Madison

Glen Greenwald has a great article about how McCarthyism is coming back in spades. A very thorough and thoroughly disgusting description of how the Democrats are operating. “A frequent weapon for Democrats in the 2016 election is to publicly malign those they regard as critics and adversaries as Russia sympathizers, Putin stooges, or outright agents of the Kremlin. … But this smear tactic extends far beyond Trump. It is now used to vilify anyone perceived to be an impediment to Clinton’s victory. When WikiLeaks published thousands of DNC emails shortly before the Democratic Convention, which ultimately forced the resignation of four top officials, it was instantly asserted that it was The Russians who gave them those emails (even though The Washington Post cited an intelligence official as saying that “the intelligence community . . . has not reached a conclusion about who passed the emails to WikiLeaks” … On Saturday, it was Jill Stein’s turn in the Kremlin seat. As the Green Party candidate rises in the polls, it was only a matter of time before Democrats turned their Russia-smearing eyes toward her.”

Here’s a new article that describes what really happened to some Bernie Sanders delegates at the convention and, more importantly, why they felt that booing and “misbehaving” were the only options left for them. This is a very detailed article about why some delegates took the steps they did – not following sit-down-shut-up orders from the top when the promised contested convention did not happen. “So here we were going into the convention with nothing to fight for. In fact, the campaign had done nothing to prepare us for any role at the convention at all. There was one staffer assigned to our delegation, and all he did was pester us to stay at the $700-a-night hotel, a severe hardship for Sanders delegates. We were told we had to stay there, so Sanders could confer with us each morning and each night. None of that happened. There was one conference call before the convention. However, it was more to explain Sanders’ endorsement and the future of the political revolution. And no one from the campaign met with us the first morning, either.”

Thomas Frank says, with Trump fizzling, kiss progressivism in the White House good-bye. “My leftist friends persuaded themselves that this stuff didn’t really matter, that Clinton’s many concessions to Sanders’ supporters were permanent concessions. But with the convention over and the struggle with Sanders behind her, headlines show Clinton triangulating to the right, scooping up the dollars and the endorsement, and the elites shaken loose in the great Republican wreck.”