PRC, once again gets it wrong, but this time you can do something about it. Also some shocking historic numbers that make Trump’s “onslaught” look pretty manageable. Also a short report on our canvassing for Abbas Saturday.

Yesterday’s Post:  A Complete Voter Guide for All State and Local Elections, including judges, State and Local Amendments.  Click here.

Update on Canvassing for Abbas Akhil.  Roxanne and I joined 14 other canvassers and likely we hit over 400 doors…. We were lucky enough to get 3 GOP voters to commit to voting for Abbas and several Decline to State. Several more Dems who hadn’t really thought about voting, also seemed committed to voting for Abbas.  That is what canvassing is all about. And in races that can be decided by 20-40 votes, you personally can be the difference. Oddly, while waiting in line to get coffee at Ohori before venturing south, we struck up a conversation with a woman and we told her we were going canvassing. Her reaction was priceless:  “Oh my, aren’t you scared?”  We told her quite the contrary. We’ve done a ton of canvassing and have had almost 100% pleasant and appreciative exchanges even with voters who disagree with us. I must admit, my legs are begging me to stay home today. But I’ll be heading south again to canvass from 1-4pm and there is room in my car and Roxanne is staying home, so there is room in my car..  paul@retakeourdemocracy.org.

It is not too late to help out with the canvassing for Abbas. We will meet at Abbas’ home, 1727 Soplo Rd, SE a few minutes before 1pm and then canvass until 4pm before we  head to the Tractor Brewery for a beer.  And we’ll back next weekend, too, both Sat (12-3) and Sunday (1-4).  If you want to join us, email me at paul@retakeourdemocracy.org.

Can’t Canvass, But Want to Call?  We’ve got just the thing for you: phone banking to get out the vote for Abbas.  Click here to get to the sign in. You’ll need a phone, a computer, and a bit of time. If you want to do this, you’ll also need to write to me to get a script and some support mats.  email me at paul@retakeourdemocracy.org. I’ll be out of the loop much of today, off canvassing.

Sunday, Oct 28, 10 am – 3 pm: “The Heart of the Community Speaks“ — a free workshop to help you prepare to participate in the Nov 7 Public Hearing on the chromium plume (see below). Workshop to be held at the Northern Rio Grande Heritage Center in Alcalde. I participated last Sunday in this training and it was excellent. I’ll be canvassing this Sunday, so I’ll miss this, but plan to testify at the hearing on the 7th. We will report more on this incredibly important hearing next week.  For more information on the plume, Retake did a post exclusively devoted to the history and scope of the plume, click here.

Van Going to Las Lunas next Wednesday through Friday for Steve Fischmann (PRC Dist 5). Seats Available.  During the primaries, Retake recruited Leah Cantor to canvass for Janine Yazzie. We reported on her experience, as she talked so enthusiastically about how much she loved the experience and how impactful she felt it had been for voters. Well, Leah is back at it and will be heading down to Las Lunas on Wednesday Thursday and Friday around 10 am and she’ll be out knocking doors till about 6 pm. She is working directly with the Fischmann campaign so she would be able to get you set up with training, turf and script. She has room for 4 other people in my car. Let’s fill that van. If you are interested in joining Leah, just email me at paul@retakeourdemocracy.org. There are now just two seats open. I took one. Join me.

The graphic above left illustrates how important it is to elect Fischmann. Just Wednesday, the PRC voted once again 3-2 to do the wrong thing, to force a very costly solar installation to be developed by El Paso Electric. The installation would produce solar that would cost consumers $78.40 MWh or roughly four times what that same energy would cost by using Community Solar and buying the solar from the grid. The PRC as presently comprised votes 3-2 for everything bad for the   planet and us and everything that is good for PNM. Time for a change. A Fischmann win would flip the PRC to 3-2  environmentalists and this nonsense will stop. Let’s do it. Let’s join Leah.. It is only a 90 minutes to Las Lunas.

Trump and His Lies About the Refugees. In Thursday’s blog, I inserted a note about Trumped up hysteria about the refugees heading toward the US, but I did so hours after the blog was published….so most of you won’t have seen it.  It relates to the refugee caravan and is something you might want to keep in your toolkit if / when you are talking with more conservative folks. We need to strongly oppose Trump and his characterization of reality and no better place to begin than here. I have added an excerpt from The Hill that amplifies my point.

Trump is calling the immigrant caravan “an onslaught” because 7500 people are so desperate to escape their homeland terror that they are willing to walk over 1000 miles in the blistering heat knowing there is only a very small chance they will get into the US.  Another way to look at this is that in 2016, Germany took 10 times this many refugees into its country EVERY MONTH OF THE YEAR.  And another way to look at it might be: we capped refugees at 40,000 for this year and have only taken in 20,000, so we have plenty of space.  Poor, desperate people are not ‘really bad people,’ they are people who are out of options and looking to us for help. Apparently, Mexico is willing to take all of the refugees, provide housing with kids and parents together, and process all refugees seeking asylum.

It is easy to say that US policy these days doesn’t reflect on our values, but I think it is incumbent upon all of us to transform our shame into anger and action. One can’t claim innocence if you aren’t actively seeking to unravel this regime.

From an article from The Hill by Ruth Ellen Wasem:

Cuba long has been a source of asylum-seekers, as Haiti has been. In 1980, for example, a mass migration of asylum-seekers, known as the Mariel boatlift, brought approximately 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians to South Florida over a six-month period. In 1992, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted 37,618 Haitians who had set sail to the United States and took many of them to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. While the treatment of the Haitians was not our finest hour as a nation, we did pre-screen those at Guantanamo for credible fear and return others to Haiti with the option of in-country refugee processing.

The estimates of migrants in the caravan are comparable to the number of Cubans (7,163) the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol picked up in fiscal year 1997. The civil wars in Central America during the 1980s prompted asylum-seekers that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Data on asylum cases filed with the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) show that about 126,000 Nicaraguans, 126,300 Salvadorans and 41,942 Guatemalans applied for asylum in the United States from fiscal year 1981 through 1990.”

In none of these instances did the US President describe these desperate refugees as an onslaught, suggest that they are ‘really bad people’ or use them as a tool to whip up fear. Click here to read the full The Hill report.

In solidarity,

Paul & Roxanne

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