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Welcome to GCD
Let's get to cooking up some spicy Latina/o political action in Colorado and the Mountain West!
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Green Chile Democrats
Passion - Spice - Activism
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Sat Dec 20, 2008 at 11:23:44 AM MST
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| Since May of this year, I have tried no less than six times to write this diary. I haven't had all the facts or references to document what I know. It became so personal a journey for me that I found myself immersed in a struggle to get the information on a small rural county fighting to preserve it's great natural resources of land, water and pristine beauty and my desire to move there.
It is the struggle of one the poorest counties in historic Southern Colorado against the oil and gas industry, drilling for Methane gas in Huerfano County.
A place that has been the crossroads of the Ute trail, Camino Real, Taos trail and the Santa Fe trail bordering the Sangre de Cristo mountain range at the base of the Spanish Peaks. The Peaks have traditional and religious significance to American Indian tribes including the Comanche and Ute. Summer thunderstorms, which often form near the summits, were evidence the rain gods worked their magic on the peaks. The common Indian names are "Wahatoya", Huajatolla" or Guajatoyah", roughly interpreted as "breasts of the earth".
A place where rivers, streams and water sheds have supported a rich diversity of life for thousands of years.
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Mon Dec 01, 2008 at 11:14:04 AM MST
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| The Dog is in love with the English language. There is nothing more satisfying than finding the very specific combination of words, words that will not only edify but persuade by their very choice and order. The way that a single comma will change the entire meaning of a sentence or paragraph is a never ending source of amusement to him. This is why it is hard for him to call for the abolition of one of the words in our language, but it has to be done. |
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Wed Nov 26, 2008 at 10:11:03 AM MST
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| The Dog's Mom is a social worker. She has talked for a very long time about teachable moments. These are places in a person's life where they can understand a new concept in the context of their current situation. As we face the problems that this country has, perhaps it is a teachable moment for a nation. Over the last 25 years or so the Repug echo chamber has been pushing a meme that is useful for them, but ultimately damaging for our country. This meme asserts that even though we are all citizens of this country we should all be expected to be totally self-reliant. It grows out of the conservative (and patently false) notion that government is inherently bad and inefficient. |
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Tue Nov 25, 2008 at 10:08:54 AM MST
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| At what point do you become completely tainted, so sullied by your past actions that you are no longer suitable for a job in government? That is a question that the Dog has been wrestling with for a while. It would seem that there are actions in your life that would irrevocably change you. The Dog has long maintained that if you were in a situation where you had to eat human flesh to survive that would change you in such a fashion. There is no moral stigma that attaches, it is just that once you engage in cannibalism you are forever in a different and rare (currently) category of humanity. It would be a category that sees other humans as a potential source of food, even if you never wanted to or did it again; you would still be somehow distinctly different from the vast majority of your species. It is a line that once crossed can not be undone. |
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Fri Nov 21, 2008 at 10:02:44 AM MST
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| Welcome to the third in the Dog's on going series on the United States Constitution! This series is intended to do two things, first to force the Dog to read and think about the foundation of the laws in our country. Second to share that reading and thinking with anyone in the netroots community that wants or needs to do the same. All of the analysis is based on the reading of the document and the Dog's native wit (such as it is). It could be wrong, so if you think it is, then post a comment and educate us all! If you are looking for the first two installments you can find them here:
Friday Constitutional One - Preamble, Article One, Section One and Section Two
Friday Constitutional Two - Article One, Section Three and Section Four. |
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Thu Nov 20, 2008 at 14:01:43 PM MST
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| Dear Republicans:
It has been a hard time for you recently hasn't it? The president of your party has been on a really losing streak, no one seems to believe in him any more, then the election season comes around. You had a big field of the senior guys in your party, and since you like to pick from that elite group is seemed that you should be as happy as pigs in mud. |
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Wed Nov 19, 2008 at 08:58:08 AM MST
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| As we move from the hustle and bustle of the election season (two years is a season now? Does that mean we have to listen the crappy X-mas tunes for the next 24 months?) the focus will naturally turn to policy. That is the normal way of politics as the elections, for all their excitement, are really just the audition, now that we have the part; we actually have to do the work. As part of this shift the Dog thought that he might lay out some thoughts on what goes into developing good policy. One caveat, of course, these are the Dog's ideas, you can take them or leave them as you like, but they are based on being involved in politics for most of the Dog's life. That does not mean that they might not be wrong, they are just the distillation of being raised in a family full of politicians and activist (it is kind of like being raised by wolves, but less cuddly.). |
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Mon Nov 17, 2008 at 09:44:39 AM MST
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| There is an axiom that the Dog holds with in everything in his life, that there are on no effective simple answers to complex problems. It is not that you can not have a simple answer to a complex problem; it is just that it is not going to resolve the problem. The war in Iraq is a great example of this. The idea was that if we toppled this one heinous dictator that had been a problem for us, then things would be great. We get him out, the people get to have a new democratic government and we get bases that are not in the land of the two holiest cities in Islam. |
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Fri Nov 14, 2008 at 09:54:58 AM MST
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| It is Friday, so it must be time for the Friday Constitutional! This is the Dog's series looking at the United States Constitution. The intent here is to read through and explain (as best as the Dog can) what each part means and does. This comes from a shameful realization that the Dog had never read the entire Constitution before and figured that might be the case for many of the netroots community. Last week we covered the Preamble, and Sections One and Two of the Constitution. If you are interested in that part of the document, you can find the diary at this link:Friday Constitutional One |
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Thu Nov 13, 2008 at 09:17:29 AM MST
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| As engaged citizens and activists in general we have a pretty good knowledge of who's who in the House and the Senate. Most of the netroots community can tell you, at the very least, their Representative's and Senator's names. This is a very good thing and the Dog applauds everyone that would be able to name more than those basic facts. But there is another side of the equation, having these servants of the people know us, as in having a name and a face to attach to the 300 phone, e-mail and snail mail missives that we will send to them over the course of the two years of the 111th Congress. |
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Mon Nov 10, 2008 at 09:38:26 AM MST
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| We were asked to leave it all on the road, and the Dog thinks that he did. For the first time in a year when he had time to write, there was nothing there. It was Wednesday Nov. 5th and one of the more wordy Chile Dems stared at a blank page and was exactly the same as the page, blank. The enormity of what had happened was too much to process in just a few hours. In some ways it still is. |
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Fri Nov 07, 2008 at 09:44:14 AM MST
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| It is Friday and on Friday's many bloggers do something light and carefree to celebrate the end of the work week. The Dog would like to do that too, so he will kick off a few weeks of the "Friday Constitutional" series. The basic intent of this series is to look at the base document of our Republic the Constitution of the United States of America. Yeah, the Dog knows, this does not seem very light or carefree, but hey, the Dog is a policy and law nerd, and a nerd has got to do what a nerd has got to do! Each week this series will look at a section of the Constitution and give a basic explanation of what it seems to mean. The Dog knows that interpretation of the Constitution is a contentious field of expertise and that he is likely to be thought to be wrong. In fact the Dog welcomes any corrections (okay, that might be an exaggeration, who among us really is happy about being told they are stupid? But you know what the Dog means) in comments. One caveat though; in places where we don't have settled decisions from the Supreme Court, both sides (or all sides for that matter) have as much change of being right as any other, so a little respect for the commenter's, even if you think they are dead wrong. |
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Mon Nov 03, 2008 at 11:08:37 AM MST
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| So, you have given, you have walked neighborhoods, you have talked and called and called and called and called, and you have voted (if not, you had better have a plan, or the Dog is going come over there and drag you to the polls! ) but you are still freaked out, aren't you? You have this feeling that something big and bad and heart breaking is coming our way, don't you? |
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Fri Oct 31, 2008 at 08:30:47 AM MDT
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| What does patriotism look like? What does hope and enthusiasm look like? What does an American look like? For the Dog it looks like a 93 year old woman from North Charleston. Dora Fitzgerald was all of those things and more. She was a mom, she traveled the world, and as the end of her life came, she wanted to be one last thing, a voter in the election of Sen. Barack Obama to the presidency of the Untied States. |
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