Leo's Maxim

Ellen Greene, circa 1953  (1933 - 2006)

Sometime in 1964, I told Mom, Ellen Greene, that I wanted to be a politician.  As an altar boy at that time, she had hoped that I would be a priest instead, nonetheless, about a week or two later, we went to Hudson's Department Store in Detroit where she bought a pictorial book about the Presidents of the United States of America, and she inscribed the words "To a future president, my son Mark."  A few months later,  a letter from the White House arrived to our house, and an actual president's aide had written something along these lines: "Dear Mark: President Johnson thanks you for the fine speech that you wrote for him during this election year, and he told me to express to you his gratitude."  I lost all of these mementos over the years, so the aforementioned written remarks are paraphrasing what I remember.





Mark Greene, circa 1962

I grew up rooting for Kaline, McLain, Wood and McAuliffe (I actually seen McLain whip the Minnesota Twins 8 - 5 three years before he became famous by winning 30 games), but I switched my allegiance from the Tigers to the Cubs the moment my mother decided to uproot the family from the city to the country, and thus we were closer to the Windy City than the Motor City.  Now, I was rooting for Williams, Banks, Santo and Hands.  It was there that I learned of this unruly, old-school manager of the Cubs named Leo Durocher. You know the type: womanizing, spits tobacco, growls, bad-tempered, kicks dirt on umpires, yells at the players, and so on.  It was Durocher who once said that "Nice guys finish last."





My former parish's (Saint Theresa, Det.) weekly pamphlet - 1964

None of this is in any particular chronological order, but throughout my years in politics I have tried to prove the late "Leo the Lip" wrong, who incidentally
is in the Hall of Fame.  I have been warm, compassionate, friendly, honest to a fault, merciful to opponents whose scandals and peccadillos that I chose not to make a case of; found a run-away beagle while campaigning and gave him or her back to a beaming little boy and his grateful mother; found it very difficult to tell a young Newcastle girl that I could not agree with her optimism about nuclear energy, and then later derided myself for not coming up with a more encouraging response, such as, at least you have a chance to offer new ideas for containing radioactive waste; was given renewed confidence when a little girl gave me her balloon after her mother had refused to sign my petition for Director of Elections; was so proud of my mother when she interrupted my first Congress election debate in Minneapolis as she accused the monitor of being unfair to me, but at the same time quivered at the astonishment of her bold though correct defiance in the face of authority; rushed away in disarray from a downtown Detroit stage with my head down after a crowd of hundreds stood in stony silence after my speech, other than applause from Mom, and polite applause from a few others; and earnestly asked the party workers in Alaska was I doing the right thing by wanting to be a peacemaker instead of wanting to crunch Saddam (I opposed the ['91 and] '03 invasion[s] of Iraq, and the party workers and my '02 campaign manager, Mom, agreed).



I have been humble, respectful and kind to opponents and their supporters alike even when I was being all but hounded out of Minneapolis City Hall by a ward politician who thought he would fit in better with the rowdy antics of Chicago-style aldermen than the formalities of Minnesota nice. Yet, I considered my civility, friendliness and measured passiveness as important to the rule of law and government as elections themselves, so 83% being against me in Newcastle just about proves Mister Durocher right, as I have come to realize that the traits that have been ingrained in me since my earliest days is basically how I see democracy thriving.   In short, respect for society and hope for a better world.

- Mark Greene

Note: More than 50-year-old photographs shown above were a little worn when scanned for computer.

[revised on 2/9/14]

Informal Policies

Hi, Washingtonians,

I was so shocked by the great disparity in numbers between myself and John Drescher in the election, that I momentarily broke my rule about not conceding before the official verification of the vote count by election officials, and thus effectively did so by wishing Drescher good luck in his coming council tenure in my "The Wider Community" post of Nov. 5.  The only reason that I took that sentiment down was that I decided to return to this rule, a general rule that I implemented for my campaigns after I learned about the other curious election of '04 in 2010.  If the facts bear out as they currently seem to indicate, more than likely I will be issuing a good sportsmanlike concession statement through this blog after verification.  Fun nicknames and such on this blog are all good-natured joshing as N.P.R. is wont to do from time to time to keep this blog from being a dry political site, though I try not to go overboard, but political and government officials, and a handful of famous, politically-oriented private citizens, wouldn't get a lot of sympathy for being very sensitive about the soft jokes on these various blogs by the Party of Commons.

- Mark Greene, N.P.R. editor and candidate

[revised on 11/16/13]

Greene Winning Late Newcastle Tallies

But Too Little, Too Late

 

Mark Greene has been winning late vote count tallies by the K.C. Elections Dept., though his percentage of the overall vote has stayed within the 17% range, and Drescher's percentage of the vote is now rounded to 82% instead of the previous 83% (we'll keep changing a post that highlights the hare's percentage until it becomes steady).  There is a small write-in vote that accounts for about 1%.  People probably became more interested in the election in the latter days and thus read more.  Of course, the more people were informed about Newcastle's governance from alternative sources like N.P.R. (a couple of our other blogs that touched lightly on Newcastle were the only other alternative sources), the better Greene's chances were, but we have a feeling that voters, by and large, were mostly just following the Establishment's golden path for the hare as many were not following the election all that closely. 



Rightist Democrat: Rep. Adam Smith

Despite a recent council campaign, I have plenty of energy to continue a different campaign for U.S. representative that will bring the people's constitutional rights to the forefront, among other matters. The rightist Democrat, Adam Smith, will soon have to explain the stolen election of '04 (even as an unwitting beneficiary, he likely knows something), his votes for keeping the status quo of an overreaching, intrusive N.S.A. that is clamping down on the Bill of Rights instead of ensuring the checks and balances he has sworn an oath to do, his vote for doing away with habeas corpus (our right to judicial review if we are jailed) through the National Defense Authorization Act, his willingness to keep America in interventionist mode, his so-called free trade mantra that has kept America under the yoke of internationalist regimes and a great many of our citizens suffering from high unemployment, and his walking in lock-step with the fraudster Obama administration.  Smith had to endorse a card-carrying Republican, John Drescher, for Newcastle City Council just to keep me from running against him as a public official, but that act of treachery against his own party will only boomerang.  You can bet that Smith won't be trying to get the hare's endorsement in the next campaign, that would be too obvious a give-away to his Democratic Party faithful.

-- Mark Greene, Candidate for Congress (Washington 9th CD)

[revised on 11/14/13]

The Hare Snares 82%

Veteran's Day, 2013: Amazingly, USMC veteran and anti-interventionist politician, Mark Greene, received the lowest share of votes, 17%, in a Newcastle General Election for Council of any candidate since 2005 and probably longer ago than that, if not since incorporation in 1994.  Ten points lower than the next lowest since '05.  For someone as steadily involved in Newcastle politics and as intellectual as Greene is to receive such a low percentage of the vote, something is not right.  Greene, however, received a significantly larger percentage county-wide, 22%, when he ran for King County Director of Elections.  Moreover, Newcastle Democrats are obviously fond of Republicans, and have chosen that party over 3rd party politicians, independents or other Democrats a number of times in so-called non-partisan elections, including this current one, of course.  The hare, John Drescher, snagged 82% of the votes, and if Democrats in Newcastle were only 40% -- though we think it's a little bigger than that -- then Drescher, a card-carrying Republican, likely received at least half of the Democratic vote.  The hare has never served a day in the service as far as we know, at least he has never noted it on his various profiles. 

Note: ex-vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin got a bigger percentage from Newcastle than Mark Greene, but Greene at least knows that Africa is a continent, not a country (and knew that since, oh, say the first grade).  Actually, Greene has pretty much always known that very elementary fact.  It's disgraceful that America actually nominated someone for vice-president who was that ignorant, let alone Alaska electing someone governor.

Northern Pacific Report salutes our veterans!

[revised on 11/25/13]