GMO Labeling Initiative 1338 Needs Volunteers

UPDATED, WITH NEW INITIATIVE NO., ON FEBRUARY 1, 2014

Website:  http://brandnewelections.us

E-mail:  poc_senator@yahoo.com

Contributions are needed for petition printing and signature gathering related stipends for volunteers ($10 suggested) and should be sent to:

C.M. Greene, RMNCW president, P.O. Box 612, Bellevue, WA 98009. (RMNCW = Respect for Mother Nature Committee of Washington)

If you can only send less than $10, that's good, too.  Just do what you can.  Thank you!

Party of Commons Website:  http://www.partyofcommons.com

Congress Election: Then and Now

My Great Supporters,

I conceded the Newcastle council race a few days ago before the certification of the vote that has taken place at the shady King County Elections Department (they misrepresented a lot of photos with silhouette-like exposures in the general election voters' pamphlet this year).  Congratulations to Mr. Drescher.  The congressional campaign in the 9th District is going very well, and like nearly all elections that I'm in, I got a very early start, although the rightist "Blue Dog" Democrat, Adam Smith, had his signs up at Newcastle Days last September.  Federal Way and Bellevue are the two biggest cities in the 9th District, and my support is very strong in both cities.  Federal Way was key in my winning the G.O.P. nomination in the 9th District in 2004 before it was snatched away from me by the then Dean Logan-run King County Elections Department (by neglect, not willful culpability) and handed to a political novice.   The official vote count for me then was 47 per cent, the actual vote count was likely 50 to 53 per cent.

If the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, Jenny Durkan, happens to be reading this, which is unlikely, I am making a plea to her to send out a press release and reveal to the western Washington media everything she knows about the 2004 primary in the 9th Congressional District.   Her office has already ignored one inquiry from me a few years ago, so I really don't expect any change from that venue (she was appointed by a Democratic Party administration, after all).  What I will really need to get the truth out to the wider community is one or two really good investigative reporters with a little heft, and who are with the mainstream media.  The chances of that happening for the case of an alternative politician who was denied a rightful primary victory almost 10 years ago are slim to none, but it is one of very few cards that I hold that may help to catapult me to the 114th Congress.  

Thank you, and by the way, I can accept up to $5000 in contributions before I have to file any paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission.  I don't have a PayPal or anything like that, so if you just drop a check or a money order under $50 to the Commoner Local Affairs Campaign Committee to my post office box (address information is in the right column), then that would be of great help to this campaign and greatly appreciated.  Once I reach the $5000 threshold, if not before, then I will start an internet system for accepting contributions.  By law, be a U.S. citizen and at least 18 years old to make a contribution.  If you decide to be extra generous by contributing 50 or more, by law, please, include your name, address and occupation.

- Mark Greene, Candidate for Congress, 9th Congressional District of Washington

[revised on 11/27/13]

9th Congressional District Women Supporting Greene

Women from the 9th CD of Washington who ordinarily vote for Mark Greene, support Greene because the veteran is more interested in solving the domestic problems of the nation rather than getting involved in overseas adventures of no practical self-defense value; and takes a sensible approach to nuclear weapons: in other words, get rid of them all through bi-lateral and multi-lateral treaties, and the sooner the better; wants to protect the social safety net programs, such as WIC, general nutritional aid, and social security; tries to advance educational security for children and young adults by strengthening public schools with morality education, and making at least the first two years of college or trade school completely as free of individual cost as publicly available elementary and high schools; is genuinely environmentally conscious; and thinks the government should stay out of people's naturally-given rights and law-abiding affairs.

[revised on 12/21/14] 
 

The Hare's Paupers

The Newcastle City Council breathed a sigh of relief when the hare won last November 5th, not that they weren't fairly sure what the outcome would be, given all the stops that they pulled for John Drescher.  Even though they knew that Mark Greene would never have gotten 4 votes on the Council in order to push through a people's agenda in Newcastle if he had won, they sure didn't want some dissenter on the council talking about poor and low income people.  Councilwoman Carol Simpson is the closest person they have to a dissenter willing to speak up for the lower economic classes every now and then.  So the Council's agenda of cozying up to real estate barons, gentrification, keeping renters in their place, and building up walls to keep the poor out of Newcastle will continue unimpeded, and as we said in a previous post, the hare will fit right in.  Any present-day apartment dweller, just about, that voted for Drescher is obviously uninformed about Newcastle politics or voted against their own interests for whatever reason. 

The so-called "Mutual Materials" apartments to be built will not be for the general workers in the shops of Newcastle's 2 strip malls, that's for sure, nor for Newcastle's government employees (by and large) for that matter.  The rents are not expected to be less than $2000 per month according to rumor, and probably much more than that in most cases.  This Council is not even hospitable to so-called affordable housing agendas put forth by the wider community, let alone actual affordable housing.

[revised on 11/25/13]
 

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.