Author: North Coast BBQ

Yesterday, President Biden decided to step aside from the 2024 presidential campaign.
Let’s all give a wholehearted thank you to President Biden for everything he’s achieved so far. No president in my lifetime has done more than Joe Biden.
Under his leadership, we’ve had historic investments in American manufacturing, renewable energy, and infrastructure, strengthened our security, and repaired relationships around the world.
Throughout decades of public service, President Biden has led with humility and compassion, with a laser focus on making life better for ordinary Americans. I am grateful to have worked with him to serve the people and stand up to the powerful, and I respect his decision that positions us to protect the programs he’s championed.
This election is between democracy and autocracy. And we need the strongest Democratic candidate to take on and beat Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda. That’s why I proudly endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Kamala Harris shares my mission of taking on the powerful to deliver for the people. She will fight for reproductive rights, American jobs, and security abroad. She will champion housing, education, healthcare, and equal rights.

From Jim Hightower
On Joe, Kamala, and the Coming Fight
JUL 23

My instant feeling upon hearing that President Biden was stepping down was not political anxiety (aw jeez, another earthquake!), and certainly not any joy in seeing Joe deposed—but pure relief. Suddenly, the deck was shuffled, and now (not a moment too soon), we have a good hand, allowing us to focus squarely on Donald’s dangerous dementia, Project 2025, and the assault on America’s democracy by the combined forces of authoritarian elites and Christian nationalist theocrats.
Kamala Harris is our logical political choice to head up job number one: Discombobulate and defeat Trumpism. An accomplished woman, a woman of color, and a child of immigrants, she’s an experienced and forceful former prosecutor with the smarts to nail the convicted criminal opposing her… and us. Sure, her policies are not as progressive as I want them to be, but neither were Biden’s, and her views are something we can continue to work on. If Trump wins in November, we won’t have even a slight chance to shape the future of an America that stands for, and with, everyone.
While the urgent need in the next 104 (!) days is to focus on the November election, I can’t stress enough that we are in this for the long haul. Campaigns end, movements don’t. We must continue to invest in the local, grassroots organizing that actually bends that long arc of justice, building the capacity to have policies and people that represent the real values of America: fairness, equity and opportunity for all.

www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-policy-record-legacy_n_669986b2e4b086df0a294ab3
How History Might Remember Joe Biden’s Presidency
By Jonathan Cohn

Posting on behalf of Kim Rosenberg
loretta.kim.rosenberg@gmail.com

I don’t usually use private citizen’s names in what I write unless the person is identified in public documents or identifies themselves as an expert in the community because of their former professional role.
Randy Kugler was the City Manager in Manzanita from 1988-1996 and in Philomath, Oregon from 1996 until he retired in 2014.
Mr. Kugler filed a referendum about monthly versus quarterly water billing, which will be on the ballot in November. Of the four initiatives he has filed, none meets all the criteria to go on the ballot, but he can resubmit any of the ones that were denied or submit new ones.
Each initiative requires legal time and staff time every time it is submitted. We pay for both. This month’s bill from Miller Nash is about $11,000.
In addition to legal fees for the initiatives, Randy Kugler, Will Stone and Laura Swanson, the editor of the Pioneer, are now suing the City of Manzanita to release the results of the investigation into the employee complaint against the former mayor.
There was a total of four requests to release those results and the Tillamook County DA denied all four.
I made a public records request to see if there were other legal costs associated with requests Mr. Kugler has made in the past two years. Most requests don’t necessitate the City Lawyer’s time, but from July of 2022 to June 28, 2024, the City has paid $15,112.50 in legal fees associated with Mr. Kugler’s requests. That doesn’t count staff time just legal fees.
In his July 10 email included in the July Council Meeting Packet, Mr. Kugler wrote, “One of the outcomes of my social media posts has been citizens taking opportunities to talk to me and sending me their comments and email addresses requesting to be kept informed of City activities.”
There are several ways a citizen can learn about the City’s activities from firsthand sources like attending meetings, asking questions of City Staff and Council, reading documents on the City’s website, and doing research to learn more about how local Oregon government works on any of a number of websites. You can do your own homework and form your own opinions. I’ve included links to the source material for this post.
After reading his post, some citizens who own homes and vote here asked to be added to Mr. Kugler’s email update listserv but weren’t.
Links to sources used:
Water billing post: www.northcoastbbq.com/?s=kim+rosenberg+splish+splash
July Council Packet (scroll past agenda to page 12 for Miller Nash legal fees and pages 32-35 for emails): ci.manzanita.or.us/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/July-10-Regular-Packet.pdf
July Council Meeting (discussion of bills and lawsuit in first part of the meeting):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ_beFRy1F8
Lawsuit document (cut and paste into your browser): drive.google.com/file/d/1UU1s_gk_fw5oyM05fK9Y-S0QXohcdGVa/view
loretta.kim.rosenberg@gmail.com

www.chrislhedges.com/about

“Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a TelePrompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years – from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic.

In Hitler and the Germans , the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote , is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist. Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist.

They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift. Those undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied.

The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.”