It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer  of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of  course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.

 

Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really  overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor  got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from  the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday.  It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama,  never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since  both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio  by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

 

As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything  Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.

 

In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now  look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.

 

Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:

 

1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.

2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.

3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.

 

The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:

 

1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..

2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.

3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.

4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).

5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.

6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.

7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.

 

Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,

 

Editor, The Amazing Democrats. 

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“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard. 

by Matt Pearce (Los Angeles Times)

A reserve sheriff’s deputy accidentally shot an unarmed man with a gun instead of a Taser, and Oklahoma law enforcement officials berated the man as he lay dying on the ground, according to body-camera footage released this weekend.

“Oh, God. Oh, he shot me; I didn’t do s—!” the suspect, Eric Courtney Harris, 44, can be heard saying as officers from the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office violent crimes task force surround him after a foot chase earlier this month. “He shot me, man! Oh, my God.”

“You didn’t do s—? You didn’t do  s—? You hear me?” responds an officer on the task force.

“I’m losing my breath,” Harris says.

“F— your breath!” an officer responds.

Harris died an hour later at a hospital.

The reserve deputy who killed Harris, Robert Charles Bates, is a wealthy 73-year-old insurance executive with close political ties to the sheriff.

The sheriff’s office did not ask an independent agency to investigate the incident. Instead, it conducted its own investigation, concluding that the deputy’s accidental use of the gun was excusable homicide, not a crime. Then the sheriff’s office brought in a Tulsa policeman to evaluate the findings and make a public statement.

The Harris family called for a “truly independent entity” to investigate the April 2 incident.

The case began as a sting operation to arrest Harris on suspicion of dealing drugs and unlawfully selling a gun as a felon. Officials said Harris had multiple felony convictions from the 1980s and ’90s as well as a 2013 conviction for assault on a law enforcement officer, and had sold drugs to an undercover officer and offered to sell guns.

Bates was supposed to be in a support role for the undercover operation, but found himself at the front of the action when Harris tried to escape.

Footage from a deputy’s glasses-mounted body camera shows Harris running from members of the task force, with officers in pursuit.

The video, released by the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday, shows a deputy tackling Harris in the street.

Moments later, Bates shouts, “Taser!” – but fires a single gunshot instead, the video shows.

“I shot him; I’m sorry,” says Bates, whose gun falls to the ground.

“Oh … man, he shot me!” Harris can be heard saying, and then moaning as law enforcement officers surround him.

The video does not clearly show the officers’ faces.

“You f—ing ran!” one of the men shouts at Harris. “Shut the f— up!”

The video cuts out shortly after the shooting, so whatever happened next is not recorded.

Tulsa County Sheriff’s Maj. Shannon Clark said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that the deputies did not hear the gunshot because they were so focused on Harris “in the heat of the moment.”

The shot was plainly audible on the video, however.

One of the deputies “had no idea [Harris] was shot,” Clark said. “He thought the guy was complaining” about being out of breath from the chase and thought, “Well, you ran.”

“It wasn’t his last breath,” Clark added. “He died an hour later, and we’re not so callous to be like that.”

Officials don’t know why the body camera deactivated, Clark said, adding that the deputy did not turn it off. After the footage ended, Clark said, the deputies handcuffed Harris, sat him up to help him with his breathing, and applied pressure to the wound until EMTs arrived.

Bates won an award in 2011 as the sheriff’s top reserve deputy,according to the Tulsa World. He was chairman of Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz’s successful reelection campaign in 2012 and donated $2,500 to the effort, the newspaper reported.

Contacted by the Tulsa World last week, Bates confirmed that he fired the fatal shot. “It was me,” he said. “My attorney has advised me not to comment. As much as I would like to, I can’t.”

In addition to his political support for the sheriff, Bates has donated equipment to the department, including “a couple cars” in recent years, Clark told The Times. He added, “He isn’t the only millionaire we’ve got” in the reserve program.

He defended Bates’ participation in the department and played down his financial contributions.

“You have to remember, this is Oklahoma,” Clark said, explaining that it’s not unusual for reserve deputies to make donations to the sheriff’s political campaign or to the department. “It’s their way of giving back. … Nobody would criticize if he gave to the Red Cross.”

Bates has been a reserve deputy since 2008, Clark said. “People thought he bought his way into the reserve program, and that’s not true.”

After the sheriff’s department completed its investigation, it brought in Tulsa Police Sgt. Jim Clark to review its findings as a private consultant, said Sheriff’s Maj. Clark, who is not related to Jim Clark.

Police Sgt. Clark defended Bates to reporters Saturday, declaring him blameless and citing a scientific theory he called “slips and capture” to explain how Bates could have confused a gun with a Taser.

“It is my opinion, after reviewing all the facts and circumstances of this case, [the state’s excusable homicide statute] was applicable in this incident,” Clark said. “Reserve Deputy Bates did not commit a crime. Reserve Deputy Bates was a victim, a true victim, of ‘slips and capture.’ There’s no other determination I could come to.”

In Oklahoma, excusable homicide is a killing “committed by accident and misfortune in doing any lawful act, by lawful means, with usual and ordinary caution, and without any unlawful intent.” The state also has a second-degree manslaughter charge for killings that are the result of negligence.

The case has been referred to the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office, which will decide whether to file charges. A representative for the office could not be immediately reached for comment Sunday.

Harris’ family called the deputies’ actions in the video “appalling.”

“We do not believe that it is reasonable for a man who claims to have all the necessary training to mistake a pistol for a Taser,” the family said in a statement issued Sunday through their attorney, Daniel Smolen. “We do not believe it is reasonable for a 73-year-old insurance executive to be involved in a dangerous undercover sting operation. … We do not believe it is reasonable – or responsible – for [the sheriff’s office] to accept gifts from a wealthy citizen who wants to be [a] ‘pay to play’ cop.”

The family questioned the sheriff’s office’s decision to investigate itself and continued:

“We will never get Eric back. He will never have a chance to fully turn his life around. He will never have a chance to develop his relationship with Aidan, his 16-year-old son. He will never be able to hug his brother Andre again. Still, we remain hopeful that some good will come out of this tragedy.”