DougCO, OR - Our little corner of the world... YES ;-))

Douglas County, Oregon. 6 possible delegates to our state platform convention, 6 possible alternates. (Don’t worry, delegate nominating convention is separate and we haven't gotten to that part of the calendar yet). Dr. Paul's people took 5 of the 6 platform delegate spots and, so far, 5 of the 6 alternate spots with one still vacant (we hope to have the 6th alternate spot sewed up in the next 24 hours). Let's KEEP THE FAITH AND THE MOMENTUM GOING!

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle;
pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge
without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice: Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy: - James Madison

They came first for the Communists,
but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
And then they came for me,
and, by that time, there was no one left to speak up.
Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power
and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap
between the government and the people. And it became always wider... the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about... and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a
farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse
than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all
reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined."
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)