HAWAII UPDATE??? THEY ARE HAVING THEIR STATE CONVENTION RIGHT NOW!!!!

PLEASE SEE THE FOLLOWING THREAD FOR THE SCRIPT:

http://www.dailypaul.com/node/49549

Fortune Favors the Bold

In case the media doesn't run with it?

Some of you are probably interested in how it went in Hawaii today, as the voting for delegates was over only a few hours ago (it is the early hours of the morning, and we are still up, after some post-trauma group debriefing). This will be just a short summary, and we are planning to put more on the web soon. Don't get excited yet, it was disappointing. . . .
Inspired by Dr. Paul, a lot of us became active in the Republican Party here months ago, on several of the islands. This goes against the trend to begin with, since Hawaii is a largely Democratic welfare state, although it does have a GOP governor. We were inspired to bring new energy and dedication, what to speak of sound and ethical principles to a lagging and anemic party, which many would also call ethically challenged, through an infusion of Constitutionally-based energy.
Leading up to the convention this weekend, many folks volunteered to spend vast amounts of thier lives working on the platform committee. The planks, through emailing back and forth innumerable times, were discussed and a final revision for each plank was, of course, expected to be discussed, debated and voted for or against at the convention.
Well guess what. News flash: the party insiders not only did not appreciate that scores of new people were showing interest in participating in the Republican state platform committees as well as the delegation process, donating much of their time and effort to help out. Such a showing would dilute support for their chosen and anointed ones in their eyes. It would disturb the status quo. Suffice it to say that the outcome was decided long ago. Although we had a good and organized group, they had decided their colleagues on the mainland had made mistakes in "allowing Ron Paul's supporters to embarrass McCain", and came out swinging. We knew there would be a fight, and would have accepted defeat graciously if it had been a fair one, but it was certainly not at all fair.
First, Gov. Linda Lingle last week shot down all the hard work of the platform committees, who were trying to craft up-to-date versions of various planks such as Environment, Government, etc. We had about 6 of 20 or so participants in those committees, along with a lot of other reformers many of whom are now in our camp. In the end, after many weeks of dedicated and sincere efforts to improve the party platform, voting was held on whether to accept any revisions, and instead of discussion and fair voting by genuine platform committee members on whether to adopt these revisions, at the final moment Lingle made clear she was having none of these changes and padded the voting with party insiders being brought in at the end, who had attended no meetings or conference calls, just to outvote the reformers and keep the 2006 Republican Party Platform unchanged. The actual vote was 19 to 26. That was hard to swallow for who those who had worked so hard for many, many weeks.
Then, it was revealed today at the end that the reason why the floor defeated EVERY ONE of our delegates and alternates, despite our politeness and subtlety, is because the RNC had the state craft a script, and paid plenty for "fixers" to sit on and influence the proceedings. They organized an opposition to Ron Paul by simply calling a secret meeting a couple days ago which would change procedures in the delegate selection process favorable to them and unfavorable to us. They apparently assumed we could be beat if they actually organized, which turned out be only too true.
However, they played SO UNFAIR that it turned off even party stalwarts at just how terrible our people were treated. Most of them who got to know us liked us. One party regular, an older Japanese-American woman, was crying as she apologized to some of us after the voting. Their key? A SCRIPT that they had devised and followed, play by play, inserting motions to keep discussion and resolutions favoring a Constitutional Government squashed. They even paid BIG BUCKS to have a guy who co-WROTE the current edition of Roberts Rules of Order, sitting on the right hand of the chair!!!!! Just to make sure they had their moves right and timely. Fair? Maybe. You decide.
One infamous resolution adopted by railroading the opposition (us) was "to streamline the voting process" by passing a resolution that would have everyone vote for delegates and alternates all at the same time, under a bogus "Unity" platform. Preprinted ballots cited McCain at the top, and mentioned the names of the five other former candidates (insultingly leaving out mention of Dr. Paul's name altogether!). Only McCain was mentioned, only a film and photos of him were shown. They did allow us a table for literature outside the hall, but only his pledged supporters' names were on the preprinted ballot distributed inside. Confusingly, there was also a blank ballot provided, which we of course used to fill in our candidates' names, but there was no allowance for discussion of values, issues, or candidates themselves, that was voted down. Also, the way the ballots were printed, and the new method of "voting" was purposely confusing. We figured out how to fill them it with the help of our own list. But it would have been easy to slip up, especially as we were spread out over the hall, generally by geographical grouping, and their change of rules required many of our people to switch from Delegate to Alternate by 11:00 am that morning, a change which only the insiders had made, and had really known about. Outrageous!!!! The reason given by insiders for the preprinted "ballot" (which was vigorously objected to but overruled, of course) was to "avoid disruptions". Welcome to the land of tyranny, where your leaders are pre-chosen for you!
We have plans for fully exposing this corrupt "selection" process which will soon be revealed. We have a copy of the actual script, slipped to us by an insider, in our hands! We hope there will be plenty of outrage about the crooked, fear-based tactics which simply reveal the weakness of Hawaii's pitiful GOP, which have served only to weaken it further. Besides so many new people leaving in disgust, the old guard have so shot themselves in the foot. My husband and I, like many others who actually put plenty of money out to travel to Oahu from the Big Island and paid to stay here, and for the privilege of participating in the Convention itself, thinking it would be a genuine, welcoming marketplace of ideas, were sadly disillusioned to see that the whole thing was just a scripted drama with a foredetermined outcome. Even the outcome was scripted to have the chair decide the outcome of each prescripted vote ("The Ayes win", even though you could see the vote was very close). We were just unappreciated and dispensible bit players who they wished weren't there at all. Sad. No wonder the GOP is practically dead here.
There were plenty of other dirty tricks as well (such as several delegates' declaration of candidacy being conveniently lost) and on and on. More to come. . . . There is one more day of the drama (which they are certainly not going to script!). Keep tuned.