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YOU are INVITED

to the

Democratic Club

Holiday Potluck Dinner

Thursday, December 15 at 6:00 p.m.

at the
 
Irish-American Club

Add your dish to the list at [email protected]


******************

 
 
CALENDAR


Saturday, December 10, 2022

11:30 a.m. - DWC luncheon meeting HOLIDAY CELEBRATION at Bent Pine Clubhouse, 6001 Clubhouse Dr, Vero Beach, 32967. 
 
Monday, December 12, 2022

6:00 p.m. - School District of Indian River County School Board Meeting at 6500 57th St, Vero Beach 32967 (Awards ceremony precedes the meeting at 5:30 p.m.)

Tuesday, December 13, 2022
  
9:00 a.m. – Indian River County Commission, County Administration Offices, Council Chambers, 1801 27th Street, Building A, Vero Beach 32960. For agenda and meeting information go to https://ircgov.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx
 
Wednesday, December 14, 2022

6:00 p.m. – Sebastian City Council, 1225 Main Street, Sebastian, FL 32958. For agenda and meeting information go to
 
https://www.cityofsebastian.org/Calendar.aspx?EID=343&month=2&year=2021&day=17&calType=0
 
Thursday, December 15, 2022

9:00 a.m. - Indian River Shores City Council
For agenda and meeting information go to https://www.irshores.com/government/town-meetings/

6:00 p.m. - Democratic Club Holiday Potluck Dinner at the Irish-American Club at 1314 20th St, Vero Beach 32960.

7:00 p.m. - Fellsmere City Council, 22 S. Orange Street, Fellsmere, FL 32948
 
For agenda and meeting information go to www.cityoffellsmere.org/citycouncil

Friday, December 16, 2022

11:30 a.m. - Taxpayer’s Association Awards and Holiday Banquet at the Vero Beach Yacht Club. Reservations for lunch are required and can be made at tpairc.org.

 
 


Democrats of Indian River



Democratic Women’s Club

  
Saturday, December 10, 2022

11:30 a.m. - DWC luncheon meeting HOLIDAY CELEBRATION at Bent Pine Clubhouse, 6001 Clubhouse Dr, Vero Beach, 32967. There will be a raffle of gift prizes & a musical performance by Linn Kezer and Margretta Fosse. Please RSVP with your meal choice of entree to [email protected]. The cost is $25, payable at the door by check or cash. Buttermilk Fried Chicken Breast, Grilled Mahi Mahi, or Vegetarian. Non-members may attend as a guest. Questions to Julie Barone at (718) 916-0682.



Democratic Club of Indian River


Thursday, December 15, 2022

6 p.m. - Democratic Club Holiday Potluck Dinner at the Irish-American Club at 1314 20th St, Vero Beach 32960. We will be honoring all of our volunteers. Please contact Caryl Zook, Democratic Club Secretary at [email protected] to PLEASE ADD YOUR DISH to the LIST. (Cash bar for all beverages.)

 
 

Toys for Tots

The Democrats of Indian River are now collecting toys to donate at our office at
2345 14th Ave in Vero Beach and at our annual Holiday Party on December 15th.

 
 

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
 


GOP candidate choices unbelievable

 

I am going to be 76 in January, and I will never understand the mindset of the current GOP, even if I live to be 100.

There's been much in print lately about the level of popularity for Ron DeSantis in our state; even to the point of stating that some Democrats must have voted for him instead of voting for Charlie Crist for the governorship. I doubt that that is the case, but I could be wrong.

I do not understand how this evil man, who has advanced his way in the GOP by imitating Donald Trump's horrid use of hatred and animosity, has become a possible standard bearer for the Republican Party. Then again, we have Herschel Walker in a runoff vote in Georgia for a Senate seat; can't get more ignorant than him. What a huge embarrassment for the state of Georgia. 

One explanation could be this party now honors lying, ignorance and bad behavior as superior qualifications for running for office. Has it been forgotten that DeSantis schemed with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to persuade immigrants to get on an airplane and fly to Martha's Vineyard as part of a political stunt?

This man is dangerous; he is just as nasty as DT, but is much smarter and more cagey than his role model. Apparently, the voters in Florida find these traits to be qualities they approve of and found the need to re-elect this political animal to another term as governor.

I doubt he will fulfill the term of office for that position as he has his sights set on the presidency. Why not? DT got elected despite his despicable character and appeals to the lowest denominators. Perhaps we will witness a "food fight" between DT, DeSantis and "Ye" West for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

How spectacular for our country!
 

Sharon Garland, Hobe Sound

 
 
LOCAL

 

Sea turtle rescuers saving hatchlings stranded after Nicole on Indian River County beaches

 

Hurricanes Ian and Nicole battered coastal shorelines unearthing turtle nests and stranding hatchlings on shore at the close of sea turtle nesting season.

Several reports to an Indian River County rescue group of endangered hatchlings followed the Nov. 10 landfall of Hurricane Nicole in Vero Beach, prompting rescues and guidance from the rescuers to beachgoers who see sick or dead sea turtle following storms.

“Our rescue team has been on call since the passing of this storm and have been very busy picking up small hatchlings that have washed back on shore due to the rough wind and waves,” said Coastal Connections Executive Director Kendra Cope.  
Altogether 13 hatchlings, and what Cope called, “wash back” turtles, were rescued and transported by Coastal Connections volunteers to the Sea Turtle Healing Center at the Brevard Zoo in Viera. All were said to be green turtles.

“This is more common during this part of the year, since green turtles are the species that nest on our beaches last,” Cope said. “At the time of the storm, there were still some green turtle nests incubating, and most recently hatched nests belonged to green turtles as well.”

During anywhere from a five-to-eight month nesting season, Cope said leatherbacks arrive first in March — ahead of the typical May start of nesting season. Loggerheads arrive in April and green turtles begin in May and continue nesting through October.

“Although sea turtles are highly migratory, the Treasure Coast is home to different species and life stages of sea turtles all year long,” she said.

Hatchling rescues continue

Cope said their work rescuing hatchlings would continue at least through the month; potential sightings could follow as seas calm and tides fall.

She said anybody walking beaches should keep an eye out for any sick, injured (or) even dead turtles.

“That is a great way to be a part of the conservation effort (and) of sea turtle conservation recovery,” she said.

As the agency does with other wildlife sightings, such as alligators, Coastal Connections partners with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and is one of the entities dispatched to retrieve turtles in Indian River County.

Properly disposing of trash helps

Aside from reporting a distressed turtle, she said recycling and properly disposing of  trash is another way to help local marine and wildlife.

“Debris entanglement, plastic ingestion and boat strikes are some of the most common reasons we find sea turtles stranding (or washing shore) all year long,” Cope said.

If you see a struggling hatchling 

  • If you see a struggling turtle, report it to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at 888-404-3922.
  • While hatchlings and turtles crawling toward water “should not be disturbed,” Coastal Connections said a stranded turtle could be reported to its non-emergency line at 772-569-6700 or to the FWC.
  • The Indian River County Public Works Coastal Engineering Division oversees a sea turtle conservation program monitoring the nesting activities of the three species found on local shorelines. You can view it at https://www.ircgov.com/publicworks/coastal/turtles.htm
 


Corey Arwood

Treasure Coast Newspapers
 
STATE
 

 

Removing Confederate Monuments in Florida


An airplane pulling a banner overhead with a Confederate battle flag and the message "PUT MONUMENTS BACK" greeted fans as they filed into TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville at the end of November to watch the Jaguars ultimately triumph over the Baltimore Ravens.

Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry responded by tweeting, “there is no place for hate of any kind in our city” and restated his support for removing Confederate monuments. The city has, in fact, removed several memorials in recent years and last year the Duval County School Board voted to rename six schools named after Confederate leaders.

"We need to stop romanticizing the Confederate side of the Civil War and need to reveal the bitter truth," a student at Jacksonville's Lee High School said during a community meeting over changing the school's name (it's now called Riverside High). "The truth is that the civil war was fought over slavery. Period. And you won't find that in our history books." 

 

How many Confederate memorials are still in Florida?

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Democracy" report, 3rd edition, as of February 2022 there are 75 Confederate memorials still present in Florida. That's one building, two parks, six counties or cities, 14 schools, four school districts, 16 roads, 19 monuments and 13 others (such as notable plaques, cemeteries, etc.).

Since 2015, when the first "Whose Heritage?" report was published, 30 different Confederate memorials in Florida have been removed or renamed.

Whose Heritage? Map:  Search this interactive map of Confederate monuments in the U.S. and their status

How many Confederate monuments have been taken down in Florida?

In 2020, the city of Jacksonville took down a Confederate soldier statue in the heart of downtown and renamed Confederate Park as Springfield Park in the Springfield neighborhood. However, the "Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy" in Springfield Park remains as debates rage on over whether to remove it and what to do with it if they do.

The marker at the end of Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway in Saint Petersburg was removed.

A bust of Robert E. Lee in Fort Myers was taken down and sent to a museum, although a group is fighting to bring it back.

A Florida Appeals Court ruled that a Confederate statue in Madison County can be removed but its immediate future is unknown.

An Orlando-area attorney and Quincy native led the fight to bring down a Confederate monument in Gadsden County that had been in front of the county courthouse for 136 years.

St. Augustine decided to remove the city's Confederate memorial from the Plaza, where it had stood for more than 140 years, and a memorial was removed from a park west of the Plaza.

In 2017 Daytona Beach city officials stripped a riverfront war memorial of three plaques commemorating Confederate soldiers and moved them to a museum. After George Floyd, the sign in front of the ancient live oak in Port Orange called the "Confederate Oak" was quietly removed.

A Confederate monument in front of the Marion County Judicial Center in Ocala was moved to a veterans park in 2010. 

In 2020, Pensacola officials took down the monument of an 8-foot statue of a Confederate soldier, along with the 50-foot granite pedestal, that sat in Florida Square for 129 years. The monument currently remains in storage at the Port of Pensacola but a lawsuit and legal battle threatens to bring it back.

A Confederate statue called "Johnny Reb" was moved from an Orlando park near Lake Eola in 2017 to a historic cemetery where 37 Confederate soldiers are buried. A time capsule was discovered underneath containing newspapers, a Confederate flag and Confederate States of America dollar bills, among other items.

In Lakeland, a 109-year-old statue of a Confederate soldier was removed from the center of Munn Park in 2019 and moved to Veterans Park. A group advocating for preserving Confederate monuments sued the city. Nearby and two years later, a Confederate marker outside the old courthouse in downtown Bartow was moved to Oak Hill Cemetery.

A Confederate monument was removed from downtown Bradenton in 2017 after a great deal of controversy was broken during the process. 

Still at the Capitol:As America again looks at symbols, Florida Capitol’s Confederate memorial remains

And while it's not in Florida, a historical milestone was reached when one of two statues representing the Sunshine State in the U.S. Capitol building's Statuary Hall in D.C., which honored Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, was replaced with one celebrating Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach and a prominent Black leader. The Bethune statue is the first representing a Black person, male or female, in the state collection inside Statuary Hall.

How many Confederate school names in Florida have been changed?

Until 2020, Roberto Clemente Middle School near Orlando was named for Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee Middle School was renamed College Park Middle.

The Alachua County School Board voted unanimously to rename J. J. Finley Elementary School, after a Confederate general, to honor a prominent Black physicist in WWII, Carolyn Beatrice Parker. The Kirby Smith Center was quietly changed in 2017 to be simply the Alachua County Public Schools District Office.

Lee Elementary in Tampa is now Tampa Heights Elementary. Robert E. Lee Middle in Miami was changed to Jose De Diego Middle.

The Jacksonville area saw a wave of name changes in 2021 that moved sharply away from Confederate leaders: Springfield Academy was once known as Kirby-Smith Middle School, Westside Middle was previously J. E. B. Stuart Middle School, Charger Academy used to be Jefferson Davis Middle, Nathan B. Forrest High became Westside High, and Riverside High was once named for Robert E. Lee. The former Joseph Finegan Elementary School in Atlantic Beach became simply Anchor Academy, and Stonewall Jackson Elementary is now Hidden Oaks.

Just this year, the Pensacola Police Department unveiled a new design that removed the Confederate flag from police badges and patches. 

 

There are concerns that it starts a slippery slope to the removal of monuments of any currently problematic person; and that Confederate memorials can be used as educational tools to fight racism.

But opponents see the statues and building names as both glorification of the people who declared war on the United States for the right to keep owning Black people and as intended intimidation of people of color. Most of the statues went up between the 1890s and 1950s, long after the Civil War, in the wake of Reconstruction during the era of Jim Crow segregation when white supremacists were creating a false narrative about the true motives of the Confederacy (the "Lost Cause"). Where previously Confederate monuments tended to be in cemeteries, these were put out in public squares and in front of state buildings.

There was another surge of Confederacy tribute years later as an outraged backlash to the civil rights movement and the Brown v. Board of Education decision: 

Southern schools' history textbooks:A long history of deception, and what the future holds
The debate over Confederate memorials has gone on for years, but the current successful movement to remove them began after the June 17, 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina when a man shouting racial epithets killed nine Black people there for Bible study and racism was once again in the eyes of the national public. Two weeks later, 30-year-old Bree Newsome climbed the 30-foot pole in front of the statehouse and removed the Confederate flag there. She was arrested and the flag replaced, but South Carolina state legislators soon voted to officially remove the flag.
That national conversation became a roar after a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia protesting the removal of statues honoring Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson turned violent and deadly. Several high-profile killings of Black people, especially the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for over nine minutes, rallied millions to the Black Lives Matter movement and attention on existing Confederate statues increased.
 

For more information go to Confederate monuments in Florida: How many have been taken down?
 

Chris A. Bridges
USA TODAY Network

 

 


FEDERAL
 
 

Five Take-Aways from Georgia Run-Off

 

Senator Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in convincing fashion on Tuesday, giving Democrats some breathing room in a closely divided Senate, and providing grist for Republicans hoping to dethrone former President Trump as the leader of their party. Even as the votes were still being tallied, Trump’s critics on the right were lashing him for saddling them with an untested and troubled candidate for a seat they believed was theirs to win.

Warnock’s victory also guaranteed that Georgia will be hotly contested two years from now, when President Biden or another Democrat tries to repeat his feat from 2020, when he flipped the state blue.
Republicans chose a deeply flawed candidate.

Lurid allegations about Walker's personal conduct drove national news: previously undisclosed children he had fathered, accusations of domestic violence, abortions he had reportedly urged romantic partners to get, exaggerations about his business affairs, questions about his residency in Georgia. And Walker kept serving up red meat. “I don’t even know what the heck is a pronoun,” he said at one rally. At another, he said that “Jesus may not recognize” transgender people if they seek to enter heaven. Walker extolled the virtues of “gas-guzzling cars” in a state that has aggressively tried to become a hub of electric-vehicle manufacturing. And, in comments that made him the butt of late-night jokes, he embarked on a lengthy tangent about werewolves and vampires.

It will be hard — though not impossible — for Trump to wriggle his way out of this one. Walker had explored running for office long before 2022. But Trump, who had known Walker since the 1980s, when he owned the New Jersey Generals football team in the short-lived U.S.F.L., almost single-handedly made Walker’s candidacy a reality.

Even before Walker’s loss, Republicans of all stripes were eyeing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a preferable alternative in 2024, and he has gained ground against Trump in every major poll since Nov. 8. As the runoff outcome became clear, Scott Jennings, a former aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, observed that “Georgia may be remembered as the state that broke Trump once and for all.”

Hillary Clinton flipped Cobb County, a fast-diversifying former Republican stronghold in the Atlanta suburbs, on her way to losing the state by just five percentage points. In 2018, when Stacey Abrams came within 1.4 points of beating Kemp in her first race for governor, she won Cobb by nearly 10.

The president, in a sign of how centrally he views Georgia to his re-election hopes, has urged his party to add the state to the early presidential nominating calendar in 2024. There’s just one problem: Republican officials in Georgia will get to decide if that happens, and they’ve already poured cold water on the idea.

Either way, the path to 270 Electoral College votes looks much the same for Biden in 2024 as it did in 2020: Win every swing state in the Midwest plus Nevada and New Hampshire, and keep Arizona and Georgia blue just in case.

Much has been made of the Democrats’ astonishingly durable coalition in Nevada, the core of which is unionized casino workers in Las Vegas. But Democrats have assembled a no less formidable turnout operation in Georgia, a much more populous and more geographically complex state.

Although metropolitan Atlanta represents nearly 60 percent of the electorate, to win the big statewide races, Democrats needed to find pockets of new voters elsewhere, too. Black communities in places like Albany, in southwest Georgia, often went neglected. In 2017, Abrams made a statement by announcing her campaign there rather than in Atlanta.

“One of the things we’ve done better with is not running a metro-centric campaign, building organizing infrastructure across the state,” said Jonae Wartel, who directed the 2021 runoffs for Democrats.

Another secret to Democrats’ success in Georgia is patience. A core network of organizers has stuck around for years, building relationships across the state and prioritizing local roots. After the 2021 Senate races, the state Democratic Party immediately hired several of the top brains behind Warnock’s and Senator Jon Ossoff’s field teams, then asked them to write detailed reports on what they had learned.

“There’s a year-round organizing conversation in Georgia,” said Nse Ufot, the former chief executive of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit that became an organizing hub for activists across the state. “It’s not transactional.”

If Georgia Republicans were hoping that making it harder to vote would help them win back the Senate seat they lost in 2021, they were wrong. And there are signs that the changes they put in place might have backfired in some respects.

The battle over voting rights kept Warnock’s base busy between elections. In 2021, when Republicans passed a major new voting law that Democrats and civil rights groups denounced as an attempt to suppress Black votes, the machine went to work. Warnock’s strategists adjusted their voter contact plans accordingly, while outside activists held protests, organized petition drives and basically kept their network buzzing all year.

“We don’t let it lay dormant,” Wartel said.

For Gerald Griggs, the president of the Georgia chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., the lesson is not that the outcry over the law was a false alarm, as Republicans have insisted.

Anticipating long lines at the polls, civil rights groups planned “parties to the polls” all over the state, featuring water and live entertainment, just beyond the minimum distance from polling locations mandated by the new rules. And the N.A.A.C.P. threatened to sue counties that allowed frivolous lawsuits under provisions of the voting law that allowed unlimited challenges to individual ballots.

“African Americans in this state know how to mobilize,” Griggs said. “But you shouldn’t have to out-organize voter suppression.” 

 

Blake Hounshell and Ruth Igielnik
The New York Times

 
 
 
VIDEO of the WEEK

Jimmy Kimmel recap of Walker bloopers.

https://youtu.be/84P2VhIa_8A
 

 
 
Office Hours
 
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 2345 14th Ave. Suite 7
 Vero Beach 32960



 (772) 226-5267 

[email protected]  

 




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