Fundraising/Events
Committee
Arnie Godmintz, Chair arniegod@sbcglobal.net;
332-5980
Responsible for developing and organizing all club events, including
the annual awards luncheon.
Legislative Committee
Joan Lee, Chair joanblee@sbcglobal.net;
332-5980
Reports on legislation, propositions, candidates and other issues
for the club to consider; responsible for planning and organizing
club participation in political events including rallies, marches
and lobby days.
Membership Committee
Louise Enspahr, Chair. (916) 325-2145 ewilli7021@aol.com.
The Membership Committee keeps a record of members, and develops
methods for recruiting new members. Also responsible for providing
introductory materials to new members. (Membership
application form...)
Sacramento County Democratic
Central Committee
Meetings: 2nd Tuesday of each month, State Capitol, Room 127, 6
PM
Contact: (916) 442-0264 or www.sacdems.org.
Democratic Clubs Auburn Area Democratic Club
Meetings: 1st Thursday of the month, Auburn Public Library, 250
Nevada St., Auburn, 7 PM
Contact: Trish Grenfell, (530) 887-8873, pgrenfell@yahoo.com
Davis Democratic Club
Meetings: 2nd Tuesday of the month. Yolo County Library-Davis, 14th
St & B, 7 PM. Contact: John Chendo, (530) 758-3331 or
jac07@dcn.org
Folsom Democratic Club
Meetings: Last Monday of the month, 7 PM. Contact: Tessa Janian,
tessa.janian@comcast.net
for info on location
Harry S. Truman Club
Burns Vic
541-3024
JFK Democratic Club
Meetings: 1st Saturday of the month, 10 AM at the Raley’s
at Hazel and Madison
Contact: Mike Dillon, (916) 967-3157, mikedillon2@comcast.net
Lincoln Democratic Club
Meetings: 1st Thursday of the month, Orchard Creek Lodge, Lincoln
Hills, 7 PM
Contact: Della Sharief, (916) 408-5028
Rocklin/Roseville Area Democrats
Meetings: 3rd Tuesday of the month, Rocklin Library, 5460 Fifth
St., Rocklin, 7 PM. Contact: Glenda Wertenberger, (916) 723-9930,
paulindaw@yahoo.com.
Sacramento County Young Democrats (35 and younger)
Meetings: 1st Tuesday of the month, State Capitol, Room 317, Sacramento,
6:30 PM
Contact: scyd@yahoogroups.com
Stonewall Democratic Club of Greater Sacramento
Meetings: 2nd Monday of the month, Lambda Players Theater, 2427
17th Street, Sacramento , 6 PM
Contact: info@sacstonewall.org
or call (916) 441-1787 or go to www.sactonewall.org
Sun City Democratic Club
Meeting: 4th Tuesday of the month, Sierra Pines Recreation Center,
Whistlestop Way, Sun City, Roseville,
9 AM
Contact: Myra Schimke, (916) 772-4371, mschimke@surewest.net
Town and Country Democratic Club Meeting: 2nd Wednesday of the month, Deterding Park Clubhouse,
1415 Rushden Drive, 7 PM
Contact: Margie Metzler, (916) 921-5008, margiemetz@hotmail.com
, website www.tcdems.org
West Sacramento Democratic Club
P.O. Box 653
West Sacramento, CA 95691
(916) 229-3509
Contact: Billie Hanlon, stbilli@vmmail.teale.ca.gov
Women Democrats of Sacramento County
Meetings: 3rd Monday of the month, SCTA Office, 5300 Elvas Ave.,
Sacramento, 6:30 PM
Contact: JoAnn Souvignier, (916) 971-9601,
josouvign@comcast.net, website www.wdsc.net
Woodland Democratic Club
927 West El Dorado
Woodland, CA 95695
(530) 666-2573
Contact: Lisa Lance, llance@woodland.net
Contact Margie
or 916-921-5008 if you need any of our working documents.
Join our weekly planning sessions: Every Thursday
in June, 6 pm. at the Headquarters. Everyone is welcome.
Info
on all three headquarters:
Downtown Headquarters 2729 P St., Sacramento, CA 95816
Phone: 916-739-6001 - Fax: 916-739-6002
Email: SacDemsOffice@aol.com
Office Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10 am to 5 pm
Elk Grove Headquarters 9089 Elk Grove Blvd., Suite 204
Elk Grove, CA 95624
Grand Opening June 28th
The DPSC (Central Committee of Sac. County) is gearing
up for the November elections, and kicking off with a "Farm
Team" recruitment program. We'd like to see Democrats
running for every seat available in this county. We as a
club strongly support this effort and stand poised to support
anyone who wants to run for office.
Mike Whiteside, Chair of the Campaign Services Committee,
is in the process of identifying boards and districts, and
would love information from YOU regarding both boards that
need people, and people who are eligible and qualified to
run for those seats. We are asking you if you know of any
individuals who are:
- Dedicated and competent
- A leader willing to work with others
- Civic minded - willing to learn
- Good Democrats with interest in their community
- Hard working and have integrity
Most of the seats (fire, water, & park boards) do not
require a tremendous amount of work or expertise.
If you have such members, please let us know. We will identify
which positions they are eligible for, and we're planning
a full program of support to help them run a campaign and
win.
If you have questions, please contact Mike Whiteside
at (C): 916-802-3072 or Email: mikensac@comcast.net
.
To all our Stonewall and other gay brothers
and sisters,
I speak both for myself and for Town & Country
Democratic Club, in congratulating all of you on one
of the most substantial decisions yet handed down
by any state Supreme Court, which acknowledges your
full membership in the society in which we all live.
We support you completely, both in the aggregate,
and personally, as our friends!
We also know that while the Supreme Court's decision
was a huge affirmation of the equal rights of all
citizens, there are still people who believe that
the majority rules even in the case of issues which
would unjustly and unconstitutionally cause immense
harm to a particular group of Americans. We fervently
hope the scales have tipped, and in fact, the majority
does not believe that gay people are less than any
other citizen
s in any way, and that all Americans
need, and deserve, to live in loving families of their
choosing and to enjoy the pursuit of happiness as
do we all.
Margie Metzler
Next
Town & Country Monthly Meeting Wed., July 9, 7 pm!
July meeting: Media
issues. Ron Cooper of Access Sacramento (www.accesssacramento.org)
will talk about media issues stemming from devastating changes
to the FCC over the years, and what we as citizens can do
to help. Democracy depends on the free flow of information!
Town & Country
Endorsed Candidates (general election Nov.) Heather Fargo for Mayor
1630 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: 916-443-2676
Email: dhoward@fargoformayor.com
Website: www.heatherfargo.net
This video was made by Lyn's son, Sean Stueve,
and it stars venerable actors Arnie Godmintz and John Bernier!
We made the finals, though we didn't win the grand prize.
But as John Bernier told me, "We already won!"
We had a ball, we made it to the finals, and we got incredible
support from all of you!
Sue Wilson
article in the Bee: Sunday, May 11, 2008
There's a mournful hush in Sacramento these
days, the empty sound of an entire political viewpoint quieted.
More than 32,000 weekly listeners who once tuned to KSAC
(1240 AM) to hear partisan Democrats beat up on President
George W. Bush, now hear only Christian hip-hop.
There's nothing wrong with Christian hip-hop; it's a great
outlet for artists breaking out of the gansta rap mold.
But there are six other commercial radio stations licensed
in the Sacramento area programming the Christian message.
In the political realm, three local radio stations program
264 hours of partisan Republican radio talkers beating up
on Democrats every week. Now, zero stations program any
Democratic view whatsoever: 264-0.
This follows the national trend revealed in the 2007 Free
Press and Center for American Progress study, "The
Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio." Nationally,
90 percent of commercial talk radio is conservative; only
10 percent is liberal. (This study does not include Public
Radio, which by statute is required to provide differing
points of view. One is as likely to hear a Republican's
views as a Democrat's. And NPR hosts don't beat up on anybody.)
KSAC shared another characteristic with other liberal radio
stations: It had a tiny, 1,000-watt transmitter. Tough for
a little station that barely reached Sacramento's suburbs
to compete with 50,000 watt giant KFBK, whose signal stretches
from Chico to Modesto, from Reno to that little town of
San Francisco. Despite KFBK reaching millions more potential
listeners, KSAC mustered an audience nearly 20 percent that
of KFBK's. (Its ratings were double local conservative station
KTKZ, which has a 5,000-watt transmitter.) And Arbitron
showed the progressive station's audience was steadily growing.
KSAC was the little station that could.
This article was one of the most valuable
the Bee has ever printed. Town & Country Democrats
(www.tcdems.org) has
a group dedicated to bringing back Progressive radio which
has been absolutely stymied, after demonstrating, joining
the stations (KCTC and, now, KSAC) to help drum up support
and advertisers, and listening rabidly. We participated
in events Christine Craft organized and we loved what
our stations did for us. We tried everything, including
starting our own stations. The 1996 Congressional action
you cited obliterated smaller, local stations and created
an environment where a radio station costs many millions
of dollars if you can find one for sale at all.
We are bereft without our Progressive radio hosts because
they are educated, civil, and most of all, while they
certainly ferreted out information favorable to our Progressive
worldview, they give us facts and they annotated their
sources. Thom Hartmann, Peter B. Collins, Randi Rhodes
and others told us exactly where they got their information
and their websites had direct links. This information
was often not available anywhere on TV, newspapers or
other radio stations. They also took calls from everyone
and treated them civilly. They sent us to bookstores,
libraries and websites in droves, and we loved them for
it. None of this happens with conservative talk shows!
Democracy can survive only if voters have the
facts they need to make thoughtful decisions.
My personal efforts now have been to join Access Sacramento
(http://www.accesssacramento.org/
) and the common Cause Sacramento Media Group (http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=2896519).
I am talking all the TV and radio classes I can find.
I also listen to Air America, Ed Schultz and Peter B Collins
on the Internet whenever I can. But none of this gives
me back my friends on my car radio, and that leaves a
huge void in my life.
From John Chendo:
Mark Twain, a local Sacramento reporter
in the 1850's, said: "It's very hard to change the
opinion of anyone who's being paid to hold it."
We have a media market, especially among talk radio hosts,
which is dominated by big corporations, some of them under
the cover of religious tax exemptions.
Ronald Reagan, when he rescinded the Fairness Doctrine
in 1987, which had worked for fifty years , said that
he thought big corporations would voluntarily provide
fair and balanced reporting, because big corporations
automatically act in the nation's best interest (this
was before the pervasive growth of multinational corporations).
A strange idea: that corporations, but not people, can
be automatically trusted to observe ethics and laws by
making all laws and regulations "voluntary"
for corporations.
This has led us down a slippery slope of unchecked permissiveness
for the rich to get up to 45% of media market control.
Not having access to a variety of sources (e.g. Why is
there always a Business section but never a Labor section?)
has led to the current corruption of language, and a budget-busting
war without being declared and with no specific reasons
-- no exits, and overwhelming repercussions on every state
and local budget. As LBJ proved: we cannot afford both
"guns and butter." Our war budget hits every
U.S. school, construction site, hospital, health plan,
food price, fuel cost, and emergency preparedness. We
have a Katrina-kind of government run by no-bid contractors-in-chief
who get to decide what we hear on the radio. Mostly noisy
screaming which makes torture seem normal.
It is worth remembering that the Kremlin-sponsored newspaper
was named "Pravda," the (Absolute) Truth.
Thomas Jefferson wrote: "If a nation expects to
be ignorant and free,in a state of civilization,it expects
what never was and never will be." Pope John XXIII
in Pacem in Terris (1963) referred to the UN Declaration
of Human Rights of 1948: "in most solemn form, the
dignity of a person is acknowledged to all human beings;
and as a consequence there is proclaimed, as a fundamental
right, the right of free movement in search for truth...and
the right to a dignified life."
As you probably know by now, our only
progressive radio station, KSAC 1240 AM, morphed into a
gospel music station this week. On April 9, our meeting
was devoted to a discussion of what happened, and immediate
and long-term possible solutions.
Steve Reed and Arnie Godmintz shared
their insider information about what happened this week.
Both agreed that it was not ideology, but economics, that
caused KSAC to drop progressive talk. We knew they needed
more sponsors, and Steve talked about his efforts in that
direction. They really needed some large corporate sponsors,
but that never happened for a combination of reasons. David
Quinlan, who is new to our group,, brought in the Arbitron
ratings, which showed that KSAC was trending up and was
by no means in a bad position. Steve noted that Progressive
talk shows need to have marketing staff familiar with the
Progressive community.
Margie noted that she is educating
herself about media issues and technology by taking classes
at Access Sacramento. (They're free and you can have your
own online show after you complete training: http://www.accesssacramento.org/).
We came to the conclusion that our
best bet in the long run is to talk to other local stations
and get them interested in running "our" shows.
We will all see what we can do individually and stay in
contact. (Contact Margie at margiemetz@hotmail.com
to get on the list.)
In the meantime, Steve talked about
his SIRIUS receiver and how to use it, Lyn Stueve described
using an IPOD to download podcasts, and we all noted that
you can still hear some stations online:
Randi Rhodes has left Air America and is now
on Nova M (along with Mike Malloy): listen live at http://www.novamradio.com/live/,
You can also download Podcasts from this site.
PLEASE email information for future
newsletters, such as Durston event photos, Letters to
the Editor and Opinions from local newspapers, and local
volunteer opportunities for the Durston campaign to:
r.hundrieser@comcast.net or msabin@sabwis.com;
Phone: 916-622-VOTE
Sac Dems Downtown
Headquarters
Democrats have an office located
at 2729 P Street (one house away from the corner of 28th
St and across from Winn Park) near Mid-Town in Sacramento.
Sam Catalano is the Executive Secretary,
and the office is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10
am to 6 pm. If you have an hour or two to spare come on down
and help or just check us out.
Barack Obama: www.sacramentoforobama.com
Phone: (916) 400-3252
Email: sacramentoforobama@comcast.net
Location: 1420 65th Street, at the corner of 65th &
Folsom Blvd. (enter the driveway at Office Depot)
Hours: Mon – Fri 10 - 7
Sat & Sun 10 - 6
Club News
Notes
on our Newsletter
The Newsletter is now in the capable hands of Margie Metzler
and John Bernier, and I am optimistic that we will have
contributions from many more of you in the future. If you
want to receive the newsletter electronically only,
please contact Margie at margiemetz@hotmail.com.
Otherwise, you will get the print newsletter as always,
and of course all newsletters are available here.
We would love to have participation from all of you! If
you have items to contribute, or suggestions for articles
you would like to see, please contact us!
More Information (Join the Club application,
legislature and media phone numbers, Info on sending letters,
Medicare Part D info, Progressive Calendar of events (SFD),
Club Bylaws
Back to
top Let's
take our good name back! Margie Metzler is campaigning
to take back our name, the Democratic Party,
from the Republicans, who have been calling us the Democrat
Party for years. The
-ic matters!There is no such thing as the
Democrat Party (even Democrats have erred, and we want
them to stop.) Join the battle at http://www.ourgoodname.com
and fight back. Back to
top
• NPR Sac area:
KQEI (part of KQED), 90.9 FM. Fresh Air: 1 and
7 pm
• KXJZ - FM (Cap Radio): 89.3 FM.
Fresh Air, 9 a.m.; Talk of the Nation, totn@npr.org
or 800-989-8255
• KVMR FM 89.5 Sac / 105.1 Truckee
- the expanded news at 6:00pm is very informative AND they
broadcast Democracy Now! at 7:00pm weekdays. Office phone,
(530) 265-9073; Studio Phone: (530) 265-9555 or (800) 355-KVMR
(5867) in N. California only; FAX: (530) 265-9077; Mail:
KVMR, 401 Spring St., Nevada City, CA 95959; Email:
news@kvmr.org for the News department, or office@kvmr.org
for everything else.
The
Town & Country Democratic Club has a 40-year history of serving
Democrats and their candidates and elected officials in the greater
Sacramento area. Our club meets monthly and usually invites a
public official or political expert on a specific topic to address
the group. We also discuss legislation, initiatives and conduct
endorsements for each election.
Additionally,
we have a vibrant membership that actively represents the Democratic
Party in public through voter registration efforts, Get Out the
Vote (GOTV) efforts, precinct walking and phone banking. For more
information about our club, please contact us via phone or email!
You may change your password and/or username online
on the cadem website, which we recommend, by logging in at www.cadem.org/conv2005
and clicking on "change password" on the left side of
the page.
Town & Country Democratic Club meets monthly
at the clubhouse of Deterding Park (1415
Rushden Drive -- click here for map) at the corner of Rushden
Drive and Somerset Road near Watt Avenue and Arden Way in Sacramento.
We meet the 2nd Wednesday of every month at 7:00 pm. Please join
us!
