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The New Republican
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Douglas County Republican Central Committee Newsletter
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With help from the Executive Board, the Precinct Committee Persons, and other strategic partners, we are bringing you the news of Douglas County. We hope you enjoy our first edition. If you would like to contribute in the future, please contact info@douglascounty.gop to submit your content.
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Analysis: The appointment of Senator Brock Smith
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Representative David Brock Smith of Port Orford was appointed to his Oregon State Senate seat in Senate District 1 on Wednesday, January 11th at the Roseburg Courthouse. David Brock Smithās ascent to the seat started on December 16th when Dallas Heard endorsed Smith as successor to his seat.
Members of the Oregon Republican Party had known that Dallas Heard was not planning on running for another term as Senator since March 9, 2022 when Heard stepped down from his position as ORP chair, but there had been no announcement of his intent to resign from the Senate until December 15th. His resignation became effective on January 1st.
The Senatorās two weeks notice during the holiday season gave the Republican Parties of Coos, Curry and Douglas Counties very little time to recruit, vet and promote candidates needed for a competitive special election. In late December the Special Election was scheduled for January 7th, with only a 13 day notice before the election date. This short notice of the meeting date caused the Douglas County Republican Party concern that a mandatory 14 day notice was not met and could allow the Special Election to be nullified.
Within the special election process, the Precinct Committee-personās of the Republican Party, instead of the general population of voters, were entitled to vote. Each PCPsā vote represents about 250 constituents within their precinctā¦
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Updates from the Last Board Meeting
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Meetings are generally held the first Saturday of the month. For the last two months, scheduled meetings have needed to be rescheduled to accommodate the Senate and House District vacancies. Normal meetings will resume March 4, 2023.
In January, the board unanimously passed a Declaration regarding the RNC Chair election.
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A Big Headquarters Decision
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Iāve enjoy being your treasurer. We take our commitments to you very seriously. For example, we promised transparency. We delivered by including our 2023 budget, which was unanimously approved by your executive board in January. The money currently held in our checking account is enough for around three months of operation. We have a difficult choice ahead of us. Do we stay in our current location, should we secure a building with lower overall rent costs, or do we shut our doors for now and work from home?
I made the commitment to call ten PCPs per week. You will receive a call from me, and I look forward to hearing any comments or suggestions that you have. What we discuss will be reported back to your executive board. Your voice will be heard.
Our last two board meetings have been well-run and productive. If you have time available, it would be wonderful if you could join us. Board meetings are held at the Republican Headquarters, the first Friday of the month, at 12 noon.
Tom Dole
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Upcoming events in Douglas County and in Oregon.
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Valentineās Dinner & Dance
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Valentine's Dinner & Dance, February 14, 2023, 5pm-9pm
Douglas County Republican Central Committee is hosting a Valentine's Dinner & Dance at the Roseburg Country Club, 5051 Garden Valley Road.
Italian Style buffet will be served. Patriot Quilt will be raffled that night with many great auction items.
Single Tickets $55 / Couple's Tickets $100
Special Guest Speaker: Richard Burke, Executive Director of Western Liberty Network
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2023 Home & Garden Show, March 3rd, 4th & 5th
Douglas County Fairgrounds, Roseburg, OR
- 10am-7pm – Friday
- 10am-5pm – Saturday
- Sunday 10am to 4pm
Our Republican Booth is located in the Community Conference Hall, Space 56.
Looking for volunteers to work in the booth. Contact Elaine to volunteer 541-680-9648
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Western Liberty Network will be hosting the 13th Annual Leadership & Activist Training in Portland on February 4th. Attend the year's premiere grassroots activist and leadership conference! Get what you need to be successful in 2023!
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SOS is dedicated to identifying opportunities to fundamentally change our Douglas County School Boards in order to reflect a moral, classical, factual, and Constitutional approach to educating our children.
Congratulations to the hard-working volunteers on SOS as we celebrate Tim Shawās recent appointment to the Glide School Board!
SOS is progressing on many fronts to identify candidates for thirteen positions targeted throughout Douglas County. Dick Heard, his team of pastors, and concerned citizens are meeting with area churches to gain support recruiting bold candidates from within their communities and congregations.
Filing to run for school board candidate is February 4th through March 16th. With our childrenās very souls under attack, this is a critical time for every concerned Patriot to get involved.
For more information, please contact co-chairs Bob and Tracy Sullivan at 480-459-0926.
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Our Election Integrity committee has been extremely busy this past year determining several goals for elections in Douglas County, and by extension, the State of Oregon. These goals include moving our elections back to one day, in person with ID voting on paper ballots, and hand counting the tally. We recognize that this is not an easy task, and ultimately needs to be conducted on a statewide basis in order to be successful.
Initially, the strategy to accomplish our goals began with looking for fraud in our local elections. Multiple efforts were made utilizing the voter roles for in-person, telephonic, and digital canvasing. However, being unable to afford the $50,000 fee required to purchase the ballot images from our county clerk's office, our research was limited and inconclusive, and the overall results of our canvassing did not unveil a substantial amount of fraud. We have learned that our election system is very complicated, ripe with room for error, and our voter rolls are mismanaged and a huge mess.
There have been three attempts at an Initiative Petition for Douglas County to return to hand counting rather than machine tabulating of election ballots. These petitions have been denied by the county clerk all three times they were submitted, and presently a fourth petition is in the works. Our group successfully circulated several citizen petitions at the Douglas County Fair in August, including petitioning for the county clerk to provide affordable public records, and soliciting for the hand-counting of election ballots.
Through our efforts we have determined that, while our goals for election integrity remain the same, our strategy needs to be adjusted. We have also added additional goals, including: cleaning up and changing the process of the voter rolls; making changes to or eliminating the Oregon DMV motor voter laws; and moving to have vacated elected offices filled by special elections rather than the current system of special appointment. We are currently researching the best means toward accomplishing these initial goals, whether it is through legislative or judicial action, or even another means yet to be considered.
In the past six months there have been a handful of election integrity themed lawsuits in the State of Oregon. Some of these have been filed Pro Se (representing an individual) against specific counties or at the state level. A class action lawsuit has also been filed against the Secretary of State and 13 county clerks, including Douglas Countyās Dan Loomis. Additionally, the State has issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against a citizen who acquired data accidentally sold to them by a county in Oregon.
There are a lot of things happening in regards to Election Integrity across our Nation, state, and county. If you are at all concerned or interested in Election Integrity and would like to help, our committee is always looking for more hands on deck! For more information, please contact Abbie Malek.
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NEED MEMBERS: So far we have 3 members on our committee: Loretta Johnson, George Middlekauff, and Linda Middlekauff. If you have any background in the health professions, weād love to have you join our committee. Contact Linda at 541-784-6306.
CHEMICAL ABORTION: On January 3, the FDA expanded the availability of chemical abortion, Also known as medical abortion, an expectant mother is given 2 pills to be taken 2-3 days apart: Mifepristone, which destroys the progesterone lining of the uterus (nourishes preborn baby); and Misoprostol, which causes contractions and the eventual sloughing off of the preborn baby. Lois Anderson, Director of OR Right to Life gave this statement to the press.
The Family Research Council recently requested readers to send letters to Walgreenās, CVS, & other pharmacies & got 53,000 responses.
HB 2279 was heard by the House Behavioral Health & Health Care Committee on Jan. 23. This bill would repeal the state residency requirement for those seeking Physician Assisted Suicide, now known as Death with Dignity and would also fully fund the expenses of those who come from out of state to obtain assistance in dying via a physicianās prescription.
The next step for this bill is to be assigned to a committee work session where it could be sent to the floor for a vote, or it may be sent to the Ways & Means Committee since it has a fiscal impact.
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During the January 11th Senate District 1 Meeting that appointed David Brock Smith to the Senate seat vacated by Senator Dallas Heard, Commissioner Tim Freeman explained that the commissioners have appointed 9 elected official appointments in 8 years, and that āThe ones that left early created the problem. The Commissioners are here to fix a problem they did not create.ā
After all nine commissioners of Coos, Curry and Douglas County voted unanimously for David Brock Smith, Tom Kress stated that Smith was āby far the most qualified, but not only most qualified but somebody that earned itā¦we are lucky to have David Brock Smith as our Senator representing Douglas County and this Districtā.
David Brock Smith has sponsored 25 bills covering a variety of topics in the last two weeks of January; a sampling follows:
1. Senators David Brock Smith and Tim Knopp are sponsoring Senate Bill 749 which states: āAn athletic organization may not designate, classify, name, categorize or otherwise indicate as specific for females, any athletic activity, sports team, sports league, athletic program, athletic competition or contests for which the athletic organization permits participation by persons whose biological sex is male.ā
Translation for SB 749: When a biological male is permitted to participate in any athletic event with an athletic organization, that organization may not indicate the event as specific for females.
When asked, David Brock Smith claimed the bill was to keep males from competing with females in athletics; a big difference from what it actually says.
2. David Brock Smith and Virgle Osborne are sponsoring House Bill 2244 that states: āIn a county in which the terms of the three offices of county commissioner are not staggered because two positions elected to fill midterm vacancies were extended to four-year terms, the current term of the third office of county commissioner shall be ex- tended by two years so that the terms of the three offices are staggeredā¦This 2023 Act being necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is declared to exist, and this 2023 Act takes effect on its passage. LC 196ā
Chris Boice is currently in County Commissioner Position 3, and therefore would receive the two-year extension. This results in legislation substituting and thus circumventing the votersā choice for the duration of those two years.
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Douglas County Citizens Coalition
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The Douglas County Citizens Coalition (DCCC) was started in August 2021 primarily due to the uproar caused by the mandated vaccine regulations which cost many people their jobs. The DCCC is a local group of people in Douglas County that are dedicated to peacefully working together and protecting our freedoms by taking intelligent action, offering real solutions to those in power, standing with each other when needed, and using the Constitution and its supporting laws as our indisputable platform.
Meeting regularly, the DCCC has shared substantial information and completed numerous action items in the past year and a half, including: helping nursing students at UCC fight for the ability to submit religious exemptions to avoid expulsion for refusing the Covid vaccine; submitting affidavits for filing a writ of mandamus at the state level; writing letters to representatives; attending countless local government board and council meetings; recruiting new PCP members; and, manning an informational and canvassing booth at the Douglas County Fair.
Several factions which developed under the umbrella of the Coalition and also meet regularly include: Education (birthing the local chapter of Mom's 4 Liberty), Election Integrity, and Emergency Preparedness.
The DCCC is a great place to congregate, meet others in your community, and find ways to be involved and take action! The Coalition has a website that is under development, and should be completed soon.
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Youāre on social media? So are we!
Weāre building a social media army to reach far and wide. We want to recruit Republicans, share information, and get feedback from every corner of Douglas County. If you post on social media regularly, you can join the Public Relations team and help us win in Oregon again.
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Iāve come to realize that my āright to lifeā is tenuous at bestā¦ as is my āright to libertyā. As an aging adult, only my āright to pursue happinessā continues to offer consolation. Indeed, as long as I continue to draw breathā¦ and remain consciousnessā¦ I will confidently lay claim to my āright to pursue happinessā. What I was given in the beginning, and what I remain truly thankful for, is simply āthe CHANCE to liveā.
My mother, like many women, had a troubled pregnancy and lost a child. It was much harder on her than it was on my little brother who never knew āthe CHANCE to liveā. He never got to go hunting and fishing with dad, and he never felt our mothers warm embrace or gazed into her smiling face. He missed it all, and Iām sorry for him, because it was some wonderful stuff. Perhaps he went straight to heavenā¦ I donāt know, but if thatās what happened, he was the lucky one. Unlike the three of us who survived, he didnāt have to watch mom die of breast cancer at forty-five, or struggle with dadās suicide two years later. It seems as though āthe CHANCE to liveā, and the āRIGHT to pursue happinessā come with a high price. And in the end, death covers us all like a blanket of snow, and all of usā¦ those of us who die in the wombā¦ and those of us who see old ageā¦ wait together for the spring.
I belong to a movement called āTHE RIGHT TO LIFEā. This branding is foolish, and we should change it immediately!
Donāt get me wrong, I believe that it is a sin to intentionally end a healthy pregnancy.
All Iām saying is, letās call it āTHE CHANCE TO LIVEā movement, and letās help the women who are considering abortion to feel empathy for the human within. Why pit the ārightsā of the mother against the ārightsā of the fetus? SUCH FOOLISHNESS!
Todd Vaughn
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We want to hear from you! What is the America First Movement and where do you stand?
We would like to know where The People stand on this important issue. America First comes from the campaign platform of President Donald J. Trump and before him, the Tea Party movement. You can read more about it in the 2017 Presidential Inaugural Address.
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Much is going on in Douglas County, with special elections, upcoming Central Committee meetings, the RNC Leadership Election, School Board elections in May, and the Valentineās Day Dance, just to name a few. All the while the PCPs are growing in numbers and precinct groups are becoming more effective. Multiple committees are working on our Schools (SOS/M4L), changing our election process (Election Integrity), and searching for America First Candidates to serve.
Wow, there is a lot of work to do, and we can use all the help available. As PCPs you have already shown that you care about what direction America is going. We humbly ask for your help and support as we move closer towards Liberty in Douglas County, Oregon, and America.
It takes daily involvement of many people to move these efforts forward. All of us on your Executive Board welcome your input and any help you are able to provide. There are Central Committee meetings every other month (the next is on Feb. 11th), and Noon meetings every Tuesday at the HQ; both provide a great place to start in finding a perfect fit for your talents. You are welcome to help as much or as little as you like, but one thing is for sure: America needs your support and it must start here, at the local level.
May God Bless you and your family,
Larry D Reeves
Executive Board Chair
Douglas County Central Committee
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