Tim was informed by Lieutenant Weirich that he was being moved to the SHU because an unidentified congressman had called from Washington DC, complaining of an email that Tim had sent to a friend. Tim was inquiring about the reported business practices of one of his legal fund contributors, threatening to return the money if their values no longer aligned with his own. According to Prison officials, Tim will continue to be held in isolated confinement pending an investigation. There is no definite timeline for inmates being held in the SHU — often times they await months for the conclusion of an investigation.

“Tim DeChristopher inmate #16156-081 be immediately removed from the Special Housing Unit (SHU) and placed back in the Minimum Security Camp at FCI Herlong.”

If you’d like to say more, here are a few key talking points we suggest:

* Moving Tim DeChristopher to SHU based on the complaint of an unidentified Congressman doesn’t make sense. Why is Congress intervening in one inmates detention status, anyway?
* Keeping inmates in isolated confinement for an indefinite amount of time awaiting a hearing is not humane and is not acceptable.
* *FOR CONGRESSIONAL MEMBERS* If they are your congressperson, tell them about the situation, [read here] and ask them if they know who ordered the transfer, and that you’d like them to take a look into it and get back to you promptly. Ask them why Congress is taking such an interest in the emails of one inmate. Tell them that Tim is a nonviolent offender who was wrongly charged and convicted to begin with, and was placed in a minimum security camp because he posed no threat to anyone. If you have time, mention that an oil and gas company owned by William Koch was recently found to have conspired to defeat a BLM oil and gas lease auction, but was merely fined, while Tim sits in isolated confinement after being charged with two felonies. If you call Jason Chaffetz, ask him to launch an investigation in his oversight committee.

About Tim:
http://www.progressive.org/tim_dechristopher_conviction_williams.html

Then came Barack Obama, and Cecil fell in love. "The war thing was big," he remembers. "I had a friend who went to Iraq and died. Obama’s whole opposition to the war was very important to me." He packed up his car and drove all the way across the country to become an Obama organizer in New Hampshire, then Maine, then Vermont. Because he was good at it, he was named deputy field director in Oregon, then one of two deputies in a crucial Midwestern state. After the election, in Washington, he was one of the principles in setting up a major new national progressive activist group.

...

You could call Cecil a progressive. Just don't call him a Democrat. As intense as his alienation from the Republican Party is his disinclination to state any party identity at all. He says, "I feel more attached to a politics of hope and optimism than I do to the Democratic Party"

...

The turn away from party identification has been a long-term American trend: According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans don't consider themselves members of a political party, compared to 36 percent in 2002 and 33 percent in 1988. But that trend has been all the more accelerated among young people — and even more so among young progressives. A study by Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement in the key swing state of Nevada found that youth were 11 percent of registered voters in the 2008 election, but just 7.85 percent in October of 2011 – meaning a key Obama constituency in 2008 will have thinned out for 2012. More menacingly for Dems, those same researchers found that in North Carolina, a Southern state where in 2008 Obama scored an apparently historic map-changing victory, Democratic registration among 18-25 year olds was 300,000 in 2008 – and only 265,000 in 2011. Republican registration among the same age cohort is about the same. Nationally, Republican youth registration has gone up—which means that the Republican Party is bucking the trend: right-of-center kids seem perfectly happy calling themselves Republicans, at the same time that young lefties are becoming increasingly chary of being called Democrats.

....


The people running the Democratic Party itself laid down their bet on that question long ago: Take 'em for granted. It makes more sense, a generation of Democratic strategists agree, to plug for "independent" voters in the middle, even at the expense of strong stands for traditionally Democratic constituencies. Jimmy Carter started the trend, deliberately shutting out unions from decision-making in his administration, canceling spending projects on infrastructure, and explaining in his 1978 State of the Union, "Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Clinton, of course, said the same thing — "the age of big government is over" — then made "triangulation" -- explicitly positioning himself as an adversary of Democrats in Congress -- the core of his reelection strategy. Barack Obama, as we know, has made such post-partisan gestures the soul of his political identity.