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Here in Los Angeles, Marcy Winograd has been an icon of those same kinds of values and principles... and tactics. She announced this week that she's moving in the opposite direction though. A former Democratic Party activist and congressional candidate, she's re-registered as a Green Party member. She explained what's she's doing in a post at the California Progress Report, part of which is reproduced below:

After the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, with its codification of imprisonment without charge or trial, I could no longer register voters for the Democratic Party – even with the hope of involving new registrants in the California Democratic Party’s popular Progressive Caucus. If I could not ask someone to join the Democratic Party, I could not in good conscience stay in the party, even as an insurgent writing resolutions and platform planks to end our wars for oil.

Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats, beholden to big-money donors or to a jobs sector dependent on militarism, vote for perpetual war and the surveillance state, replete with secret wiretaps, black hole prisons, and targeted assassinations. Far too many who are fearful or bought by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee vote for legislation that relegates Palestinians to second-class citizenship and threatens to take our country to the brink of an unthinkable war on Iran

My, that twenty years went rather fast.

I really wish I could be with you this evening. ABC counts as
one of the concrete successes I can point to from a lifetime
of political and community activism. Victories and success
make for far better war stories than the usual reports of the
repeated bruising we endure in our work to reclaim our lives
from the corporations.

Two decades ago, our nation was on the verge of beginning
its longest war in our history against the people of Iraq (a
war which spanned six terms of four Presidents, costing the