No I don't think so at all, they are prevalant, but really dont think there has been that much growth, Denver had a Hispanic mayor in the 80s as well to one of the first major US cities to do so. There has been massive growth in the past ten years but 95% of it has been more white people moving in
U.S. Presidential Race: Official Thread
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
-
In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran are here to talk about a frustrating 2 points dropped at Crystal Palace. They then discuss the regeneration of Old Trafford. Finally, Nik is joined by special guest Michael Statham from the Football Oranje podcast - who gives us a more in depth look at our EL opposition FC Twente, and then runs through the (many) Dutch connections currently at United.
whatever the reasons....the state has been steadily trending Democrat...and in a huge economic problem year...the trend is not going to reverse...
Really I'd say the economy is doing quite well in Colorado, other than the housing market which is shit everywhere other than Manhattan atm. I'm sure the DNC helped it out as well, plus the tourism money is always guaranteed. Yeah it was closer than I thought it would be last election so the trend has been going on for more than just this election
Intrade Real Time Quotes by state:
Colorado Obama 60.0 McCain 39.1
Virginia Obama 53.9 McCain 48.00
Ohio Obama 53 McCain 48.5
Colorado Obama 60.0 McCain 39.1
Virginia Obama 53.9 McCain 48.00
Ohio Obama 53 McCain 48.5
Truthiness Stages a Comeback
NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.
For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.
Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.
If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.
You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.
Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.
That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.
Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.
For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.
The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.
The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.
Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.
But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.
The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.
This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.
NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.
For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.
Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.
If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.
You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.
Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.
That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.
It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.
After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.
Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.
For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.
The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.
The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.
Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.
But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.
The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.
This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.
One of the things that I dont get about that is that there were so many possible ways to hit the US, I mean how in a month could the US protect against it, a plan so elaborate, yet so simple and easy to conduct. I mean whats the alternative keeping tabs on all Muslims in the country, oh wait that's unconstitutional and everyone is up in arms about that
What?
You were telling us a few weeks ago that it was going to be the most humiliating election for the republicans in modern times.
Squeaky bum time Raoul?
Simply put you can't fault Bush for 9/11, if there is any President who deserves the blame it's Willy Jeffy Clinto
thats ridiculous Alex....
How is it ridiculous, Clinton let the problem fester and 9/11 happened 9 months into Bush's first term
Er... from CBS:
President Bush was told in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes - information which prompted the administration to issue an alert to federal agencies - but not the American public.
Read the brief Bush got on 6th August 2001 here.
The title of the brief:
"Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"
The 9/11 attacks were in the works for months before Bush came to office. And exactly how do defend based on that brief? Impossible. 'Someone might do something with an airplane at some time. Go get 'em.' No one in this country invisioned that type of attack at that point. How do think that many planes were able to be taken over and flown into buildings? If that were to happen today I think some poeple might actually try and retake the plane. Hell, it happend on 9/11. There's not much blame that can be layed on Bush for that. There are lots of things to blame him for, but that's not one.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4734564/
Memos Bush saw about Bin Laden's attacks:
"Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"
"Bin Laden planning multiple operations"
"Bin Laden network's plans advancing"
"Bin Laden threats are real"
"The system was blinking red," Tenet told the commission in private testimony, the panel's report noted.
and
"The document ended with two paragraphs of circumstantial evidence that al Qaeda operatives might already be in the United States preparing "for hijackings or other types of attacks," and that the FBI and the CIA were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May "saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.""
Feel free to keep asserting, "There are lots of things to blame him for, but that's not one." After all, he was only the President.
well Bush is an imbecile....he is excused....
the Republicans get themselves elected...and they are not responsible for anything that happens in their watch.....
ridiculous....
Wow, it's shocking how clueless people are when it comes to military intelligence. I'm not sayng he is blamless but the bulk of the blame cannot go to him. On another note, this intellegence he was supposed to believe but the information about Iraq he was supposed to dismiss. Right? I don't care if he was repub or demo. He could intern blame his father for not finishing the job when he had the chance and that woud be a valid point. Papa Bush fecked up the situation also. If you all think there's no blame in part due to Clinton you're not being objective. There is plenty of bame to go around to both parties over muliple presidencies.
...clueless did you say? yes you certainly are....
thats it...the buck stops with him....
ffs he and Chenny manufactured the 'inteligence' so he could get us into Iraq...please dont get confused....
he had sufficent warnings...and he did feck all...becuase he did not give it any importnace....
If things continue as they are, Obama might win by 100 electoral votes. He's leading in virtually every key swing state and has now drawn even in North Carolina.
There is a definite trend towards the Democrats. I wonder how much of it has to do with them traditionally being thought of as the party of the working man?
Sorry to butt in, but there's a hilarious Palin/Clinton parody video: http://onelittlevictoryblog.com/2008/09/14/snl-palinclinton-parody/
Probably none, as they are actually the party of the Hollywood rich, organized labor bosses, and the non-working man. Their advantage this election is that they are NOT the party of George W. Bush.
Fair enough. I know what kind of party they are, in fact they are similar to Labour in that they don't really reflect the working man's views, but those stereotypes can translate into votes - they do here at least.
Things are trending to the Dems in the states due to voter registration and the continued influx of newly naturalized immigrants who typically vote Democratic. Broad dissatisfaction with Bush administration policies is also a contributing factor.
You've got your mojo back after an extremely worrying week or so.
I liken the dems to the scouse boom/bust cycle.
09/24/08
MSNBC is showing McCain ahead:
McCain: 47%
Obama: 44%
*Gallop poll
This is a bullshit figure. The only way McCain could possibly win is if the voting machines are fixed. I can't see the American public tolerating a third consecutive fixed election.
MSNBC is showing McCain ahead:
McCain: 47%
Obama: 44%
*Gallop poll
This is a bullshit figure. The only way McCain could possibly win is if the voting machines are fixed. I can't see the American public tolerating a third consecutive fixed election.
ABC News has Obama 52 McCain 43 today.
more importanly Obama is ahead in some polls in Florida,Viginia and Indiana....he has pretty much sewn up NM and Colorado.
more importanly Obama is ahead in some polls in Florida,Viginia and Indiana....he has pretty much sewn up NM and Colorado.
Bob--just wanted you to know the elections aren't "fixed" in the conventional Chicago-Daley or the old Long machine in Louisiana tradition. There might be some (many) screwed up machines, but they seem to malfunction as often in areas and states with Democratic regimes as with the GOP in power. At a given local site the votes might be skewed, miscounted, or subject to the fact that the average voter is a complete idiot and can't operate a simple machine properly, but there is no national or even state-wide conspiracy on any given issue or candidate. Further, it isn't a matter of the company (Diebold) making the machines controllling the outcome of the election, as the machines are owned by and programed by the local government prior to the election, far beyond the reach of the corporate entity.
The machines we have in California register the vote, but leave a complete paper trail, so that any contested election is easily (but rather tediously and slowly) recounted by hand. My chief observation after being a precinct inspector collecting votes for the county in the past 14 elections is that far too many people come in unprepared to vote, uninformed on most issues (such as local candidates, bond issues, and legislative/constitutional initiatives) and take too long to mark the ballot incorrectly, fail to vote on each of the myriad items on the ballot, and generally get what they deserve for not taking the election process seriously for more than 5 minutes before entering the polling station. In California, we also have far too many issues on the ballot for the average person suffering from ADD to fill it out correctly.
By the way--the California ballot is so long this election that instead of printing the single ballot in English and Spanish, there have to be two completely separate ballots. It won't be long before the Hmongs and Armenians demand their own ballots as well.
Here it usually translates into money to the candidates. The union leadership can demand that the rank and file contribute to the PAC so that the unions can financially support selected candidates, but cannot control the actions of the average working stiff once he gets into the polling place.
I suppose you are going to dispute the standard GOP actions of caging/disenfancising voters as a matter of fact each election cycle...take OHIO and Michigan as small examples....
...and the GOP is the party that supports the troops....and honors those who gave up their lives so citizens have the right to vote....
FFS!! I guess we should all just bow to the chaste and divine Democratic party.
If you cannot admit that both parties manipulate the system as much as possible to their advantage, discussion on the subject is useless.FFS!! I guess we should all just bow to the chaste and divine Democratic party.
FFS...I have proved my point....only Republicans can say disenfrancising of voters is 'manipulating' the system....
By "caging" do you mean incarcerating felons? That isn't a GOP function. It also wasn't a GOP mandated law that prohibits incarcerated felons, or those on active parole, from voting. Also, describing some actions as "standard GOP" as a "matter of fact" each election cycle is an overstatement.
However, when it comes to criminals like those self-appointed Brown-Shirts who try to intimidate Hispanic voters in places like Orange County, as a prosecutor, I'd like a chance to deal with those people in the manner prescribed by law.
Per "disenfranchising," my memory still runs back to the Daley machine in Chicago that not only "enfranchised" the deceased of Cook County to vote (straight ticket Democratic) but also registered any visitor who signed into a cheap hotel in Cook County and insured their votes counted to. No saints out there for either set of partisans.
What I've recently had concerns about is the absentee or "mail-in" voters who can come under extreme pressure from outside sources and might only be signing their names to what others (labor representatives, minority rights groups "advocates," employers, other family members, etc) are filling out. We really don't have any way of insuring the privacy and sanctity of the votes mailed in, only the ability to limit them to one ballot per registered voter
As I mentioned previously, during elections I don't take a partisan position, I work as an inspector at a precinct and I can report in the last 8 years, there hasn't been a problem at any of my sites.
I might be wrong, but I think 'Red Dreams' is talking about gerrimandering, when he's referring to 'Caging'...
Both sides are guilty of gerrimandering, although the GOP Neo-Con and religous-right have taken this practice of grouping the economically priviledged Ultra-Right against the disenfranchised poor.
It is by this means that the Right-Wing have denied the poor from voting. In my current state of Maryland, machines hadn't been working, the electric had been shut off on election day at a single block (with the electric on across the street), and doors to voting facilities are not open on time for 9-5 people to vote. All of these have been problems that have remained unaddressed for the past two elections that I've known.
Here is my hope if Congress and the Presidency go Democrat:
A. There be a constituional ammendment against the concept of gerrimandering.
or (at the very least)
B. The Democrats undo the gerrimandering design of the GOP. Furthermore, if the Republicans are deadset against the idea of a constitutional ammendment, they should know that the Dems will be just as aggressive in the redesignation of the districts to slant things in the advantage of the Democrats.
As it is, the United States of America doesn't have a fair concept of Democracy.
Both sides are guilty of gerrimandering, although the GOP Neo-Con and religous-right have taken this practice of grouping the economically priviledged Ultra-Right against the disenfranchised poor.
It is by this means that the Right-Wing have denied the poor from voting. In my current state of Maryland, machines hadn't been working, the electric had been shut off on election day at a single block (with the electric on across the street), and doors to voting facilities are not open on time for 9-5 people to vote. All of these have been problems that have remained unaddressed for the past two elections that I've known.
Here is my hope if Congress and the Presidency go Democrat:
A. There be a constituional ammendment against the concept of gerrimandering.
or (at the very least)
B. The Democrats undo the gerrimandering design of the GOP. Furthermore, if the Republicans are deadset against the idea of a constitutional ammendment, they should know that the Dems will be just as aggressive in the redesignation of the districts to slant things in the advantage of the Democrats.
As it is, the United States of America doesn't have a fair concept of Democracy.
Thanks for the possible definition. As a former resident of the Golden State, you remember the way this state is gerrymandered, and it isn't a GOP creation. While we can posture on "disenfranchised poor" v. "economically privileged Ultra-Right," I think thats a bit of an overstatement, especially in a state like California which has the economically privileged Ultra-left as well. Both sides are working very hard in every state to tip the balance of power by manipulation of voting districts.
My experience at the state level in California is that the Democrats are much more committed to and practiced in the art of gerrymandering than their cohorts across the aisle. They also expend vast resources to defeat any proposed amendment or law that would undo the ability of their state lawmakers to draw their own districts.
Enlighten me on the situation in Maryland (which sounds grim for those of us who love to vote and follow the electoral process) and how it's the Republicans' fault. As I recall,they aren't the majority party, so how would they be able to disable the voting machines, turn off the electricity, and keep the doors locked at various polling places, apparently in Democratic strongholds? From the outside, it would appear to be more a systemic problem related to the conditions in those areas (including poor wiring) and irresponsibility of election staff (in opening up the polling place--which I do every election right on time) rather than a deliberate plot by the rich boys who don't live, work, or visit in the areas affected. I agree that the Secretary of State in Maryland (or whoever is in charge of the elections in that fair commonwealth) should be looking into a repeated collapse of the system in certain locations, but is it really "fair and balanced" so suggest that the GOP is at fault for it? Although, of course, it is undoubtedly fun to argue and assign blame where it suits our political bent.
I'd say it's more than likely the corporate interests that are causing issues at the polling places. Oh, and yes this is a majority Dem state... although there are lots of hard right leaning Democrats, those with their hands deeper into the lobby interests. We are doing our best to weed them out.
If you've had a brush with either the insurance industry or organized labor recently, you know that lobby interests are of far more importance to our elected officials than the mere needs of the populace.
please dont be purposly obtuse.....you well know I am refering to what is going on in Michigan. here is an article.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Michigan GOP has
announced plans to use a list of housing foreclosures as the basis for a
broad voter-caging operation, as reported yesterday by Eartha Jane Melzer
in The Michigan Messenger. James Carabelli, chairman of the Republican
Party in Macomb County, Michigan, has announced plans to assign "election
challengers" to polling places to question the eligibility of home
foreclosure victims based on residency. "We will have a list of foreclosed
homes and will make sure people aren't voting from those addresses,"
Carabelli told the Messenger.
Today Teresa James, attorney for the voting rights organization Project
Vote, and author of the 2007 report Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of
Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters, issued the following statement in
response:
The Macomb County GOP's plan is a cynical partisan attempt to suppress
the vote of thousands of low-income and African-American voters, a replay
of the 2004 threats of mass challenges. Just because you're behind on your
mortgage doesn't mean you lose the right to vote. All a foreclosure filing
tells anyone is that the owners are behind on their mortgage; it does not
mean a voter has necessarily moved. Foreclosures take time. And even if the
plan is to only challenge voters whose homes have actually been sold at
auction, the challengers will still achieve nothing but to slow-down voting
and create an intimidating atmosphere at strategically chosen polls.
Michigan law says that challenges may be made at the polls if the
challenger "knows or has good reason to suspect" a voter is ineligible. The
Michigan Secretary of State has clarified this to require that challenges
should be based on "reliable sources or means." Republican challengers with
only a list of foreclosure notices will have NO evidence or reliable source
to suggest that eligible voters have moved and are no longer eligible to
vote.
This is just the latest -- and most transparent -- in a long history of
racially and politically motivated GOP attacks against Michigan voters,
designed to suppress votes by disenfranchising individual voters and
creating confusion and delays at the polls. In 1999, right-wing volunteers
in Hamtramck, Michigan systematically challenged the citizenship of voters
with dark skin and Arabic-sounding names. In 2004 and 2006, Republicans
reportedly recruited thousands of paid challengers to disrupt predominantly
African-American precincts. "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote," a GOP
state representative was quoted as saying in 2004, "we're going to have a
tough time in this election cycle."
As the Messenger reports, Macomb County is in the top three-percent of
counties in the U.S. hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis -- and
African-Americans, as the primary victims of sub-prime lending practices,
make up the majority of these cases. African-Americans also tend to vote
democratic, which is why it's not surprising that the GOP would target
these voters for suppression.
Regardless of politics, no one faced with the possibility of losing
their home should also have to lose their vote. Project Vote is writing to
ask Michigan Secretary of State, Republican Terri Lynn Land, to instruct
election officials that someone's presence on a list of foreclosure notices
is not a legitimate basis for challenging that individual's right to vote.
Project Vote will also send letters to both major parties, reviewing the
acceptable criteria for voter challenges under Michigan law, and if
necessary will file lawsuits on behalf of disenfranchised voters.
In America you get to vote even if you're behind on your bills. All
Americans -- particularly those members of the community hit hardest by the
economic crisis -- deserve a voice and a vote on Election Day.
It seems McCain doesn't want to debate Obama on Friday anymore.
...rats jumping ship?....can you imagine McCain debating on anything without someone preping him...it will be a full hour of his wartime memories....for every question....
Meanwhile, Mr. Red Dreams, from the next day's Detroit Free Press:
GOP won't use foreclosure list to block voters
Macomb County party chair says blog is wrong
BY KATHLEEN GRAY and AMBER HUNT • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS • September 12, 2008
Michigan Republicans will send thousands of challengers to polling places on Election Day, but party officials said they won't be using foreclosed home lists to contest voters.
Their comments followed allegations in a liberal blog, "The Michigan Messenger," that the Macomb County Republican Party would use foreclosure lists to challenge voters who no longer live in their foreclosed homes.
Rumors that Republicans were trying to keep people who had lost their homes from voting went viral on the Internet on Thursday as activists announced plans to rally outside Republican presidential candidate John McCain's Farmington Hills campaign office today to demand the resignation of James Carabelli, the Macomb County GOP chairman.
Carabelli flatly denied quotes attributed to him, saying he told a staffer for the blog that volunteers only would check to make sure that an address in a poll book matches the one the voter gives.
The GOP is "absolutely not" gathering foreclosed home addresses for poll challenges, Carabelli said. He said the blog was "actually kind of shocking. It's completely untrue."
The Michigan Republican Party also won't allow its challengers to use foreclosure lists, spokesman Bill Nowling said.
"What does a name on a foreclosure list tell us? Nothing," Nowling said. "We go into the polling place with the qualified voter file and that is all."
A person's name and address on a foreclosure list doesn't mean he or she has left the home, Nowling said.
Eartha Jane Melzer, who talked to Carabelli for the blog, said she stands by her story but didn't tape her interview.
"It could be that they're embarrassed at having such a cynical tactic exposed," she said.
Under a new state law requiring voters to produce photo identification, poll challengers may check to see that the person voting matches the ID.
In 2004, 4,276 Republican volunteers were challengers in 1,800 Michigan precincts. A similar effort will occur this year, Nowling said.
Democrats and other organizations say the GOP challengers aim to intimidate and suppress the vote.
So, we have two slightly conflicting stories, but the key is that the source for the allegations is a single "blog" claiming the information came from an untaped interview. The reaction of the various groups cited in your article comes from that not necessarily reliable source.
I know it's important for you to believe the initial allegation is true, but I don't think the source of the story would be one I'd rely on without a bit more collaboration.
GOP won't use foreclosure list to block voters
Macomb County party chair says blog is wrong
BY KATHLEEN GRAY and AMBER HUNT • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS • September 12, 2008
Michigan Republicans will send thousands of challengers to polling places on Election Day, but party officials said they won't be using foreclosed home lists to contest voters.
Their comments followed allegations in a liberal blog, "The Michigan Messenger," that the Macomb County Republican Party would use foreclosure lists to challenge voters who no longer live in their foreclosed homes.
Rumors that Republicans were trying to keep people who had lost their homes from voting went viral on the Internet on Thursday as activists announced plans to rally outside Republican presidential candidate John McCain's Farmington Hills campaign office today to demand the resignation of James Carabelli, the Macomb County GOP chairman.
Carabelli flatly denied quotes attributed to him, saying he told a staffer for the blog that volunteers only would check to make sure that an address in a poll book matches the one the voter gives.
The GOP is "absolutely not" gathering foreclosed home addresses for poll challenges, Carabelli said. He said the blog was "actually kind of shocking. It's completely untrue."
The Michigan Republican Party also won't allow its challengers to use foreclosure lists, spokesman Bill Nowling said.
"What does a name on a foreclosure list tell us? Nothing," Nowling said. "We go into the polling place with the qualified voter file and that is all."
A person's name and address on a foreclosure list doesn't mean he or she has left the home, Nowling said.
Eartha Jane Melzer, who talked to Carabelli for the blog, said she stands by her story but didn't tape her interview.
"It could be that they're embarrassed at having such a cynical tactic exposed," she said.
Under a new state law requiring voters to produce photo identification, poll challengers may check to see that the person voting matches the ID.
In 2004, 4,276 Republican volunteers were challengers in 1,800 Michigan precincts. A similar effort will occur this year, Nowling said.
Democrats and other organizations say the GOP challengers aim to intimidate and suppress the vote.
So, we have two slightly conflicting stories, but the key is that the source for the allegations is a single "blog" claiming the information came from an untaped interview. The reaction of the various groups cited in your article comes from that not necessarily reliable source.
I know it's important for you to believe the initial allegation is true, but I don't think the source of the story would be one I'd rely on without a bit more collaboration.