Up The Mainstream

Check out this powerful Obama ad.

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My thanks to Wally Balin for sharing this bit of topical humor with me.

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose
handwas caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a
conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah
Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President .

The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.'

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post
turtle was.

The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you
come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post
turtle.'

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued
to explain. 'You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't
belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and you just
wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.'

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Who is this wonderful woman? I might just have to break down and get cable TV!

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, here's another great reason to repeal California's "super majority" rule to pass the state budget. I hope Arnold sits on his blue pencil and takes it where he's sticking it to low-income seniors.

Arnold Raises Taxes on Low-Income Seniors
by Paul Hogarth‚ Sep. 25‚ 2008

As if this year's state budget wasn't horrific enough, the Governor just made it worse. By exercising his constitutional power to "blue-pencil" out specific items, Arnold Schwarzenegger abolished the Senior Citizens Renters' Tax Assistance—a 40-year-old program that gives rebates to low-income elderly tenants of up to $347.50 a year. He also took $41 million out of a similar tax credit program for low-income homeowners. A Governor who wouldn't even restore the top income tax bracket for rich people to Reagan-era levels somehow found it appropriate to abolish a modest tax credit for vulnerable seniors. As momentum grows to repeal the two-thirds rule to pass a state budget (which has paralyzed our state government year after year), it's also time to repeal the Governor's ability to "blue pencil" items out—which he has now abused twice in two years.

Posted by Dan Carter at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was waiting in a line to get into a concert at the Sierra Nevada Big Room the other day when I overheard a conversation between a female Obama supporter and a male McCain supporter. Almost immediately the talk steered toward Sarah Palin. The McCain man was singing the party line and mentioned something about Sarah's speech at the RNC. The Obama woman pounced on that like a dog on a bone. She said something like, "Yeah, she didn't even write that speech...it sounded to me like it was written by Karl Rove!" To which the McCain man responded with his belief that Sarah had written the speech and "Where did you hear that? On the Internet?"

About that time they were joined in the line by another woman and I screamed, "Wait a minute sweetie, no jumping line!" Well not really. It was cool in this context. Anyway, the Obama woman welcomed her friend with, "It's a good thing you came when you did, we were talking politics." It's also a good thing because I was about to jump into their conversation with the facts: Sarah Palin's RNC speech was written by one of GW Bush's speechwriters Matthew Scully. By all accounts Sarah did a fine job mouthing the words...but she certainly did not write them. Yeah, yeah, I know, most national politicians don't write all or even any of their important speeches, but they come to own them when they are delivered.

According to the following article, Sarah Palin's job in Alaska is being handled by McCain surrogates as well.

McCain Campaign Running Alaska While Palin Campaigns
stumble digg reddit del.ico.us news trust mixx.com
MATT VOLZ | September 25, 2008 04:13 AM EST |

Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin talks to the media prior to her meeting with Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008, in New York. (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The McCain campaign is speaking for the Alaska state government these days, especially when it wants to ensure that nothing embarrassing about Gov. Sarah Palin emerges before Election Day.

Questions for the Palin administration are most often answered by McCain staffers, including Meghan Stapleton, a former Palin spokeswoman; Taylor Griffin, who worked for President Bush's campaigns in 2000 and 2004; and Ed O'Callaghan, a McCain campaign lawyer and former federal prosecutor from New York.

They have clamped down on information flowing out of state government, especially when it comes to the so-called Troopergate investigation. The inquiry centers on whether Palin abused her power by firing the public safety commissioner after he refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper. The McCain group even attached a "truth squad" moniker to Troopergate news conferences this week.

The presidential race has kept Palin out of Alaska for all but three days since Sen. John McCain announced on Aug. 29 that he had chosen her as his running mate. This week, Palin was in New York for her first-ever meetings with world leaders, a trip to the World Trade Center site and an interview with CBS' Katie Couric.

Even Palin's lieutenant governor, Sean Parnell, said keeping in touch has been difficult. And since hackers broke into Palin's Yahoo e-mail account last week, he said, it has dropped off entirely.

"Until she was hacked, we were communicating just about daily. Now I'm talking with her chief of staff," Parnell said. "I saw her in person when she came home about a week ago, but I haven't spoken to her since."

In Palin's absence, messages left with the governor's office are usually returned by the McCain campaign. A recent request for information was answered by a governor's spokesman with a sad smile and a shake of the head.

Even a message left on the cell phone of a hometown friend of Palin was returned by a McCain campaign staffer. The friend agreed to be interviewed by a reporter only after she was reassured the campaign had given its approval.

Such actions, not unusual when a governor runs for national office, have prompted questions in close-knit Alaska about whether Palin has abdicated too much of her role. The Anchorage Daily News asked in an editorial, "Is it too much to ask that Alaska's governor speak for herself, directly to Alaskans, about her actions as Alaska's governor?"

"I think that with the Troopergate thing kind of unfolding the way it is, it would seem to make more sense for her to be around, at least be available," said Graham Smith, a 28-year-old employee for an oil and gas industry trade group who was drinking coffee outside an Anchorage cafe. "She might be paying attention, she might not. Nobody really knows because she's off doing her campaign thing."

Palin spokesman Bill McAllister, who largely vanished from the public eye the first half of September, emerged this week and denied that Palin had disengaged.

"The fact of the matter is the McCain campaign is not running state government. We want to talk to the press but we want to do so in a way that separates state government from national politics," he said. "We're going to try to walk a fine line."

John W. Katz, special counsel to Palin, said the governor has made it clear "that she is in charge, she's in touch and all the gubernatorial decisions are going past her." Aides cited the appointment of a new state public safety commissioner, which she approved during her three-day visit back to Alaska earlier this month.

McAllister said no major policy decisions are pending, her staff is compiling next year's budget requests and she is in daily communication by phone and e-mail with her chief of staff.

Parnell, meanwhile, said he has taken over giving many of Palin's speeches and has taken a more active interest in Alaska's budget and the governor's legislative agenda.

"I'm speaking several more times a week _ like, for instance, I'm about to go meet the president of Iceland," Parnell said.

___

Associated Press writers Garance Burke and Martha Mendoza and contributed to this report.

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This from Steve Young....

An ABC/Wash Post poll found that, among likely voters, Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago, in the days immediately following the Republican National Convention, the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent. As a point of comparison, neither of the last two Democratic nominees -- John F. Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000 -- recorded support above 50 percent in a pre-election poll by the Post and ABC News.

And for those of you who enjoy such things, a possible preview of the next McCain corruption scandal. Oh, he's a rebel alright!

Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)
This Is HUGE - and It SHOULD End McCain's Bid for the Presidency
By Maryscott OConnor
Created Sep 24 2008 - 12:18am

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING [1]

John McCain's CAMPAIGN MANAGER, Rick Davis took a leave of absence -- that is, he "stopped taking a salary" -- from his lobbying firm in 2006... but that firm has been accepting FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS a MONTH until...

LAST MONTH. [2] For, apparently, no reason. No work has been done by Davis's firm on behalf of Freddie Mac since Davis "stopped drawing a salary." John McCain and his campaign claimed as recently as TWO DAYS AGO that Rick Davis has NOTHING TO DO with Freddie Mac. Nothing. And that he has NEVER lobbied for Freddie Mac.

Why was Freddie Mac paying Rick Davis's lobbying firm $15 THOUSAND a MONTH until 24 days ago? [3]

THIS IS F***ING HUGE.

No, seriously. If this is not THE NUMBER ONE STORY in the media this week, there is something VERY VERY VERY wrong with the media and with us for not MAKING them cover it as the NUMBER ONE STORY.

Because THIS IS FUCKING HUGE.

Connect the dots: McCain... Rick Davis... Freddie Mac... FINANCIAL APOCALYPSE... Government Bail Out.

John McCain = CORRUPTION

He has two choices (aside from simply throwing his hands in the air and admitting to the American people that his campaign is a disaster and, further, properly reflects what his Administration would look like): Either he throws Davis under the bus and claims total ignorance -- which makes him look... totally ignorant; or they circle the wagons and McCain marches into the Valley of Death with a huge, flashing red sign over his head that says: MOST CORRUPT CANDIDATE EVER. And a tattoo on his forehead that reads: PROPERTY OF FREDDIE MAC.

Naturally, it appears the McCain campaign has opted for the latter approach. And the only thing standing between their SUCCEEDING at this outrageous tack and the whole goddamned country erupting into Watergate-sized horror at this... is the media -- and us.
_______
Rage, rage against the Lying of the Right [4]

About author
Maryscott O'Connor runs the liberal community blog, MY LEFT WING [5], featured on the , right beneath the Pope on Easter Sunday a year after she created it. She was NOT pleased with the picture and would like you to know that she is not even CLOSE to being that grotesquely unattractive.

Posted by Dan Carter at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mommy, mommy...that bad lady is saying bad things about Conservatism...waaaah!

(clip)
"The Myth of the Free Market is exactly that - a myth. It’s a Utopian model that does not work in real life, because it only works if all things are equal - if the worker, the employer, and the consumer all have equal power and influence. And we know that is not true at all."

Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)
Conservatism - The Elephant in the Room
By Alicia Morgan

Well, here we are at last.

When I started writing The Price of Right over two years ago, the idea that I wanted to express in the book was that, as horrific a president as George W. Bush was, he was not the cause but the ultimate expression of a systematically destructive social, economic and political ideology that was driving our country away from democracy and towards, if not fascism, certainly feudalism.

It is not only Bush, but the system that produced a Bush - conservatism. It is conservatism itself that made the Worst President Ever a reality.

Ever since the 60s, when a consortium of über-wealthy conservative Republican power-brokers decided to wage war on liberals by linking everything bad in society to liberalism, and making ‘liberal’ a pejorative of the worst kind, conventional wisdom laid the blame for all of society’s ills at the feet of liberalism. Even liberals themselves accepted this - Democrats no longer wished to be called ‘liberal’ when that word could lose you an election faster that you could spit - and attempted to define their values along lines that they thought conservatives would agree with. As Republicans moved farther and farther to the right, Democrats moved right with them in an ‘Overton window’ [1] sort of way, until ‘moderate’ Dems were more like Republican-lite, and what was now the Commie-radical far end of the left-wing spectrum would have been considered merely left of center only a couple of years ago.

When I began writing this book, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was approaching 12,000. In April of 2007, it reached 13,ooo, and only three months later, in July 2007, the Dow topped out at 14,000. In what looked to me as a repeat of the Roaring Twenties, when stocks were going wild, thanks to ‘new and creative investment instruments’, and every one was an investor, it seemed to me that the disparity between the dizzying profits at the top of the heap and the reality that average people were becoming poorer, while working longer and harder and struggling more was an indication that this kind of financial hot-rodding was doomed to crash. Next stop - 1932!

If you step back and look at the situation from a macro rather than micro perspective, several things become clear.

1.Working people of all strata were making less money.

With the onslaught of ‘downsizing’ and layoffs, people were being forced into a financial corner not of their own making. Those that were fotunate enough to keep their jobs either had to accept rather drastic pay cuts, or assume the laid-off workers’ jobs without extra pay. Raises to keep up with the cost of living were out of the question. Those that lost their jobs had a difficult time finding another at a comparable salary; many had to take jobs that paid much less, with little or no benefits. And most families needed two working partners just to make ends meet, so there was no ‘safety net’ where a stay-at-home partner could get a job to take up the slack.

2. While income from wages dropped, prices rose.

Prices of essentials, such as housing, energy, food, and transportation, continue to rise as usual, but the money to pay for them did not increase proportionally, but either stayed the same (which is a de-facto decline in real income) or actually declined.

3. Meanwhile, corporate profits soared to record levels.

This would seem to be a good thing for the economy. But much of that profit could be attributed to money saved by laying off workers, and freezing or reducing the salaries of those who still had jobs. Wall Street rewarded the corporations who cut jobs, stole pensions, reduced benefits. And the profits that ensued were often moved off-shore so as to not pay taxes on it, thereby depriving Americans of the tax revenue due to them by creating an environment in which the corporations could make those profits - providing both physical and legal structure for the corporations to utilize, such as roads, communications, power and water, and also a legal system that allowed them to be able to make contracts and conduct business with the assumption that there were laws in place to enforce contracts, and a justice system to make sure that the contracts are enforced.

The corporations did not create these physical and legal infrastructures - they were paid for by taxpayers and were the property of the American people. Yet they considered the profits they reaped theirs alone, and to pay taxes on these profits were regarded as stealing their property.

This is theft, pure and simple.

Theft of our labor - if you ask me to work for you for 12 hours and you pay me $10, you have stolen my labor. There’s no other way to put it. Saying that ‘you can’t afford to pay more’ is not an excuse - you either can afford to hire an employee or not. And paying ten guys $1 an hour instead of one guy $10 an hour is not creating ten jobs!

The Myth of the Free Market is exactly that - a myth. It’s a Utopian model that does not work in real life, because it only works if all things are equal - if the worker, the employer, and the consumer all have equal power and influence. And we know that is not true at all.

So - up to this point, we have: wages falling, prices rising, and profits escalating.

If the profit margin were roughly equal to the wage and price margin, one would assume that the market was working correctly - if there was a downturn that was felt by all, then it would be more or less attributable to forces that were outside of the wage/price/cost/profit structure - perhaps a natural disaster, governmental upheaval, or a failure of some aspect of production.

But if profits are rising for corporations, and growth is rising, and consumers are getting poorer at the same time, the only reasonable explanation is that those profits are coming from somewhere within that system - a transfer.

That transfer of wealth has been from the bottom to the top.

This is the natural progression of conservatism.

It’s like holding a big juicy steak in front of a starving man who only has 50¢ in his pocket, and offering to sell it to him on credit for $50, after which the poor man is excoriated for “buying something he couldn’t afford”. What the hell do you think that man was supposed to do? Say “No, I can’t afford that steak - I think I’ll just crawl off over in a corner and die”?

I (and many others) could see this week’s financial meltdown coming years ago. We knew that the economy was unbalanced. As I’ve said before, the problem with impoverishing workers to fatten your bottom line is that eventually you run out of consumers. If workers are not paid enough to meet their basic needs and have spome left over for discretionary spending, there will be no discretionary spending! Yet, conservative economic theory insists that the way to prosperity is to make the already-prosperous more prosperous, even at the expense of the majority of the workforce. So, when we actually ran out of money a few years ago, the solution to keep the masses spending and keep the economy afloat, was to dangle credit in front of us, and force us into spending money we didn’t have after taking all the money we did have.

Why is this a conservative problem?

Because of one of the deep frames of conservative cognition - the metaphor that says “Wealth=Morality”

I truly believe that this deep-rooted conviction is at the heart of the conservative mindset, and it transfers to every aspect of conservatism. It is responsible for the conservative Christian ‘Prosperity Gospel’ which says that God shows His approval by bestowing Earthly wealth on those who obey His wishes, and whom He favors - and therefore, the wealthier you are, the more moral you are. It is also responsible for the assumption that, because you are rich, you are hard-working, honest, smart, responsible, strong, self-reliant and deserving - whether you are any one of those or not. The corollary is that people who are hard-working, honest, smart, responsible, strong, self-reliant and deserving should be the people in charge!

This is the core of conservatism. This is also why even poor conservatives support the rule by the rich - because they really believe, deep down - whether they are conscious of it or not - that “wealth=morality”.

So, this is the mentality that is driving us over the cliff. And this is why conservatism itself is doomed to fail if we truly want an America that works on (small d) democratic principles.

The United States was formed to escape that mentality altogether - the mentality that says the Golden Rule is “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Conservatism, when followed to its logical conclusion, leads to feudalism - a large, poor, overworked, under-educated, powerless underclass supporting a small, powerful, wealthy, leisured ruling class.

There can be no other outcome.

I wrote about just this sort of thing two years ago, when the Dow was popping like Orville Redenbacher. This magical belief that tax cuts plus borrowing plus war spending equals a sound economy was never challenged because of the irrational certainty that if the wealthy get wealthier, that all will be well.

The equivalence of money and morality is the cause of the fatally flawed philosophy that is conservatism, and we are living with the results now. This is the common thread that binds together big-business Republicans and right-wing evangelicals.

Of course, you can still see the influence of this belief in the approach of Paulson to this crisis - that the perpetrators of this debacle will pay no price for their perfidy and theft. The idea of ‘too big to fail’ also means ‘too big to punish’, and ‘too big to hold accountable’. Punishment and accountability are only for the little guy. Adamantly opposed to helping the people who these policies have damaged, and instead dumping the bill for their own destruction upon the victims, while the perpetrators sail off unscathed, their stolen booty intact, thus adding insult to injury, the people in charge of ‘fixing the problem’ will instead continue the policies that have brought us to this disaster.

Just like John McCain’s idea of a cure for the havoc that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy have wreaked upon us are - more tax cuts!

They simply do not get that if you kill the golden goose, you get no more golden eggs.

If you make it impossible for consumers to spend, the economy will screech to a halt. You can tell that they still don’t get it when they talk about ‘unfreezing credit’ so that people can spend again. In other words, the only way that people can spend is by going into debt! What about the notion that people could be paid enough to spend money without going into debt? That’s a novel concept, isn’t it?

This irrational idea is simply too strong and deep-seated to be changed by those who subscribe to it. Those of us who are not hostage to the idea that both wealth and poverty are meted out to those who deserve it need to start connecting the dots, and understand that it is this conservative belief system that has led to the destruction of the middle class, and that there are other values besides profit and money - the liberal American values of liberty and justice for all, and the liberal idea that we as Americans have a responsibility to all other Americans whose very lives are being decimated by this childish, selfish, destructive philosophy.

We cannot afford The Price of Right one more minute.
_______

About author
Alicia Morgan is a blues musician and progressive blogger who writes at Last Left Turn Before Hooterville [2].

She has written a book about the dangers of conservatism called "The Price of Right" [3], published by Sterling and Ross. It is available for pre-order on Amazon [4] and other online book outlets, and will be in stores May of 08.

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Posted by Dan Carter at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“I knew it. I knew it. I knew that girl was special,” said 96 year-old Edna Baily, ” I’m saying twelve Hail Marys then I’m pulling the lever for Sarah, that older fella and Jesus.”

Image of Virgin Mary Found In Palin’s Bouffant
September 23, 2008 · Filed Under 2008 Election, Sarah Palin, Satire
from Steve Young on Politics

(Tampa, Fla) During a campaign appearance by Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin at a retirement village in Tampa, Florida, onlookers were stunned to see what they believed to be an image of the Blessed Mother Mary embedded in Palin’s wrapped puffed-up do.
“At first I thought it was just one of those Love Bugs y’get caught in the car grill, ” said 82-year-old Hubert Henry. “But then it started glowin’ like the baby Jesus I seen last year in the window at the Stuckey’s just of Route 1 in Hulmville. Damn miracle, I tellya.”
McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds, said that while the selection of Palin was a miracle for the campaign, the viability of Palin being chosen by the Virgin Mary to appear in her hair was something he’d rather leave up to the voter.

“People, and that includes Christians, are going to make up their mind on the issues,” said Bounds. “If the fact that some people believe that the Blessed Mother of Jesus and Sarah being somehow intertwined is an issue, so be it.”
“I knew it. I knew it. I knew that girl was special,” said 96 year-old Edna Baily, ” I’m saying twelve Hail Marys then I’m pulling the lever for Sarah, that older fella and Jesus.”

Posted by Dan Carter at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Princeton Economist Paul Krugman weighs in on BushCo's bail out of the U.S. financial system:
(clip)
But [Treasury Secretary] Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

September 22, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Cash for Trash

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq.

There’s justice in the gibes. Everyone agrees that something major must be done. But Mr. Paulson is demanding extraordinary power for himself — and for his successor — to deploy taxpayers’ money on behalf of a plan that, as far as I can see, doesn’t make sense.

Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing? He’s making it up as he goes along, just like the rest of us.

So let’s try to think this through for ourselves. I have a four-step view of the financial crisis:

1. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to a surge in defaults and foreclosures, which in turn has led to a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.

2. These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt. This problem is especially severe because everyone took on so much debt during the bubble years.

3. Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs.

4. Financial institutions have been trying to pay down their debt by selling assets, including those mortgage-backed securities, but this drives asset prices down and makes their financial position even worse. This vicious circle is what some call the “paradox of deleveraging.”

The Paulson plan calls for the federal government to buy up $700 billion worth of troubled assets, mainly mortgage-backed securities. How does this resolve the crisis?

Well, it might — might — break the vicious circle of deleveraging, step 4 in my capsule description. Even that isn’t clear: the prices of many assets, not just those the Treasury proposes to buy, are under pressure. And even if the vicious circle is limited, the financial system will still be crippled by inadequate capital.

Or rather, it will be crippled by inadequate capital unless the federal government hugely overpays for the assets it buys, giving financial firms — and their stockholders and executives — a giant windfall at taxpayer expense. Did I mention that I’m not happy with this plan?

The logic of the crisis seems to call for an intervention, not at step 4, but at step 2: the financial system needs more capital. And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)

But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

I’m aware that Congress is under enormous pressure to agree to the Paulson plan in the next few days, with at most a few modifications that make it slightly less bad. Basically, after having spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control, the Bush administration says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says now now now.

But I’d urge Congress to pause for a minute, take a deep breath, and try to seriously rework the structure of the plan, making it a plan that addresses the real problem. Don’t let yourself be railroaded — if this plan goes through in anything like its current form, we’ll all be very sorry in the not-too-distant future.

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Defenders of Wildlife cuts to the quick! Check out this video.

Posted by Dan Carter at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I first received Anne's letter I emailed her a message, thanking her for her courage and sense of civic duty. I also was seeking to determine if the version of the letter that I received was authentic. What appears below is the response I received:

Hello,

Thank you for emailing me with your thoughts and questions about Sarah
Palin. Some of you have waited for days for my reply; I apologize for
my slow response, but I have received over 12,000 emails and I have
just not been able to keep up!

Who am I?
I am the writer of an email dated 8/31/08 about Sarah Palin that
“went viral”. SOME PEOPLE HAVE RECENTLY RECEIVED A DISTORTED,
EDITED
VERSION OF THIS EMAIL. I urge you to go to the website listed below
to
see what I actually wrote (with an addendum I wrote on Sept 9th), or
see below.

http://community.adn.com/adn/node/130537.

On Sept 4th, I asked the Anchorage Daily News if they would post on
their website my original email. I asked them to do this for several
reasons: 1) they are the largest newspaper in Alaska, 2) they are
not
aligned with either party, 3) I was being told that people were
changing
what I wrote, and 4) --importantly--they know me. When I go to City
Council meetings there is always a reporter from the Anchorage Daily
News there; they can verify that I am a resident of Wasilla and
frequently to go City Council and other meetings.

I HAVE NEVER BLOGGED. I DO NOT HAVE A WEBSITE. If you find other
things with my name attached, it is campaign dirty tricks.

I am not working for either campaign, however, by now I assume they
both are aware of my letter. I am not an official spokesperson for
any
group. Nobody connected with either campaign suggested that I write
my
email, nobody has paid me, and nobody has asked me to stop answering
my
email. Sitting next to my keyboard as I type, however, is the most
beautiful bouquet of flowers which were sent to me by a total stranger
in
Conneticut in appreciation for the time I put into writing it!

I am a fiscal conservative and social liberal. I believe that
government serves an important function in society: doing for the
common good
what individuals and the private sector cannot. Primary government
responsibilities include infrastructure and guardianship of our
rights.

I am a real person. You might have seen me on NBC’s Nightly News
with Brian Williams, the Today Show, and Good Morning, America. You
might
have heard me on NPR, ARS Pacifica, and several satelite radio
programs.

How & why did I write my email?
My piece about Sarah Palin evolved over a 3 day period in response to
questions I got from friends and relatives who live outside Alaska.
By
the afternoon of the 3rd day I was getting replies from friends of
friends of friends--in other words, people who didn't know me--and
they
were asking "Who are you?" and "Why did you write this?", so I added
those sections to my email and then sent it out to about 30 people on
my
email list with whom I had not yet communicated. Within a couple of
hours a friend of a friend of a friend posted it AGAINST MY WISHES on
a
website. From there, it was posted on numerous other websites.

I had no idea it would "go viral". For years, I had drafted PTA
newsletters that went electronically to hundreds of people, and THEY
never
went viral! In fact, I have reason to believe most of the time they
weren’t even read! ha!

How do I know anything?
I have been a Wasilla resident since 1981. I went to many City Council
meetings, because in 1996-7 I was the author of a new chapter in the
city of Wasilla Municipal Code, and it took a year to shepherd this
new
code through the City Council. (It passed unanimously). After that,
I
went to meetings periodically: when there was something on the agenda
of interest to me and around election-time.

What’s happening?
I am inundated with email, but I am still trying to reply to as many as
I can; I am way behind. I’m sorry for the length of this, but with
over 12,000 emails I’ve had to draft an “omnibus” reply.

How can you verify the truth of what I wrote?
Many people have asked me if what I have written is true. Your request
for facts to check is appropriate and fair, however with over 12,000
emails to answer, I do not have the time to supply all the information
you would need to substantiate everything I have written. I have
become
aware of some factual, grammatical, and personal errors which are
identified in the addendum, but none of these errors substantially
change
what I wrote. These errors are addressed in the addendum to my email
which is posted on the Anchorage Daily News website referenced above.

I have been interviewed by many newspapers, and NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN.
I have supplied them with all the names of the individuals involved,
etc. so they could fact-check what I wrote. I suggest that you go to
the following sites to check out those parts of what I have written
that
the mainstream media has been able to put together reports on so far.
I am so impressed with the reporters I’ve met; they are literally
working around the clock to get to get up to speed.

A story dense with facts and information about Sarah Palin's first 6
months as Mayor can be found at:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008163431_palin070.html

A more comprehensive look at her terms as Wasilla’s Mayor and her 20
months as governor can be found in a NY Times story that appeared
9/14/08, and can be accessed at the website below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1221415398-aXQkakmNv2hz9SVPQ1KEuw

ABOUT THE LIBRARY/CENSORSHIP ISSUE. . . .

Below is a link to a segment from Good Morning, America on 9/10/08,
which covers the attempted library censorship and attempted firing of
the
librarian. It is accurate to the best of my knowledge, however I
can’t confirm or deny that the named books were the target(s).

http://www.acakadut.com/videos/v-VcdqcXZ1jqU/Ross-on-Palin-ABC-09-10-09.html

Did the Mayor ask the Librarian about removing books from the Wasilla
Public Library?
Yes. I was a witness to one of the occasions on which Mayor Palin asked
the Librarian about removing books from the collection.My recollection
was that Mayor Palin stated that there were books in the library that
shouldn’t be there, and she asked the Librarian what the procedure
was for removing books from the collection.

Stories in the Anchorage Daily News & Frontiersman newspapers
report
that Mayor Palin asked such a question. Snopes reports that the
McCain
campaign also acknowledges that she did this.

Was there a list of books?
Not as far as I know. I’ve always said I didn’t know of any, Gov
Palin says there was no list, and the list in circulation looks bogus
because some of the books on it weren’t even published at that time.

Were any books removed?
No. Not as far as I know. The City also says books were never
censored. If you read carefully what I wrote, you will see that I
said that
she “attempted” to censor the books, not that she actually was
able
to.

What does Palin say?
Conflicting things. At the time that all this happened, Palin
acknowledged to both of the local newspapers that she had asked the
librarian
about removing books from the library; she said that her questions
were
“rhetorical”. However, ABC News broadcast video of her telling
Charles Gibson that all of this was an “old wives tale” and I
have
been told that she is telling people around Wasilla that this whole
library story is B.S.

What remains in dispute?
Mayor Palin’s motives for discussing censorship of the library
collection remain in dispute. She claims her questions were
rhetorical.
They sure didn’t sound rhetorical to me! I foresee no resolution
to
this aspect of the story. Palin also says that the community
reaction
to her attempt to fire the Librarian had nothing to do with the fact
that she fired the Librarian one day and re-hired her the next. (How
often do you hear of a person being fired for a day?)

Palin’s approval rating
Governor Palin is a very attractive, warm person, with lots of
charisma. I think that her high approval ratings are because of that.
On Sept
13, 2008, pro- and anti-Palin rallys were held in Anchorage and the
anti-Palin rally was the larger; some say this is because there had
been
many pro-Palin rallys already.

“Troopergate”
Trooper Wooten (Palin’s ex-brother-in-law) is not anyone’s idea of
a model State Trooper, but I am of the opinion that everyone should be
treated the same. I think it would be wrong for friends and relatives
of the Governor to get special favors, OR be more severely punished.

About aerial wolf-hunting in Alaska.
The recent aerial wolf hunting issue was not about sport hunting. It
was about whether or not only State Fish & Game employees would be
allowed to shoot wolves from planes when there are emergencies and
packs of
wolves are attacking kids and pets. Sarah Palin’s position on this
issue should not, in my opinion, be construed as lacking a proper
“sporting” attitude. This was not a hunting issue; it was a prey
management issue.

Funding for students with Special Needs
It is true that at the encouragement of Gov Palin, the Legislature
increased funding for Special Needs education. When Palin took office
in
2006, the state was spending $27,000 a year per child. The budget she
signed this year raised that funding to $49,000 per child. In three
years, the amount will rise to $74,000, which is roughly equal to the
yearly
per-child cost of educating special needs children. So, yes, there
was an increase, however, since the increase in funding for educating
students with special needs doesn’t yet cover the cost, there will
be no
improvement in services. And, given the inflation we are seeing, by
the time the amount of funding covers the current cost, the cost will
be higher! (The deficit in funding is made up by shifting funds for
general education to special needs education.)

Various questions
I’ve been repeatedly asked if I could verify the accuracy of a
racist, sexist comment that is being attributed to Palin. I cannot
either
confirm or deny that she made this crude comment.

Yes, her husband is part Native Alaskan.

Wasilla has a strong mayor form of government; the mayor is full-time.

Forwarding/editing/blogging.
Yes, you may forward my email to your friends and others who you think
might be interested in its contents. I would prefer if you didn't
change it or edit it in any way.

If you want something shorter, write your own white paper and put YOUR
name on it.

I remain very conflicted about giving permission to post my email on a
website. I don’t have time to check out all the blogs and websites
which have requested permission to post it. Yet, I don’t want to
penalize the considerate and conscientious people who ASK when so many
(800+ I’m told) have not. So, I am not going to give permission,
but I
am also not going to do anything if someone posts it without my
permission, either. How you introduce what you post will influence
how it is
read. I tried to write a balanced piece; I hope you will respect that
and not cast it as a Palin slam.

I hope that I have adequately answered your questions and been a help
to you in deciding which ticket you want to vote for. In this
imperfect
world there are no perfect candidates--unless one wants to run for
office oneself!

I encourage you to get involved in the campaign of whichever candidate
you support. The best decisions are made when people are informed and
everyone participates.

Anne Kilkenny
Sept. 15, 2008

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have reproduced Anne's letter as it appeared on the Ancorage newspaper's website, according to a link provided by Anne in her response to my email. Also on this website there is an addendum that I have reproduced below.

Dear Readers,

As I write, it has been more than a week since the email I wrote to friends and family about Sarah Palin began to ping-pong around the country. In that time I’ve received over 9,600 emails. I’ve lost track of the number of journalists--maybe 3 dozen?-- who have challenged me to provide sources to substantiate all that I mentioned in it. I have cooperated fully with everyone, providing all the information anyone has requested, and offering all the help I could.

It is a strange thing to have your words echo back to you from around the world. If I were to write my email today, I would make the following changes.

1) If I could change one word, it would be the word “hate”. I said Sarah Palin hated me. That was inappropriate. I should have said that Sarah knows that she lost my support when she sought to remove books that she didn’t like from the library.

One of the great things that America has given the world is the tradition of irenic debate: the understanding that we can agree to disagree, that there is a difference between disagreeing and disliking. I failed to demonstrate that important concept when I used the word “hate”. Sarah has always been polite and gracious to me in public. I don’t know how she feels about me, and it was inappropriate for me to use that ugly word to describe her feelings.

2) I wrote: “While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed.”

I should NOT have written “. . . because the Librarian refused . . . “ . I should have written “ . . . .after the Librarian refused. . . . “

3) If I were to write my email today I would add that I have no recollection of what specific book titles Mayor Palin wanted removed from the library, or if she even named any. There is a list of books out there; I know nothing about that list! It looks bogus to me.

4) I wrote: ““PTA mom”: true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since”.

This appears to have been a somewhat inaccurate statement. Sarah Palin has referred to herself as a “PTA mom” for so long that I just assumed it was true. Having been active in PTA since 1996, I assumed that she was an officer before that. Even McCain, when announcing her as his running mate, referred to her executive experience in PTA. But the Alaska State PTA office says it has no record of Sarah Palin ever having been a PTA board member; they do record that she paid dues.

5) I wrote: “Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans.”

I should have capitalized “native”, as in: Eskimo, Inupiat, Athabascan, etc.

For your information, I do not have a website, and I don’t blog. So if you see my name out there attached to anything besides my original email and this, it’s somebody else trying to smear me.

The response to my email has been totally unexpected and amazing. I am SO impressed and heartened! My inbox is full of story after story of generous, courageous, everyday people who have made personal sacrifices for the common good: stories of quiet courage. We are a nation of unsung heroes!

And ours is truly a Christian country. It is obvious to me that people are really trying hard to practice the Christian faith that they profess. I am so pleased by the thoughtful, respectful arguments that people have put forward for why they have chosen one ticket or the other. The vast majority of the people out there reject the Karl Rovian politics of personal destruction and wish that campaigns could be free of “spin” and “image”.

I am pleased to know that the overwhelming majority of the readers of my email found the information helpful.

Dozens of journalists have researched what I have said. They have found nothing else to be inaccurate.

Anne Kilkenny
September 9, 2008

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you may have noticed, Anne's letter is not very complimentary of Sarah Palin. Still, to me at least, it has an even tone that adds to her credibility. Here's part two.

(continued)

She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative.

Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah's mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.

As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as "AGIA" that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.

Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked to global warming. She campaigned "as a private citizen" against a state initiaitive that would have either a) protected salmon streams from pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State's lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior's decision to list polar bears as threatened species.

McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being President.

There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she.

However, there's a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.

CLAIM VS FACT
*"Hockey mom": true for a few years.

*"PTA mom": true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since.

*"NRA supporter": absolutely true

*social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).

*pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.

*"Pro-life": mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation

*"Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.

*political maverick: not at all

*gutsy: absolutely!

*open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.

*has a developed philosophy of public policy: no

*"a Greenie": no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.

*fiscal conservative: not by my definition!

*pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.

*pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents

*pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla's history.

*pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?

First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name (Anne Kilkenny + Alaska), you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.

Secondly, I've always operated in the belief that "Bad things happen when good people stay silent". Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.

Third, I am just a housewife. I don't have a job she can bump me out of. I don't belong to any organization that she can hurt. But, I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that's life.

Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah's attempt at censorship.

Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.

CAVEATS
I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in spending & taxation 2 years ago (when Palin was running for Governor) from information supplied to me by the Finance Director of the City of Wasilla, and I can't recall exactly what I adjusted for: did I adjust for inflation? for population increases? Right now, it is impossible for a private person to get any info out of City Hall--they are swamped. So I can't verify my numbers.

You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the population of Wasilla, ranging from my "about 5,000", up to 9,000. The day Palin's selection was announced a city official told me that the current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was 5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-90's.

Anne Kilkenny
August 31, 2008

Posted by Dan Carter at 04:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like many activists and other email users, I get so many messages that I can't read them all, and a lot of it just turns to fog in my mind. A friend of mine forwarded a letter to me that was written by a woman from Wasilla, Alaska. It's something that has gone viral on the Internet and been discussed in the national media. I hadn't heard of it, so after reading it, I was skeptical as to its authenticity.

Anne's email address was included in the message, so I sent her a quick email asking if the letter I had received was as she had originally written it, fully expecting that it would bounce back. Much to my surprise I found an actual response to my inquiry waiting for me the next time I checked my email. I will share that response on my blog in part three or four, but for now, here's the first half of The Anne Kilkenny Letter.

Dear friends,

So many people have asked me about what I know about Sarah Palin in the last 2 days that I decided to write something up . . .

Basically, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have only 2 things in common: their gender and their good looks. :)

You have my permission to forward this to your friends/email contacts with my name and email address attached, but please do not post it on any websites, as there are too many kooks out there . . .

Thanks,
Anne

ABOUT SARAH PALIN

I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Sarah since 1992. Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her father was my child's favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a first name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more City Council meetings during her administration than about 99% of the residents of the city.

She is enormously popular; in every way she's like the most popular girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice and won't vote for her can't quit smiling when talking about her because she is a "babe".

It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents for seven months.

She is "pro-life". She recently gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby. There is no cover-up involved, here; Trig is her baby.

She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym.

She is savvy. She doesn't take positions; she just "puts things out there" and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit.

Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin's kind of job is highly sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their major source of income. Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans.

Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters.

She's smart.

Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents.

During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.

Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a "fiscal conservative". During her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents.

The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren't enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over $22 million. What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? or a new library? No. $1m for a park. $15m-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn't even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later--to the delight of the lawyers involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5m for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing.

While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once.

These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.

As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as Governor she proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state.

In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today's surplus, borrow for needs.

She's not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren't generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren't evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them.

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

Sarah complained about the "old boy's club" when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of "old boys". Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal--loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State's top cop (see below).

As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla's Police Chief because he "intimidated" her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska's top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it's pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn't fire her sister's ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.

She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn't like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.

Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.

When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job which paid $122,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job. In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the "old boys' club" when she dramatically quit, exposing this man's ethics violations (for which he was fined).

As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the "bridge to nowhere" after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.

As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects--which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance--but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as "anti-pork".

To be continued tomorrow...

Posted by Dan Carter at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John McCain, in his smoothest "my friends, trust me because I was a POW" tone, insist that our economy is "still fundamentally sound" This from a man who admits that he don't know much about economics and plans to study up using Greendpan's book. Funny, Alan Greenspan commented on McCain's economic plan this past weekend, indicating that cutting taxes the way McCain intends to is dangerous...unless there are corresponding cuts in spending. Look out education, Social Security, Medicare...and anything else that isn't defense... you're about to get "reformed" McCain style!

Anyway what follows is a great article that explains how we've gotten so screwed.

(From the Huffington Post)

Hale "Bonddad" Stewart

"From one Disaster to Another"

This has been one hell of a weekend. On Friday night my wife and I were in Houston, Texas. We survived Ike intact; I'm fine, Mrs. Bonddad is fine, all three dogs are fine and the house is fine. However, I am currently in Austin, Texas for the week.
Then I wake up and find out Lehman and Merrill Lynch are no longer going concerns on Wall Street. And this is a few weeks after the "free market" U.S. nationalizes its mortgage industry.
Let's back up a bit and see how we got here. Advance warning: this will be long and fairly complicated, so get a cup of coffee now (actually, get the pot ready).
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article titled, "An extended shallow near recession." This was a riff off a comment made by one of the people who writes at Angry Bear. The point is this expansion has not felt like a real expansion. Job growth has been the weakest of any expansion since 1960. Real median household income is now at the same level it was in 2001. (Please see The Bush Boom Was A Complete Bust.) Combined these elements tell us the economy is doing very poorly. These two points also tell us there is at least one fundamental problem with the economy if not more.
So -- let's look at am important fundamental issue with the US economy. At the beginning of this expansion the US savings rate was right around 2%. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
Here's what this figure means. An economist defines savings as all the money left over after a person spends money on everything else. In other words, after a person has paid their bills and mortgage and bought all their other stuff (clothes, restaurants etc...) the left over money is "savings". The assumption here is people buy stuff and then save whatever is left. The point with this data is at the beginning of this expansion people were already spending just about everything they made.
Personal consumption expenditures increased for the duration of this expansion. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real personal consumption expenditures increased from a level of 104.128 to 123.931. So people kept spending. At the same time, incomes have been stagnant for the vast majority of the US population.
Workers with professional degrees, such as doctors and lawyers, were the only educational group to see their inflation-adjusted earnings increase over the most recent economic expansion, adding to the concern that the economy has benefited higher-earning Americans at the expense of others.

Workers in every other educational group -- including Ph.D.s as well as high school dropouts -- earned less in 2007 than they did in 2000, adjusted for inflation, according to data from the Census Bureau. Data don't include 2008 earnings.
So let's sum up. Real (inflation adjusted) incomes for the vast majority of Americans declined during this expansion. At the same time, people were already spending most of their incomes at the beginning of this expansion yet they continued to increase their spending for the duration of this expansion. Where did all of the new money for increased spending come from?
Tons of debt. At the beginning of this expansion total household debt outstanding stood at $7.6 trillion. That current figure is $13.9 trillion. That's an increase of 82%. To place that figure in perspective, total household debt outstanding is now almost as large as total US GDP. All of that does not exist in a vacuum; it has to go somewhere. And that's where we get to the current problems in the markets.
As the figures above shows, the US went on a debt orgy primarily concentrated in mortgages. First, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to 0% after adjusting for inflation. Then the financial system had to increase the number of people who could access the debt market and increase the amount of money they could get access too. However early on it was obvious this would cause problems:
Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford.

But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.
In 2001, a senior Treasury official, Sheila C. Bair, tried to persuade subprime lenders to adopt a code of "best practices" and to let outside monitors verify their compliance. None of the lenders would agree to the monitors, and many rejected the code itself. Even those who did adopt those practices, Ms. Bair recalled recently, soon let them slip.
And leaders of a housing advocacy group in California, meeting with Mr. Greenspan in 2004, warned that deception was increasing and unscrupulous practices were spreading.
John C. Gamboa and Robert L. Gnaizda of the Greenlining Institute implored Mr. Greenspan to use his bully pulpit and press for a voluntary code of conduct.
"He never gave us a good reason, but he didn't want to do it," Mr. Gnaizda said last week. "He just wasn't interested."

All of this debt was cut into a large amount of securitized debt -- collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), collateralized debt obligations and the like. The belief among everybody was securitization so spread out risk that possible problems (like the ones we are currently having) were non-existent.
All of this debt was based on the housing sector, which was grossly inflated from the overly aggressive federal reserve. All of this debt was purchased by, well, everyone. And that's what's leading to all of the problems on Wall Street. As housing collapses we are learning the following:
1.) Record low interest rates increase borrowing. This is standard economics. Lower the cost of most goods and demand will increase.
2.) Housing was clearly in a bubble.
3.) Increasing the number of people who have access to debt and the amount of money they can borrow is not the greatest idea.
4.) Securitization -- while a solid financial development -- does not so spread out risk that risk is eliminated.
As the value of housing has dropped, the number of people who have defaulted on their loans has increased. This means the collateral backing all of these securitzed loans has deteriorated. This means that all of the CMOs, CLOS and the like that everyone has purchased are no longer worth anywhere near what everybody thought they were worth. As a result, you are seeing tons of "writedowns" all over Wall Street. This simply means firms are saying "this bond isn't worth $100, it's worth $90." The problem is everybody is writing down debt. So far we've had over $550 billion in writedowns. And these writedowns are what is leading to events like those we are having today. And there is no reason to think we are anywhere near done with these problems.
So, let's sum up all the points made above.
1.) Incomes shrank for most Americans over the last expansion.
2.) But Americans kept spending thanks to a mammoth increase in household debt.
3.) To increase the amount of debt in the system, lending standards were lowered.
4.) Lowered lending standards have led to a higher default rate from borrowers.
5.) Higher default rates have lowered the value of all the collateral backed by mortgages.
6.) Lowered collateral values have killed the balance sheets of literally every major financial company.

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These days the Republican mantra is "Country First" sort of a modern day "Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alis!" minus the swastikas. As they embrace jingoism in the style of Germany in the 1930's their current standard bearers seem to be angling on making America a Theocracy. After what we've seen for the last eight years, would you really expect McCain and Palin to "...preserve, protect and defend..." the Constitution? Now I understand the "change" these wacky crazy "mavericks" are planning to bring to Washington. They want to change our Constitutional Republic to Biblical Theocracy.

In the following article from Salon, Juan Cole asks...

"What's the Difference Between Palin and Muslim Fundamentalists? Lipstick

A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian."

What's the Difference Between Palin and Muslim Fundamentalists? Lipstick

A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian.

by Juan Cole

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront
the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic
extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy."
But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more
resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the
Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in
schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's
will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia
rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the
difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

McCain pledged to work for peace based on "the transformative ideals
on which we were founded." Tolerance and democracy require freedom of
speech and the press, but while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin
inquired of the local librarian how to go about banning books that
some of her constituents thought contained inappropriate language. She
tried to fire the librarian for defying her. Book banning is common to
fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did
not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the
Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for
its sexually explicit language. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson wrote,
"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor
that be limited without danger of losing it."

Palin argued when running for governor that creationism should be
taught in public schools, at taxpayers' expense, alongside real
science. Antipathy to Darwin for providing an alternative to the
creation stories of the Bible and the Quran has also become a feature
of Muslim fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia prohibits the study, even in
universities, of evolution, Freud and Marx. Malaysia has banned a
translation of "The Origin of the Species." Likewise, fundamentalists
in Turkey have pressured the government to teach creationism in the
public schools. McCain has praised Turkey as an anchor of democracy in
the region, but Turkey's secular traditions are under severe pressure
from fundamentalists in that country. McCain does them no favors by
choosing a running mate who wishes to destroy the First Amendment's
establishment clause, which forbids the state to give official support
to any particular theology. Turkish religious activists would thereby
be enabled to cite an American precedent for their own quest to put
religion back at the center of Ankara's public and foreign policies.

The GOP vice-presidential pick holds that abortion should be illegal,
even in cases of rape, incest or severe birth defects, making an
exception only if the life of the mother is in danger. She calls
abortion an "atrocity" and pledges to reshape the judiciary to fight
it. Ironically, Palin's views on the matter are to the right of those
in the Muslim country of Tunisia, which allows abortion in the first
trimester for a wide range of reasons. Classical Muslim jurisprudents
differed among one another on the issue of abortion, but many
permitted it before the "quickening" of the fetus, i.e. until the end
of the fourth month. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalists, however,
generally oppose abortion.

Palin's stance is even stricter than that of the Parliament of the
Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2005, the legislature in Tehran attempted
to amend the country's antiabortion statute to permit an abortion up
to four months in case of a birth defect. The conservative clerical
Guardianship Council, which functions as a sort of theocratic senate,
however, rejected the change. Iran's law on abortion is therefore
virtually identical to the one that Palin would like to see imposed on
American women, and the rationale in both cases is the same, a
literalist religious impulse that resists any compromise with the
realities of biology and of women's lives. Saudi Arabia's restrictive
law on abortion likewise disallows it in the case or rape or incest,
or of fetal impairment, which is also Gov. Palin's position.

Theocrats confuse God's will with their own mortal policies. Just as
Muslim fundamentalists believe that God has given them the vast oil
and gas resources in their regions, so Palin asks church workers in
Alaska to pray for a $30 billion pipeline in the state because "God's
will has to get done." Likewise, Palin maintained that her task as
governor would be impeded "if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right
with God." Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran expresses much the same
sentiment when he says "the only way to attain prosperity and progress
is to rely on Islam."

Not only does Palin not believe global warming is "man-made," she
favors massive new drilling to spew more carbon into the atmosphere.
Both as a fatalist who has surrendered to God's inscrutable will and
as a politician from an oil-rich region, she thereby echoes Saudi
Arabia. Riyadh has been found to have exercised inappropriate
influence in watering down a report in 2007 of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.

Neither Christians nor Muslims necessarily share the beliefs detailed
above. Many believers in both traditions uphold freedom of speech and
the press. Indeed, in a recent poll, over 90 percent of Egyptians and
Iranians said that they would build freedom of expression into any
constitution they designed. Many believers find ways of reconciling
the scientific theory of evolution with faith in God, not finding it
necessary to believe that the world was created suddenly only 6,000
ago. Some medieval Muslim thinkers asserted that the world had existed
from eternity, and others spoke of cycles of hundreds of thousands or
millions of years. Mystical Muslim poets spoke of humankind traversing
the stages of mineral, plant and animal. Modern Islamic
fundamentalists have attempted to narrow this great, diverse tradition.

The classical Islamic legal tradition generally permitted, while
frowning on, contraception and abortion, and complete opposition to
them is mostly a feature of modern fundamentalist thinking. Many
believers in both Islam and Christianity would see it as hubris to tie
God to specific government policies or to a particular political
party. As for global warming, green theology, in which Christians and
Muslims appeal to Scripture in fighting global warming, is an
increasing tendency in both traditions.

Palin has a right to her religious beliefs, as do fundamentalist
Muslims who agree with her on so many issues of social policy. None of
them has a right, however, to impose their beliefs on others by
capturing and deploying the executive power of the state. The most
noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her
conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but
rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft
wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her
pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is
incompatible with the Founding Fathers' commitment to tolerance and
democracy, which is why they forbade the government to "establish" or
officially support any particular religion or denomination.

McCain once excoriated the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his ilk as "agents
of intolerance. " That he took such a position gave his opposition to
similar intolerance in Islam credibility. In light of his more recent
disgraceful kowtowing to the Christian right, McCain's animus against
fundamentalist Muslims no longer looks consistent. It looks bigoted
and invidious. You can't say you are waging a war on religious
extremism if you are trying to put a religious extremist a heartbeat
away from the presidency.

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.
Salon contributor Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern
and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author
of "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East."

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What follows is an article entitled "Ten ways the McCain/Palin GOP is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote"

As one person who posted a response to the article writes, and I agree, it's like the Socialist basketball dilema:

"While the socialists are focusing on making sure (a) everyone has a chance to share in the game - even if they suck, (b) the rules are followed properly and (c) the goal is for all the players to have fun and perhaps 'grow' as a player, the Capitalists will go out and crush the opposition by doing anything they can to win."

"Ten ways the McCain/Palin GOP is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote"

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The McCain/Palin GOP is already in the process of stealing the Ohio vote, as was done in 2004. Among those at the center of the GOP strategy is Bush Family computer operative Michael Connell, who programmed the key vote counting mechanisms that were used to give George W. Bush his second term.

Except for John Kennedy in 1960, no candidate since 1856 (James Buchanan) has won the White House without carrying the Buckeye State. No Republican has ever done it.

On October 27, 2004, we published "Twelve Ways Bush is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote" at www.FreePress.org. Despite four years of denial by the Democratic Party and the corporate media, all methods mentioned in that article (plus many more) were used in the theft that gave George W. Bush his second term.

Much has now changed in Ohio, including the transition from a Republican Governor (Robert Taft) and Secretary of State (J. Kenneth Blackwell) to Democrats Ted Strickland and Jennifer Brunner. Brunner has made strong public commitments to conducting a fair registration process, an orderly election and a reliable vote count this fall. She is being pushed by the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit, filed originally against Blackwell.

To help guarantee an election that truly reflects the will of the voters, Freepress.org will convene a conference on election protection procedures web-cast from Columbus this September 26-8. It will reinforce the positive steps Brunner has taken, and will help train poll workers and judges to safeguard the vote in Ohio and around the nation.

But much of the electoral apparatus remains beyond public control. Serious questions remain about how reliable the final vote count will be, and how much of it the Republican party will cage, confuse and steal in its crusade to put John McCain and Sarah Palin into the White House.

Here are some of the key factors that still endanger the vote in Ohio and around the nation:

1) ILLEGAL DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE SURROUNDING THE VOTE COUNT

In a federal court decision delivered in August, 2006, Judge Algernon Marbley ruled that all materials related to the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio must be preserved. Standing federal law required that these materials be protected for 22 months dating from November 4, 2004. In response to the King-Lincoln lawsuit, Marbley's decision came in time to make it a federal offense to destroy any poll books, ballots and other records relating to the 2004 election in Ohio at any time.

Around the time of the decision, GOP Secretary of State Blackwell, who also served as Ohio co-chair of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, issued ambivalent orders to the state's 88 county Boards of Elections about preserving these materials.

Blackwell subsequently lost his 2006 campaign for governor of Ohio, and was replaced by Brunner as secretary of state. Brunner publicly announced that she would establish a repository in Columbus for all 2004 election materials. In accordance with the King-Lincoln lawsuit, a definitive recount would then establish what actually happened during the Bush re-election.

But in August of 2007, Ohio Attorney-General Mark Dann informed the King-Lincoln attorneys that 56 of the 88 county Boards of Elections had illegally destroyed all or some of their records and ballots from 2004. No repository has been established for what remains, and no definitive recount is now possible.

Ironically, Florida Governor Jeb Bush did preserve materials from the 2000 election there from all but one of the counties in that state. The materials are being held in a repository in Tallahassee. But no such resource---and no definitive recount---will be possible in Ohio.

There have been no state or federal prosecutions for the illegal destruction of these materials. Nor does there seem to be any guarantee similar destruction will not follow the 2008 election.

2) MASSIVE RESIDUAL ELIMINATION OF REGISTERED VOTERS:

In the run-up to the 2004 elections, GOP-controlled Boards of Elections in Ohio eliminated some 308,000 registered voters from the rolls used at the polls to determine whether or not citizens are eligible to vote. The purges were conducted in heavily Democratic districts in Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Lucas (Toledo) and Hamilton (Cincinnati) Counties. The numbers of voters eliminated represented more than 5% of the 5.4 million Ohioans who voted in 2004. The GOP also challenged the right of some 35,000 registered voters to cast ballots, based largely on letters the Republicans sent to voters which then came back undelivered, thus allowing them to claim the lack of a valid address. Challenges were also issued to prevent thousands of ex-felons from voting, even though there is no state law disenfranchising them.

Overall, the removals far exceeded Bush's official victory margin of less than 119,000 votes. After the 2004 election, another 170,000 voters were eliminated in Franklin (Columbus) County, also now heavily Democratic.

Despite massive grassroots voter registration drives, those voters have never been restored to the registration lists. None were notified when they were eliminated, and no public accounting has been made of exactly who was disenfranchised. Parallel purges were used in Florida 2000, and throughout the US in 2004. There is every reason to believe the GOP will repeat them in 2008 wherever possible.

3) RENEWED ATTEMPTS TO ELIMINATE ADDITIONAL REGISTERED VOTERS:

Throughout Ohio's 88 counties, GOP-controlled Boards of Elections have continued "caging" registered voters by sending them notices requiring that the post office return those that cannot be delivered. A loophole in Ohio law allows partisan challengers to then demand that the names of those whose forms come back be eliminated from the voter rolls. This practice has been used by the GOP throughout the nation to purge voter rolls in inner city precincts. In many cases those removed are soldiers currently serving in Iraq.

The Advancement Project has notified Brunner that it will challenge any mass purges in Ohio 2008. For her part, Brunner has ruled that returned notices cannot be used as a basis for eliminating voters from the registration rolls. She has further attempted to counter-act the purges by requiring that any registered voter fingered for removal be issued notice and given a pubic hearing by the purging BOE. But the process remains intimidating for prospective voters---especially the heavily-targeted list of those voting for the first time. With sixty days left to election day, the on-going impact remains unclear.

4-5) RESISTING UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO ABSENTEE BALLOTS WHILE RE-INTRODUCING CHAOS:

Brunner and voting rights advocates want the Boards of Elections in all 88 Ohio counties to mail absentee ballots to all voters. Previous restrictions on casting such ballots have been lifted. Brunner has strongly supported the practice of making these paper ballots available throughout the state. It would, among other things, help eliminate long lines at the polls, increase access for the infirm and disabled, and circumvent electronic voting machines, which her office has deemed to be easily corruptible. "As we prepare for Election Day," Brunner has said, "we are promoting clear, consistent, statewide standards for absentee voting. Every Ohioan who requests an absentee ballot should have the same rights and responsibilities," no matter what county they might be in.

Ohio's GOP leadership has made a loud public show of supporting this universal access to absentee ballots. But the Republican-controlled legislature pointedly failed to authorize enough money to the Secretary of State's office to pay for the full mailing. In a stunning display of public cynicism, the GOP leadership has since told Brunner, in a non-binding promise, that she should just go ahead and order the local BOE's to do the mailings. The Legislature, they say, will then vote the additional money at some point in the future.

Brunner has refused to do this, pointing out that the potential shortfall would be in the millions, and that such an order---in essence, an unfunded mandate---might be illegal. As a result, using a calculation based on per capita postage rates, she has informed every BOE how much state money they can expect. She is encouraging those that have the additional money in their budgets to do the mailings on their own.

The GOP-sponsored shortfall has thus introduced chaos into what should have been the orderly, manageable process of providing every Ohioan with a paper ballot prior to election day. As it now stands, some counties will be mailing absentee ballots and others will not. The uneven distribution is expected to favor GOP voters in better-funded rural and suburban districts. Should problems arise as a result of this uneven distribution, the GOP will certainly blame Brunner.

6) RESISTING SAME-DAY REGISTRATION AND VOTING

A loophole in a recently passed Ohio election law allows voters to register to vote and then cast an absentee ballot at the same time by coming in person to their Board of Elections between September 30 and October 6. Ironically, the loophole was accidentally inserted into an otherwise highly repressive bill by Republican State Senator KevinDewine, second cousin of the former US Senator Mike DeWine, who lost his seat in 2006. By allowing voters to cast absentee ballots as they register, they can avoid long election-day lines and the perils of electronic voting machines. Furthermore, the only election ID required is the last four digits of the voter's Social Security number.

The Ohio Republican Party has called on Brunner "to revoke a directive to allow residents to register to vote and cast an absentee ballot the same day." The GOP says her directive is illegal. The party is expected to deploy a full attack on this provision that would otherwise allow thousands of Ohioans to participate in the process for the first time with relative ease and security.

7) THE PERSISTENT SPREAD OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

In addition to mass elimination of Democratic voters, a principle method of stealing the 2004 election in Ohio was through the manipulation of electronic voting machines. Since then, the Ohio-based Diebold Company has admitted that its machines are vulnerable to manipulation and the dropping of significant numbers of votes. Decertification and lawsuits involving Diebold and other electronic machines in California and elsewhere have proliferated. Some 800,000 Ohio ballots---representing about 15% of the state's vote---were cast on Diebold machines in 2004. Additional votes were cast in Ohio and nationwide on machines made by ES&S, Hart Inner-Civic,Triad and others, all of whom have come under serious legal and legislative scrutiny.

Studies by the Brennan Center, Princeton University, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee and others, have all concluded that results coming from such machines can be easily manipulated, and election outcomes reversed, with just a few keystrokes. A $1.5 million report to Brunner's office concluded that electronic machines could easily have been used to steal the 2004 election in Ohio.

But because of the Help America Vote Act, authored by former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney (just recently released from Federal prison), electronic voting machines will be in far greater use in Ohio and around the nation during the 2008 election than ever before. The reinstatement of electronic voting machines has also been forced into effect in New York and elsewhere despite widespread attempts to require the use of paper ballots. Without a massive influx of absentee ballots, voters in 54 of Ohio's counties are likely to be forced to use touchscreen machines, with parallel increases nationwide. This includes Ohio's largest city, Columbus, and other major urban center such as Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.

In 2004, the compiled tabulation of Ohio's electronic vote was deisgned for Secretary of State Blackwell by Michael Connell, a Bush family loyalist who programmed the Bush-Cheney web site in the 2000 election. Connell directed the Ohio vote count to servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which also housed e-mail traffic for the White House. Thousands of emails from Karl Rove and other key Bush Administration operatives have mysteriously disappeared from servers in this basement. Many worked side-by-side with the Connell-designed ones to which Ohio's official election results were outsourced, under supervision by Rove and Blackwell.

Like Rove, Connell now works for the McCain/Palin campaign. An IT associate, Steve Spoonamore, himself a McCain supporter, has stated that Connell's IT apparatus can be used to steal elections. Attempts to force Connell to testify under oath have thus far been successfully resisted by the GOP.

Brunner has ordered a halt to some better-known e-voting abuses, such as "sleep overs" whereby electronic machines have been stored at the homes of poll workers prior to election day. At the behest of attorneys working through the King-Lincoln lawsuit, other potential abuses in the electronic apparatus are being exposed and eliminated by Brunner. She has issued the 2008-74 County Board of Elections Security and Risk Mitigation Plan which requires Boards of Elections to secure the machines and file plans that safeguard the hardware and software as well as establish chain of custody. Her 2008-73 memorandum, concerning "Minimum Security Requirements of Vote Tabulation Servers," mandates that "Each board of elections shall develop and/or maintain a policy for account and password management for granting access to the server and access to related workstations, if any, for its election system." The directive goes on to require that, "Each Board of Elections shall have a policy for maintaining sign-in documentation of server activity and related workstation activity..."

"We want Ohio's voters and the rest of the nation to see that we have prepared a transparent process of transporting voting equipment, ballots and supplies," Brunner says. "That begins with security practices at boards of elections and polling places, documented chain of custody, and now procedures to make secure voting machine delivery."

But electronic touchscreen voting remains a black hole through which a close election could once again be stolen, in Ohio and throughout the nation.

8) RESIDUAL CHAOS FROM PRECINCT ELIMINATION AND MANIPULATION

In the lead-up to Ohio 2004, Blackwell eliminated numerous precincts where voters had cast their ballots for decades. Consolidation was uneven. Some 321 precincts have been shifted in Franklin County alone. Blackwell admitted to a Congressional hearing that false, misleading and out-of-date information was posted on the state's official web site, misdirecting thousands of voters to the wrong polling stations. In many cases, they were then denied the right to vote altogether, or forced to cast provisional ballots which were never counted.

The chaos resulting from these precinct eliminations has not been entirely overcome. For financial and other reasons, Brunner has not restored all the precincts to pre-Blackwell levels. It is expected that her website will provide accurate information about precinct status and location. But it's likely some problems will persist.

9) DATA MINING

Early indications are that the Republicans are heavily involved in data mining. Registered voters are already reporting strange letters from undisclosed senders or unidentified nonprofit organizations "welcoming" voters to the system. As in 2004, voters should expect a deluge of phone calls as well, telling them if they vote they'll be arrested if they have outstanding parking and traffic tickets, back child support payments due, or are on parole, probation or reside in a halfway house. None of these are legal grounds for disenfranchisement. But we expect thousands of such calls will be made to keep first-time and uninformed voters away from the polls.

10) EXPANDED VOTER IDENTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS

A US Supreme Court decision has upheld an Indiana law, drafted and passed by the GOP, requiring photographic identification for voter registration. Because millions of young, poor, homeless, minority and elderly voters may not have voter ID, various state laws are expected to eliminate large numbers of mostly Democratic voters from casting ballots throughout the country. In key swing states like Ohio, which now require ID other than signature to vote (except by absentee ballot), the outcome of the election could be significantly affected. Attempts by voter registration organizations to help such voters obtain suitable ID are proceeding. But the law may still deprive crucial numbers of citizens their right to vote, and play a decisive role in the November 4 outcome.

Overall, there is no doubt that four years of intense public scrutiny, legal action and grassroots organizing have made the theft of the 2008 election in many ways a more difficult proposition. Widespread training of poll workers, poll judges and independent observers (including video teams) will add to the safeguards available during the registration process, voting and vote count. Should thousands of trained election protection activists committed to the democratic process come to the polls this year, it may prove impossible for the 2008 election to be stolen, as happened in 2000 and 2004.

But the Supreme Court approval of photo identification requirements and the proliferation of electronic voting machines will prove serious challenges to a fair registration, voting and vote count process. Given the number of ploys used by the GOP in Ohio and elsewhere in 2004, it's certain additional methods of election theft will surface this year that no one has seen before.

Unless they are effectively countered, there is little doubt that John McCain and Sarah Palin will follow George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into the White House.

--

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of four books on the electoral process, including AS GOES OHIO: ELECTION THEFT SINCE 2004, newly published at www.freepress.org and www.harveywasserman.com. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit, and co-convenors of the national election protection conference to be web-cast from Columbus September 26-28 through www.freepress.org. Their other books include HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (Freepress.org, harveywasserman.com) and WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, co-authored with Steve Rosenfeld, from The New Press.
_______

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I awoke Monday morning to the BBC talking about the US Government taking over and bailing out Fanny May and Freddie Mac. The BBC I've noticed, has a tendency to dispense with much of the nuance one hears from American news organizations when reporting on the USA. This is good since much of the mainstream media has become little more than stenographers for the conservative, free market mavens of our government. As someone once put it, the mainstream media is a, "wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party." Big Media is all owned by corporations, run by ideologues and by definition drowning in conflict of interest and as such, void of credibility. But I digress.

The ironic thing is that here we are with an administration that lives and breathes, "free market" and they find themselves having to NATIONALIZE two of the largest financial entities in the world due to failures and abuses made possible because of the deregulatory zeal endemic to their economic philosophy.

This, for the Bush administration, was not a position of great choice. The risk of allowing Fannie May and Freddie Mac to go under was undeniable. Now the Chinese will continue to finance our debt and instead of a stock market crash, there was a modest surge. We'll see how long that lasts, the economic news has been nasty after nasty of late and economists' optimism about the immediate future is guarded at best. I wonder what they'll determine will need to be nationalized next?

Posted by Dan Carter at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is funny and spot on for my money, check it out.

http://www.truemajority.org/haveaheart/

Posted by Dan Carter at 10:58