Guns or butter? Bombs or healthcare? participatory democracy or plutocracy/fascism?

Washington Post talks about Clinton and Obama tying the economy to the war in Iraq.

That is getting close to what this election is about. This election is fundamentally about the survival of this nation as a good place to live and as a positive force in the world.

There are two directions we can go. The first is the Bush/McCain way. We can allow entrenched multinational corporations to run our country in the best interest of their short term profits. This will involve using our tax dollars to maintain our control of the world and its resources by military might, and we will press on with fossil based fuels that we will try to steal from others. This will require enormous military expenditures, and a virtual fascist state. The world will be our enemy, and we will be perpetually at war. This will entail loss of our freedoms and civil rights, domestic spying, racial and religious intolerance, and turning away from transparency, and from intellectual and scientific pursuits. History and reality will be defined by the ruling class.

Our citizens will do without healthcare coverage, and major illnesses will result in bankrupcy for all but the wealthy.  Our country will eventually go bankrupt, our currency will be worthless, and social security will vanish. We will do nothing to mitigate global warming.

Our citizens are already fed up with the corruption and sleazy politics, and our young people are turned off by, and to, the democratic process. Election of John McCain will further entrench those attitudes.

The other way is to elect someone who represents and gives hope to young people, who will go to the polls, who will demand some say in their future, who will demand that their tax dollars buy something useful, like universal healthcare. This way sees the rest of the world as a partner, not a slave or a colony. This way sees change as necessary, and will put money into generating new solutions, rather than holding on to the fossil fuels of the past and present. This approach will revitalize our economy. This is the way (we hope) Barack Obama can lead us. Some fear that he has not had enough experience. What presidents in the past have had “enough” experience? Lincoln? FDR? Teddy Roosevelt? Kennedy? Reagan? By the time you get a candidate with “enough” experience, they are in their sixties, and unable to inspire and lead those to whom the country really belongs.

Barack Obama has a record as an intelligent and responsible leader, and is an inspiring person. He connects with the young; he can bring them into the process. He is the hope of this country and, I dare say, the world. It took me a while to figure out what Obama’s message was about…it seemed like empty rhetoric…but now I get it.  This is about mobilizing our people, and taking back our country.  It’s leadership. Hillary Clinton is not the person who can do this. She represents the aspirations of millions of women, but she just can’t inspire large numbers of people to enter the system. Perhaps that is sad. Already she has become a less admirable figure, because of the lies and slurs she has employed in the campaign.  She cannot bring more people into the process and she cannot win against John McCain, even if she were to defeat Obama for the nomination by sleazy tactics.

It seems ironic that Texas would be the state that can decide the issue. A year ago, who would have expect that an African American could win a primary there? No one who has ever lived there, I can tell you that. But let’s see if it happens. It would be a powerful statement.

Wisconsin legislature votes to pay unjustly imprisoned state employee

Link

Continued fallout from the U.S. attorneys scandal. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The state Senate on Thursday unanimously approved the payment of legal fees for Georgia Thompson, a state employee whose conviction for mishandling a contract was overturned by a federal appeals court….Senators voted 32-0 to pay $228,793 for Thompson’s legal fees; the bill now goes to the Assembly, where it is expected to pass. There was no debate on the bill, but Sen. Judy Robson (D-Beloit) said it was the “least we can do” for Thompson, who served time in a federal prison before the appeals judges ordered her released.

Of course, the appeals court’s decision to immediately overturn the case was remarkable in itself. But here you have a state legislature working to redress the wrongs of a federal prosecutor. Has this ever happened before? It strikes me as a rather unique situation.

NH vote count stinks BIGTIME!

Nobody knows more about Diebold than Bradblog:

…Kucinich says that he’s calling for a “recount”. While it may seem a quibble, the fact is that until now, 80% of New Hampshire’s ballots have been “counted” only by a hackable, prone-to-error, Diebold optical-scan machine. The systems were entirely programmed, serviced and controlled by one somewhat less-than-reputable company (LHS Associates). The machines are the very same model shown being hacked in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, in which the results of a live mock election were flipped via the gaming of the machine’s memory card.

Unedited footage of that live landmark hack from December of 2005, as well as rare footage of LHS Associate’s President John Silvestro, can be seen here. And more deep background on LHS and their troubling, and exclusive control over New Hampshire’s ballots is posted here.

..

Hillary Clinton seems to have received a full 7 point advantage in Diebold precincts, versus hand-counted ones.

and look at this:

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%

Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

This is just impossible !!! the votes had to have been switched!!!

Typical Bush law-breaking

TPM

Politicization to a degree forbidden by the law. This is lawbreaking. And of course, the law enforcement apparatus is captive and impotent, according to Bush’s “unitary executive” bullshit. So there is no enforcement against the king; he is above the law.

Same kind of thing is going on at the Federal Elections Commission, Consumer Safety, on and on…

The packing scheme relies on Republican commissioners changing their party affiliation to “Independent” after they’ve been appointed, thus creating room for more Republicans to be appointed (there can be no more than four commissioners at any one time from a single party).

The Republicans who’ve switched their affiliation, of course, have denied changing them just to create more room for other conservatives. Abigail Thernstrom was no different, telling the Boston Globe‘s Charlie Savage that she’d just decided that she’d be “most comfortable” as an independent.

But her comfortability level appears to have abruptly changed. In December, the president reappointed her to the commission, but this time as a Republican, after one of the four Republican nominees left. The move also allowed her to become the commission’s vice chairman.

So to retrace her steps: she was first nominated as a Republican, then registered as an independent, then was re-nominated as an Republican. With that move, the commission’s conservative majority drops to five to two — it’s not clear yet who the eighth nominee will be, or what party he or she will represent. But not to worry: the committee can move forward on business with a simply majority, so the commission’s direction shouldn’t change that much.

More toxic toys from China: our government sucks

Our taxes are supposed to be used to do things for us; to protect us from toxic products, for example.  The US Consumer Product Safety Commission might as well not even exist any more.  State governments are having to pick up the pieces, with little in the way of resources.

More than 500,000 pieces of children’s jewelry are being recalled for excessive levels of lead paint after a dozen retailers, including Michaels Stores, Big Lots and Family Dollar Stores, agreed to a settlement with the New York state Attorney General’s Office, federal and state officials said Wednesday.

Michaels does not have to pay a fine, through some of the others retailers will, including Big Lots, which agreed to pay a $1,000 penalty under the settlement.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recall includes 29 jewelry items, including a total of 200,000 pieces sold at 950 Michaels Stores. The items, such as butterfly charms and toggle bracelets, were supplied by Pure Allure in Oceanside, Calif.

Despite recent recalls of millions of hazardous and lead-contaminated children’s jewelry and toys, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and national consumer groups urge parents to be diligent over the holiday season because unsafe items remain on store shelves. Lead can be toxic and can cause developmental problems in children.

Bush and GOP congress spent record amounts of money, there have been record deficits, the national debt is ballooning, people are wondering about Social Security….  yet we get no meaningful service from our government.
Where did the money go?

Florida, Hans von Spakovsky deny vote to 13,000 US citizens

Thanks to Hans von Spakovsky, the crack Florida legislature, and one whacked out Nigerian, 14,000 US citizens in Fl are going to be denied their basic right to vote. Of course, Hans’ targets were blacks and hispanics, and that makes up most of the total, but there must be a bunch of white people, maybe even a few suburban white males in that bunch. I hope to hell the Republicans who got caught in this anti-democratic/Democratic scam will begin to realize what Amerika is coming to under Bush, Rove, Hans von Spakovsky, and their ilk. Via Josh Marshall, link to Southwest Florida’s News-Press:

County election officials say the number of voters lost through Florida’s central registration system is small — 90 percent of applications get voter cards.

oh, by the way; that ten percent: that was 76,000 people on the initial run.
According to Marshall:

The law, first implemented in January, 2006, was based on advice from Hans von Spakovsky — yet another addition to his legacy of voter suppression at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Civil rights groups, calling the measure “disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy,” have sued to halt the law in an attempt to minimize the effect on the 2008 election.

As far as I know, there was only one person convicted of voter fraud in Florida in the past several years, a confused Nigerian. But under the Bushist regime, we are denying the vote to 14,000 (at this point) mostly minorities:

— three-quarters of them minorities — didn’t make it through that last set of hoops.

Of course, just by coincidence, THESE folks are the most affected:

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

Too bad; better luck next life, if you are reborn as either white or a Republican:

Unaccepted but also not denied, they remain in limbo as “incomplete” or, often, sitting in Florida’s new statewide voter registration system with no designation at all.

State law requires those “lost” voters to be notified; most contacted said they were unaware of the problem…. Applications that don’t match are reviewed by the Department of State, fixed by hand if the problem is obvious, and forwarded to the county for its own determination of whether to fix the application or leave it in limbo.

By law, applicants must be told if their registrations are incomplete. Voting rights advocates complain those notices, when they are sent, often fail to explain the problem.

The Nigerian I mentioned: yes, US Attorney Gregory Miller’s coup that allowed him to get off the US Attorney hit list:

Gregory R. Miller, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Florida, announced today that KOLAWOLE A. OLAOGUN a/k/a YOMI OLAGUN, 53, of Tallahassee, Florida was convicted by a jury of one count of falsely claiming United States citizenship for the purpose of registering to vote, one count of falsely representing himself to be a United States citizen on a voter change of address form, and two counts of illegally voting in a federal election. Evidence introduced at trial established that Olaogun falsely claimed to be a United States citizen when he registered to vote and later voted during federal elections, including the 2004 Presidential Election. As a lawful permanent resident, Olaogun did not have the legal right to vote.

The idea has always been to encourage people to vote, not the reverse. Judge Mukasey/Dianne Feinstein, where do you stand on this issue? What are you going to do about 14,000 Floridians who are being denied the vote? What do you think of the nomination of von Spakovsky to the FEC? How about enforcing the Voting Rights Act? is that an idea? Doesn’t the Clue Train stop at your station four times a day? How about offloading a few?

Bush making late charge for a Smokey award

Evidently Bush can’t do anything about Musharaff, so now he’s going to start portraying him as the George Washington of Pakistan. Watch the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the Beltway Pundits take up the chant.  The damage done to America and the world over the last 6 years is exceeded by the damage to the truth.

President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general “hasn’t crossed the line” and “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.”

Bush spoke nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule, sacked members of the Supreme Court and began a roundup of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists. Musharraf’s government yesterday released about 3,000 political prisoners, although 2,000 remain in custody, according to the Interior Ministry.

Californians: Watch out for petition fraud

It is clear that the Giuliani crowd is trying to steal the presidential election with a petition drive to allow for splitting California’s electoral votes. The petitions needed to put the measure on the ballot are being circulated by a company with a questionable reputation; their strategy is to say they are getting signatures for a children’s hospital, but then to ask the signers to sign another sheet without seeing that it is for the vote splitting initiative.

See this link. 

I have witnessed this myself. If you see it happening, call your local election board.