WHAT'S NEW?

The New Know-Nothings, by Larry Beinhart, commondreams.org (November 2, 2008)

"It was Jesus Christ, if Matthew is to be believed, who said, "Love thine enemy." It is in that spirit that I write this belated valentine to Sarah Palin.

Sarah, I love you for having revealed unto the media the snarling heart of the beast that is the base (and the soul) of the Republican Party. Yes, you have the lipstick and the heels, not to mention the calves and bosoms, that send Republican men into swoons, but you have more; the pit-bull snarl that rouses your supporters to cry out, "Traitor!" against Obama, and "Kill him!"

George Bush kept those folks in their kennels, ran as a "compassionate conservative," and always masked his most heinous plans in double speak. Bush the Elder, Ronald Reagan, and even Richard Nixon never explicitly ran on hate and fear of "the other." They used words that were coded enough that it was possible to pretend that they were true.

But now the beast is loose.

The Republican Party likes to remember Abraham Lincoln. And so they should. It's a nice memory and brings credit to them. As does the accidental ascension of Teddy Roosevelt, environmentalist and basher of corporations. Back in the 1950s and '60s, their party included such figures as Dwight Eisenhower -- whose reputation grows ever better in retrospect -- Nelson Rockefeller, who built New York's state university system, and New York City mayor John Lindsey.

But there is another strand that runs through their history.

Back in the 1840s, there was a group called the Know Nothings. They were against immigrants and for real Americans. ("Real American" did not then, as it does not now, refer to Indians; it refers to descendants of English immigrants.) The movement was based on fear. Irish and German Catholics were going to take over. They would take orders from the Pope-in-Rome (one word). Their values were not "our values." They drank. Their nunneries were virtual brothels and when the nuns had babies they practiced infanticide.

The Know Nothings started with secret societies like the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, associated with William Poole, better known as Bill the Butcher, depicted by Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. Their public political face was the American Republican Party, which became the Native American Party, and finally the American Party.

Their platform was:

Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries.
Restricting political office to "native-born" Americans.
Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship.
Restricting public school teaching to Protestants.
Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (from the Protestant version of the Bible).
Restricting the sale of liquor.

For a brief time, the American Party was wildly popular. In 1854 party membership swelled from 50,000 to over a million in a matter of months. It elected mayors in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Chicago, and won the state legislature and governorship of Massachusetts.

But there were other things going on: the Mexican War, slavery, secession, and the Civil War. The movement didn't last long and was soon absorbed by the Republican Party.

Fair is fair. Things morph and change. The Republican Party freed the slaves and tried to create an interracial democratic South during Reconstruction. The Democratic Party became the party of segregation in the South and the second home of the Klu Klux Klan. To be Republican is not to be necessarily narrow-minded and in dread fear of foreigners. To be Democratic is not necessarily to be liberal, progressive and open-minded.

But enough of being fair.

The Great Depression demonstrated that the principles of the Republican Party were bankrupt. Like most of the country. The Democrats became the progressive party, representing social justice and programs that would protect capitalism from its own worst tendencies, moving toward a vision of a perfectable world. The Republicans became -- in a very literal sense -- a reactionary party, reacting against whatever the Democrats were doing, engaged in a 60-year-long war against the New Deal.

Lyndon Johnson is the pivotal figure, both heroic and deeply tragic. The Democratic Party's dirty public secret was that its political hegemony rested on the Solid South, still refusing to vote Republican out of hatred of Lincoln. Johnson knew that if he pushed through the Civil Rights Act his party would lose the South for a generation. Or more. His heroism is that he did anyway. No, he did not end the race issue, but he broke the back of segregation.

The Republicans saw their opportunity. They pursued the Southern Strategy, wooing resentful whites with great success.

But two things happened.

Racism became less and less tenable. The generation that cherished it has grown old. That pillar of the Republican Party is crumbling.

And then along came Bush-Cheney. Like Herbert Hoover, in the process of leading the country to bankruptcy they demonstrated that the Republican Party's ideas were also bankrupt. They made government bigger, not smaller -- and more intrusive, too. They didn't oppose special interests, they were the special interests. They didn't oppose lobbyists, they forced lobbyists to join their party at fiscal gunpoint. They were militaristic on parade, but could not run a war. They could not protect the country nor punish the people who actually attacked us. Their policies demonstrated that free markets are a fiction, and real markets need more supervision than a grade-school playground.

Along came John McCain. He looked out, from sea to shining sea, from the mountains, to the prairies, in search of voters who would vote for him. All he could find were the new Know Nothings. People who, frightened of the way things are changing, want to change back to that white, Protestant place it was, oh, sometime back before 1840. America Firsters. Anti-immigrant. Anti-foreigner. Anti-elite. Anti-intelligence.

Not quite capable of running as a true Know Nothing himself, he chose someone who could: Sarah Palin. She does it well, and in so doing, shows us, clearly and simply, who they really are."

The Ugly America, by Mike Farrell, Huffington Post (October 27, 2008)

""You really do hate America!" This was the parting shot from a man I had just debated on a television show shortly before the invasion of Iraq. Because he's a notorious right-wing blowhard, I laughed it off as the ravings of a crackpot in extremis.

Little did I know...

Soon, those of us who opposed the Iraq war, torture, "extraordinary rendition," Guantanamo, spying on innocent Americans and other illegal tools in the Cheney/Bush black bag began to hear variations on that theme from people one would have expected to know better. And it's gotten worse as they've become more desperate... or do the depths to which we've fallen suggest a fault-line in America's culture?

Only a short time ago we dissenters were called "Saddam-lovers," "America-haters" or, when they really wanted to cut deep, "French!" But that usually came from the relatively unhinged, like my debate-partner. Today, similar imprecations fall readily from the lips of media bloviators while the hoi polloi moves toward lynch-mob tenor with screams of "traitor," "terrorist," "kill him," and "off with his head" - these not aimed at lowly actors but rather the next President of the United States. Worse, it is winked at and ignored, then defended and embraced by some of those from whom we expect better.

As one in the crucible of this volcanic yet potentially transformative moment, John McCain, who claims to put "Country First," should re-read "The Ugly American." Sarah Palin can watch the movie.

Fifty years ago, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's book exposed the boorish behavior of some of our citizens when abroad, warning that a "mysterious change seems to come over Americans..." when amid people and cultures seen as 'different.' While the ensuing half-century proved those in developing countries to be neither less intelligent, less capable, nor less interested in improving their lives than human beings anywhere, this breed of Americans, inclined to "isolate themselves socially," per Burdick and Lederer, seems to have turned inward, chanting "USA, USA!"

As the world prospered behind their backs, this insular strain of American metastasized into swaggering jingoes full of Cold War machismo, content to wave the flag and "Go for the gold." For them, the collapse of the Evil Empire proved the world's sole Superpower could do as it damned well pleased: "We're Number One," baby! Anybody who doesn't like it should get the hell out of the way.

"[L]oud and ostentatious," per the book, this parochial group bequeathed its "mysterious change" to generations of Know-Nothings who stuck to their own, seeing 'difference' as a threat. Dumbed-down by television and wary of anyone lacking sufficient fervor for their triumphant "Christian nation," they made those of different color, heritage, or belief into "the other," a practice encouraged by coded appeals to racism from would-be leaders. With Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and "silent majority" setting the stage, Reagan's "Welfare Queens" and Bush the First's "Willie Horton" spread the contagion while conferring it legitimacy.

Embraced as true conservatives and stoked by hate-radio millionaires, these changelings seduced the Republican Party, laid claim to the flag and launched a "culture war." Adopted by anti-government hucksters, empire-seekers and profligate free-marketeers, they divided the nation with a 'God and Country' ethos that declared the Bible inerrant, reviled homosexuality, "permissiveness," liberalism and critical thinking, denied women equal rights, children any at all, and cowed the media into submission.

For them, the horror of 9/11 lay at the feet of the enemy within - the ACLU, abortionists, pagans, gays and lesbians, secularists. And a stunned public, reeling from the assault and sinking into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, was led into a flag-waving frenzy of revenge-seeking and other-hating that targeted "Rag-heads" and "sand-niggers."

Drunk with power, this mob took heart from W's "you're either with us or with the terrorists," their malignant hostility dividing us more sharply at each iteration, until the enemy became the world of Islam and anyone who disagreed. Forsaking constitutional freedoms in favor of "security," they turned our very nation inside out, with Americans pitted against one another in states red and blue.

And today, while some dream of change, a perfect storm of cultural division, failed leadership, lost principles, military disaster and economic collapse have ripped the mask away, exposing a virus that has undermined and rendered quaint American values of tolerance, generosity, equality and fairness, replacing them with chauvinism, avarice, confusion, fear and despair.

But struggles that have trampled the principles urging America toward greatness are not new. That they have not destroyed us but rather helped us grope toward maturity is due to some who have called on our better angels and re-inspired the triumph of decency that ennobles our promise. Even with chaos at the doorstep people look for hope, for change, for reason to believe that the America of song and story persists.

Yet today, unable to rise to the challenge of hope, would-be-president McCain chooses expediency over country, placing the priestess of parochialism, a barb-tongued, inanity-prone neophyte, a heartbeat away from his Oval Office. Schooled in "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" and "American Idol," she energizes the pitchfork mob, dividing "real America" from the rest, reviving faint echoes of white superiority and "manifest destiny" as her sponsor deafens himself to it all.

This failure of leadership affirms the ugly America, the misanthrope nation. Yet the heartbeat of promise persists. There is hope. There is truth. If the people demand them. "

ATF Says Racists Plotted to Kill Obama, by Carrie Johnson, Washington Post (October 28, 2008)

" Investigators disrupted an improbable plan to assassinate Sen. Barack Obama and kill 102 other African Americans in a spree fueled by white supremacist ideology, officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said yesterday.

    Federal prosecutors in Jackson, Tenn., unsealed a criminal complaint charging two men with conspiracy, possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun and making threats against a presidential candidate. Daniel Cowart, 20, and Paul Schlesselman, 18, remain in federal custody.

    The men met online nearly a month ago through a mutual friend who was not identified in court papers. Their chats intensified and their scheme took shape, according to a sworn statement by ATF agent Brian A. Weeks.

    Using a .308-caliber rifle and a high-powered weapon they planned to steal from a gun store, the men plotted to "drive their vehicle as fast as they could toward Obama shooting at him from the windows," the affidavit said. "Both individuals stated they would dress in all white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt."

...."

Racism and Hate at McCain/Palin Rally in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Talking Points Memo (October 28, 2008)

"A new video posted to Youtube shows McCain/Palin supporters spewing racism and hate at peaceful pro-Obama demonstrators outside a McCain/Palin rally Oct. 27 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. One older gentleman early in the video shouts "Bomb Obama!" at the videographer and Obama supporters. Asked by the videographer what that means, the man says, "Get rid of him," then gestures indicating this means assassinating Obama. A younger man holding a "Democrats for McCain" sign says, when asked why he supports McCain, "I'd never vote for a black man." Another young man declares, "I do not want a black man running my country." Among women at the rally, one says she is against Obama because "his associations and his judgment are not American," repeating the Obama-as-foreigner meme. Another older gentleman also repeats this idea, insisting that Obama was born in Kenya, not the United States, and asking for his birth certificate (ample proof exists that Obama was born in the US state of Hawaii). Other rallygoers shout various combinations of "Barack Hussein Obama" in addition to the usual charges that Obama is a "terrorist" and a "baby killer." If we needed more proof that racism and hate are indeed running rampant in the grassroots Republican ranks, this is it. The video is credited to the Pennsylvania progressive organization Keystone Progress."

Bush Again Breaks Wall Between Church, State, by Helen Thomas, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 28, 2008)

"Is there anything more that the administration can do to ignore the spirit of the U.S. Constitution before President Bush leaves office?

The New York Times has revealed that a 2007 memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel claims that even federal programs subject to nondiscrimination laws can hand out taxpayer money to groups that discriminate in hiring staffers. The memo says the administration can bypass laws that bar giving taxpayer money to religious groups that hire only staff members who share their faith.

It specifically applies to a $1.5 million grant to World Vision, which is headquartered in Federal Way, for salaries for staff members on a program that helps at-risk youths avoid joining gangs.

The organization limits its hires to Christians, but the DOJ memo said that's not a problem because exceptions to the nondiscrimination rule are permissible when obeying the law would impose a "substantial burden" on people's ability to freely follow their religion.

Requiring World Vision to hire nonChristians as a condition of the grant would create such a burden, according to the DOJ memo.

It seems no president has done so much to break down the wall of separation between church and state than Bush has.

A couple of weeks after he took office in 2001, Bush dropped into the White House press room to hold an impromptu news conference -- his first as president. Every question but one was focused on his campaign's proposed tax cut. But I asked the president why he did not respect the historic wall of separation of church and state.

"I do," he replied.

"No, sir," I said. "If you did, you would not create a religious office in the White House." I was later called by Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, who asked me why I had "blindsided" the president with my church-state question. I told him I thought it was a "legitimate" question for the new president.

I grant you that there have been other presidents who have clouded the question, such as President Nixon, who held prayer gatherings on Sundays at the White House with invited ministers.

But none of this touched on the intrinsic question of separation of church and state.

The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was established by Bush in the White House, paving the way for church groups to win grants for social causes such as anti-drug programs and shelters for the homeless.

The president asked Congress to make it "legal" for religious groups to be given taxpayer money even when they discriminate against hiring people of other faiths. When Congress balked, Bush issued an executive order making the changes he wanted on his own.

Religion and politics seem to intersect frequently these days.

In remarks worthy of the Founding Fathers, retired Gen. Colin Power broke with his own party to support the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama -- and addressed a taunt against the Democratic candidate that he is a Muslim. Obama is a Christian.

But, Powell asked rhetorically on NBC TV's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, what if Obama were Muslim.

"He's always been a Christian," Powell said. "But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?

"The answer's no, that's not America," Powell said. "Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?"

Powell went on to tell the story of a young American of Arab heritage who joined the Army as soon as he came of age and was killed in Iraq.

This country was founded by people who sought freedom to practice their own religion. To each his own. Democracy is a better alternative to theocracy and we know that tolerance of race and creed is the essence of what America is all about."

Paulson's Swindle Revealed, by William Greider, The Nation (October 29, 2008)

"  The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride - a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

    These are dynamite facts that demand immediate action to halt the bailout deal and correct its giveaway terms. Stop payment on the Treasury checks before the bankers can cash them. Open an immediate Congressional investigation into how Paulson and his staff determined such a sweetheart deal for leading players in the financial sector and for their own former employer. Paulson's bailout staff is heavily populated with Goldman Sachs veterans and individuals from other Wall Street firms. Yet we do not know whether these financiers have fully divested their own Wall Street holdings. Were they perhaps enriching themselves as they engineered this generous distribution of public wealth to embattled private banks and their shareholders?

    Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, raised these explosive questions in a stinging letter sent to Paulson this week. The union did what any private investor would do. Its finance experts vetted the terms of the bailout investment and calculated the real value of what Treasury bought with the public's money. In the case of Goldman Sachs, the analysis could conveniently rely on a comparable sale twenty days earlier. Billionaire Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs and bought the same types of securities - preferred stock and warrants to purchase common stock in the future. Only Buffett's preferred shares pay a 10 percent dividend, while the public gets only 5 percent. Dollar for dollar, Buffett "received at least seven and perhaps up to 14 times more warrants than Treasury did and his warrants have more favorable terms," Gerard pointed out.

    "I am sure that someone at Treasury saw the terms of Buffett's investment," the union president wrote. "In fact, my suspicion is that you studied it pretty closely and knew exactly what you were doing. The 50-50 deal - 50 percent invested and 50 percent as a gift - is quite consistent with the Republican version of spread-the-wealth-around philosophy."

    The Steelworkers' close analysis was done by Ron W. Bloom, director of the union's corporate research and a Wall Street veteran himself who worked at Larzard Freres, the investment house. Bloom applied standard valuation techniques to establish the market price Buffett paid per share compared to Treasury's price. "The analysis is based on the assumption that Warren Buffett is an intelligent third party investor who paid no more for his investment than he had to," Bloom's report explained. "It also assumes that Gold Sachs' job is to protect its existing shareholders so that it extracted from Mr. Buffett the most that it could.... Further, it is assumed that Henry Paulson is likewise an intelligent man and that if he paid any more than Mr. Buffett - if he paid $1 for something for which Mr. Buffett would have paid 50 cents - that the difference is a gift from the taxpayers of the United States to the shareholders of Goldman Sachs."

    The implications are staggering. Leo Gerard told Paulson: "If the result of our analysis is applied to the deals that you made at the other eight institutions - which on average most would view as being less well positioned than Goldman and therefore requiring an even greater rate of return - you paid a$125 billion for securities for which a disinterested party would have paid $62.5 billion. That means you gifted the other $62.5 billion to the shareholders of these nine institutions."

    If the same rule of thumb is applied to Paulson's grand $700 billion bailout fund, Gerard said this will constitute a gift of $350 billion from the American taxpayers "to reward the institutions that have driven our nation and it now appears the whole world into its most serious economic crisis in 75 years."

    Is anyone angry? Will anyone look into these very serious accusations? Congress is off campaigning. The financiers at Treasury probably assume any public outrage will be lost in the election returns. I hope they are mistaken. "

A Last Push to Deregulate, by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post (October 31, 2008)

   "The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

    The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

    Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

    Once such rules take effect, they typically can be undone only through a laborious new regulatory proceeding, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis.

    "They want these rules to continue to have an impact long after they leave office," said Matthew Madia, a regulatory expert at OMB Watch, a nonprofit group critical of what it calls the Bush administration's penchant for deregulating in areas where industry wants more freedom. He called the coming deluge "a last-minute assault on the public . . . happening on multiple fronts."

    White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: "This administration has taken extraordinary measures to avoid rushing regulations at the end of the term. And yes, we'd prefer our regulations stand for a very long time -- they're well reasoned and are being considered with the best interests of the nation in mind."

    As many as 90 new regulations are in the works, and at least nine of them are considered "economically significant" because they impose costs or promote societal benefits that exceed $100 million annually. They include new rules governing employees who take family- and medical-related leaves, new standards for preventing or containing oil spills, and a simplified process for settling real estate transactions.

    While it remains unclear how much the administration will be able to accomplish in the coming weeks, the last-minute rush appears to involve fewer regulations than Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, approved at the end of his tenure.

    In some cases, Bush's regulations reflect new interpretations of language in federal laws. In other cases, such as several new counterterrorism initiatives, they reflect new executive branch decisions in areas where Congress -- now out of session and focused on the elections -- left the president considerable discretion.

    The burst of activity has made this a busy period for lobbyists who fear that industry views will hold less sway after the elections. The doors at the New Executive Office Building have been whirling with corporate officials and advisers pleading for relief or, in many cases, for hastened decision making.

    According to the Office of Management and Budget's regulatory calendar, the commercial scallop-fishing industry came in two weeks ago to urge that proposed catch limits be eased, nearly bumping into National Mining Association officials making the case for easing rules meant to keep coal slurry waste out of Appalachian streams. A few days earlier, lawyers for kidney dialysis and biotechnology companies registered their complaints at the OMB about new Medicare reimbursement rules. Lobbyists for customs brokers complained about proposed counterterrorism rules that require the advance reporting of shipping data.

    Bush's aides are acutely aware of the political risks of completing their regulatory work too late. On the afternoon of Bush's inauguration, Jan. 20, 2001, his chief of staff issued a government-wide memo that blocked the completion or implementation of regulations drafted in the waning days of the Clinton administration that had not yet taken legal effect.

    "Through the end of the Clinton administration, we were working like crazy to get as many regulations out as possible," said Donald R. Arbuckle, who retired in 2006 after 25 years as an OMB official. "Then on Sunday, the day after the inauguration, OMB Director Mitch Daniels called me in and said, 'Let's pull back as many of these as we can.' "

    Clinton's appointees wound up paying a heavy price for procrastination. Bush's team was able to withdraw 254 regulations that covered such matters as drug and airline safety, immigration and indoor air pollutants. After further review, many of the proposals were modified to reflect Republican policy ideals or scrapped altogether.

    Seeking to avoid falling victim to such partisan tactics, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten in May imposed a Nov. 1 government-wide deadline to finish major new regulations, "except in extraordinary circumstances."

    That gives officials just a few more weeks to meet an effective Nov. 20 deadline for the publication of economically significant rules, which take legal effect only after a 60-day congressional comment period. Less important rules take effect after a 30-day period, creating a second deadline of Dec. 20.

    OMB spokeswoman Jane Lee said that Bolten's memo was meant to emphasize the importance of "due diligence" in ensuring that late-term regulations are sound. "We will continue to embrace the thorough and high standards of the regulatory review process," she said.

    As the deadlines near, the administration has begun to issue regulations of great interest to industry, including, in recent days, a rule that allows natural gas pipelines to operate at higher pressures and new Homeland Security rules that shift passenger security screening responsibilities from airlines to the federal government. The OMB also approved a new limit on airborne emissions of lead this month, acting under a court-imposed deadline.

    Many of the rules that could be issued over the next few weeks would ease environmental regulations, according to sources familiar with administration deliberations.

    A rule put forward by the National Marine Fisheries Service and now under final review by the OMB would lift a requirement that environmental impact statements be prepared for certain fisheries-management decisions and would give review authority to regional councils dominated by commercial and recreational fishing interests.

    An Alaska commercial fishing source, granted anonymity so he could speak candidly about private conversations, said that senior administration officials promised to "get the rule done by the end of this month" and that the outcome would be a big improvement.

    Lee Crockett of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Environment Group said the administration has received 194,000 public comments on the rule and protests from 80 members of Congress as well as 160 conservation groups. "This thing is fatally flawed" as well as "wildly unpopular," Crockett said.

    Two other rules nearing completion would ease limits on pollution from power plants, a major energy industry goal for the past eight years that is strenuously opposed by Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.

    One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.

    A related regulation would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks.

    A third rule would allow increased emissions from oil refineries, chemical factories and other industrial plants with complex manufacturing operations.

    These rules "will force Americans to choke on dirtier air for years to come, unless Congress or the new administration reverses these eleventh-hour abuses," said lawyer John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    But Scott H. Segal, a Washington lawyer and chief spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said that "bringing common sense to the Clean Air Act is the best way to enhance energy efficiency and pollution control." He said he is optimistic that the new rule will help keep citizens' lawsuits from obstructing new technologies.

    Jonathan Shradar, an EPA spokesman, said that he could not discuss specifics but added that "we strive to protect human health and the environment." Any rule the agency completes, he said, "is more stringent than the previous one.""

With Time Short, Bush Pushes EPA to Relax Power-Plant Rule, by Renee Schoof, McClatchy Newspapers (October 27, 2008)

"Washington - At the Bush administration's direction, the Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would weaken pollution regulations for power plants, allowing them to increase emissions without adding controls.

    EPA officials have been working on a fast track to meet a Saturday deadline, but many of them are arguing against changing the rule, said former EPA attorney John Walke and an EPA career official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the official wasn't authorized to make statements.

    They said that the EPA was expected to decide in November on another eleventh-hour rule that would allow more power plants to be built near national parks and wilderness areas.

    Power companies have sought the rule about power plant emissions for many years, and it was part of Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy plan. Rules finalized more than 60 days before the administration leaves office are harder for the next administration to undo.

    The Clean Air Act requires older plants that have their lives extended with new equipment to install pollution-control technology if their emissions increase. The rule change would allow plants to measure emissions on an hourly basis, rather than their total yearly output. This way, plants could run for more hours and increase overall emissions without exceeding the threshold that would require additional pollution controls.

    The Edison Electric Institute, an association of shareholder-owned electric companies that represents about 70 percent of the U.S. electric-power industry, told the EPA that it supports changing the rule because improvements at plants would allow them to produce more energy with less fuel and in this way reduce emissions per unit of electrical output.

    The EPA official said that concerns in the agency were that the analysis justifying the rule change was weak and the administration didn't plan to make the analysis public for a comment period, as is customary.

    The EPA originally argued that changing the rule wouldn't seriously harm the environment because another law, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, reduced power plant emissions, offsetting any increase under the new rule. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated the interstate rule, however, and the EPA was stuck with having to develop a new analysis to justify the change.

    Walke, who's now the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's clean air program, said that EPA officials in two departments told him that they'd been instructed to finalize the rule by Saturday. When such rules are made, it's common practice for the White House and the vice president's office to give the EPA their views before the EPA chief makes a decision.

    Walke said that two EPA officials told him that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and Robert Meyers, the assistant administrator in charge of air issues, didn't agree with the new rule. EPA spokesman Jonathan Schradar said they hadn't made a decision yet and that he had no comment about their views.

    Schradar said the EPA was committed to finalizing the rule by the time Bush left office in January. He said work was continuing on it and that "rumors are exaggerated" about a Saturday deadline.

    The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the administration was moving to adopt the changes to the power-plant emissions rule.

    The EPA is under no obligation to reveal internal deliberations, so in many cases the public never knows what objections may have been raised.

    The White House wouldn't comment on its views about changing the rule, Kristen Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, said Monday.

    Walke charged in a comment to the EPA that the rule would amount to a "parting gift to the utility industry."

    The rule change applies to old plants that are expanded or upgraded to prolong their lives. The changes can make them more efficient but not as clean as they'd be with modern pollution controls.

    The emissions bring smog, acid rain and particulates. The Bush administration argues that carbon dioxide, which power plants also emit, shouldn't be regulated under the Clean Air Act."

Bureau Proposes Opening Up Utah Wilderness to Drilling, by Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post (October 31, 2008)

"The federal Bureau of Land Management is reviving plans to sell oil and gas leases in pristine wilderness areas in eastern Utah that have long been protected from development, according to a notice posted this week on the agency's Web site.

    The proposed sale, which includes famous areas in the Nine Mile Canyon region, would take place Dec. 19, a month before President Bush leaves office. The targeted areas include parts of Desolation Canyon, White River, Diamond Mountain and Bourdette Draw.

    The bureau has sought to open these public lands to energy exploration since 2003, though it had earlier classified them as having "wilderness character." But the agency has been repeatedly blocked by federal court and administrative rulings.

    "Previous administrations proved that there can be a balance between wilderness protection and oil and gas development," said former bureau director Jim Baca, who served under former President Clinton, in a statement. "Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has worked tirelessly to appease the oil and gas industry no matter the cost to our national heritage of wild and untamed places."

    Terry Catlin, the bureau's energy team leader for Utah, said it has not finalized the list of lease sites but bases them on "industry nominations" and provides a 30-day comment period before the sale.

    "At the end of the 30-day protest period, we look at the protests and make our final decision at this point," Catlin said in a telephone interview yesterday. "There isn't anything unusual about this timing. We do a lease sale every three months."

    The agency will publish the list of lease sites Tuesday. In a notice being published today in the Federal Register, the bureau says it is finalizing five resource management plans applying to about 9.5 million acres, a required step for parts of the sale to go forward.

    One of the areas set to be auctioned off is Upper Desolation Canyon, which was named by explorer John Wesley Powell in 1869 while he traveled down the Green River, which traverses the canyon, to the Grand Canyon.

    In a 1999 assessment, bureau officials wrote that Desolation Canyon "is a place where a visitor can experience true solitude - where the forces of nature continue to shape the colorful, rugged landscape," and heralded the area's "cultural, scenic, geologic, botanical, and wildlife values."

    "What makes this action by the Interior Department so deplorable is that BLM itself determined these areas to be wilderness-quality lands," said Stephen Bloch, conservation director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an advocacy group, in a statement. "Nonetheless, BLM is condemning these lands to a future of oil rigs and gas pipelines and almost certain disqualification from future wilderness designation."

    The bureau first proposed opening up energy exploration in part of the area in the fall of 2003, after former interior secretary Gayle Norton reached an agreement with then-Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt not to declare any new wilderness areas in the state. Environmental advocates fought the leasing proposal in federal court, which ruled in 2006 that the plan violated the National Environmental Policy Act. Interior's own Board of Land Appeals also issued an administrative ruling backing the leasing prohibition.

    In recent weeks, GOP presidential nominee John McCain (Ariz.) and running mate Sarah Palin (Alaska), along with other politicians, have repeatedly called for greater domestic energy exploration - leading chants of "Drill, baby, drill" on a daily basis. In a speech on energy policy Wednesday, Palin said the United States needs to pursue oil and gas at home rather than relying on imports.

    "In a McCain administration, we will authorize and support new exploration and production of America's own oil and gas reserves, because we cannot outsource the solution to America's energy problem," Palin told an audience in Toledo.

    But environmentalists questioned why the administration is pushing for the lease of ecologically sensitive areas when Utah has more acres leased for oil and gas development than are being drilled. At the end of fiscal year 2006, there were about 4.6 million acres of BLM-managed lands in Utah under lease, with just over 1 million acres in production. "

How These Gibbering Numbskulls Came to Dominate Washington-The degradation of intelligence and learning in American politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies, by George Monbiot, Guardian/UK (October 28, 2008)

"How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century - Franklin Roosevelt, JF Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived - but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little, using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said: "There you go again." His own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD. But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so stupid, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of The Origin of Species, for instance, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy - now known as social Darwinism - of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a lot to offer the US, but none of this will stop if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance."

In Case You Weren't Scared Enough: Palin on "Fruit Fly Research", by Todd Palmer and Rob Pringle, Huffington Post (October 27, 2008)

"Today, we are blogging from Durham, North Carolina, where we are trying to do our humble bit to help elect Barack Obama. On Friday, Sarah Palin gave us yet another reason to feel good about what we're doing here.

We are far from the first people to comment on this subject -- even within the Huffington Post -- so we'll keep it brief. But Palin's mockery of "fruit fly research" during her October 24th speech on special-needs children was so misconceived, so offensive, so aggressively stupid, and so dangerous that we felt we had to comment.

Here's the excerpt from the speech:

"Where does a lot of that earmark money end up, anyway? [...] You've heard about, um, these -- some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!"

It's hard to know where to begin deconstructing this statement. This was a speech on autism, and Palin's critics have pounced on the fact that a recent study of Drosophila fruit flies showed that a protein called neurexin is essential for proper neurological function -- a discovery with clear implications for autism research.

Awkward! But this critique merely scrapes icing off the cake.

Fruit flies are more than just the occasional vehicles for research relevant to human disabilities. They are literally the foundation of modern genetics, the original model organism that has enabled us to discover so much of what we know about heredity, genome structure, congenital disorders, and (yes) evolution. So for Palin to state that "fruit fly research" has "little or nothing to do with the public good" is not just wrong -- it's mind-boggling.

What else does this blunder say about Palin and her candidacy? Many people have used it as just another opportunity to call her a dummy, since anyone who has stayed awake through even a portion of a high-school-level biology class knows what fruit flies are good for. But leave that aside for a second. Watch the clip. Listen to the tone of her voice as she sneers the words "fruit fly research." Check out the disdain and incredulity on her face. How would science, basic or applied, fare under President Palin?

We have other questions. Who wrote this speech? Was he or she as ignorant as Palin about the central role that fruit flies have played in the last century of biomedical research? Or was this a calculated slight to science and scientists -- a coded way of saying, "We don't care what you know or what you think"? We find it odd that, of all the examples of dubious expenditures of public funds, the speechwriters alighted on this one.

Whatever the explanation, it scares us. Everyone who has suffered, either personally or indirectly, from an inherited illness, and anyone whose life has been lengthened or enriched by modern medicine, should channel Palin's flip comment when they stand in the voting booth on November 4th."

Sarah Palin and the Know Nothings, by Meg White, buzzflash.com (October 15, 2008)

"Here's a thought: John McCain didn't pick Sarah Palin to be his VP because she's a woman. He didn't pick her because of her adeptness at winking onstage, or her folksiness, or her so-called "family values."

He picked her because she appeals to the Know Nothing wing of the GOP. I'm not the first to suggest this. For example, check out Paul Krugman's op-ed in The New York Times in August:
 

"Know-nothingism -- the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant -- gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise -- has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: 'Real men don't think things through.'"

Whoa, wait a minute there, Krugman. Aren't you being a little sexist? You forgot all about Sarah Palin!

First a little history: The real Know Nothing Party was a short-lived movement embracing anti-immigrant, anti-naturalization sentiments in the mid-1850s.  Interestingly, by the 1860 elections, most members had merged with the Republican Party.

It's tough to really picture politics back then, when we still had a Whig party and we hadn't even had a civil war yet. So try this: Imagine a political party "empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by... immigrants, who [a]re often regarded as hostile to US values." Tough to envision, I know.
 

The Know Nothings were nativists, who warned against the "others" in our society. You know, the "exotic" foreigners who may have different religions or upbringings than the majority of those in power.

Palin is doing her best tightrope act on this one. But her coded language is carefully tailored to the Know Nothing wing of the Republican Party, and they're listening.

Now, the name of the Know Nothing Party is a little misleading. The party called itself the American or American-Republican Party. The story goes that they were so secretive, that when asked about the party's dealings, members would reply, "I know nothing." Thus, they became known as "know nothings."

In today's political parlance, the phrase "know nothing" has taken on two meanings: nativism and ignorance. Which is why Palin is a perfect spokesperson.

Palin has expressed ignorance on a range of issues so wide, that it's hardly worth giving the scope of, but here goes:

I'm sure there's more (feel free to remind me of what I've forgotten below), but I'm getting a little worn out just thinking about it. Maybe I should take a page out of Palin's book and just stop thinking so darn much.

Sarah Palin has taken lack of knowledge to a whole new level and embraced ignorance. She's said herself that she doesn't think, er blink, when she has to make a life-changing decision.

I'm sure if you asked Palin in a friendly room if she were anti-intellectual, she'd say yes. She asked a Wasilla librarian what it would take to remove books she found offensive from the local library. She's against comprehensive sex-education. She wants schools to teach children creationism. She's anti-science.

Long story short: Palin is not satisfied with simply stemming the tide of her own informational intake. She wants to remove educational opportunities for America's children as well. And the way she drags her school-aged children around the campaign trail doesn't inspire much confidence in her educational values either.

There are plenty of happy, ignorant people in this country. But the fact that we have to reach back to the mid-19th century to find a party that embraced ignorance to the degree that we see in today's GOP should say something about the false correlation between the McCain/Palin ticket and the idea of change for the better. "

Ted Stevens, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Culture of Corruption, Talking Points Memo (October 28, 208)

"The last thing Republicans needed a week before Election Day was yet another high-profile GOP scandal coming to fruition and reminding voters of the "culture of corruption" they voted to end just two years ago. This is exactly what Republicans got yesterday, however, when Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was convicted on federal corruption charges. Following more than a decade of Republican rule on Capitol Hill, the GOP scandals of 2005-2006 would be greatly to blame for the loss of the House and Senate to Democrats in Nov. 2006. As he now joins Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, and Randy "Duke" Cunningham in the Republican gallery of disgraced lawmakers, Ted Stevens may contribute greatly in turn to the Republican defeat of 2008.

The likely loss of Stevens' Senate seat to a Democrat and the shadow his conviction may cast over other congressional GOP campaigns are not the only worries this latest scandal presents for Republicans as Election Day approaches. Stevens is also a problem for the Republican presidential campaign, owing in particular to his ties to Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. However she might seek to distance herself from her fellow Alaskan now, Palin shares an extensive history with Stevens in Alaska politics, including a stint for Palin as director of an independent 527 group organized by Stevens. Palin's relationship with Stevens is detailed in a video from the Anchorage Daily News including a joint news conference with the two from July 2008 and Stevens' endorsement of Palin for governor in 2006.

Between 2003 and 2005, Palin served as one of three directors of "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Sevice, Inc.," a 527 group authorized to raise unlimited funds from corporate donors and designed according to the Washington Post "to serve as a political boot camp for Republican women in the state." While perfectly legal, Palin's service in Stevens' group does conflict somewhat with her presidential running mate John McCain's official position that 527s should be abolished and with the McCain/Palin claim to be maverick reformers (see also Rolling Stone, Think Progress).

Following Palin's service with his 527 group, Stevens endorsed Palin in her run for governor of Alaska in 2006, while both Stevens and Palin were supporting the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" project that Palin now disavows. Stevens' endorsement for Palin is preserved in a video which Palin removed from her gubernatorial campaign website shortly following her pick as McCain's vice-presidential running mate, but which may still be viewed at Youtube and in the Anchorage Daily News video on Stevens and Palin.

Previously, as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, between 1996 and 2002, Palin hired a Washington lobbying firm headed by Steven W. Silver, a former chief of staff to Ted Stevens. Silver's firm helped secure $27 million in congressional earmarks for Wasilla during Palin's tenure as mayor - a hefty sum for a town of only 7000 residents, and a further contradiction to Palin's claim of being a maverick reformer (Washington Post).

Palin is also associated with the Alaska-based oil pipeline company VECO Corporation and its former CEO, Bill Allen, who has pled guilty to bribing Alaska legislators including Ted Stevens' son Ben. Remodeling work organized by VECO on Ted Stevens' home is among the more than $250,000 in gifts and services Stevens has now been convicted of accepting from wealthy friends in exchange for political favors. When Sarah Palin ran for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska in 2002, she received $5,000 from VECO officials and/or their wives, including $500 directly from Bill Allen, accounting for 10% of her campaign fund (Anchorage Daily News).

So it looks like Sarah Palin has some "palling around" problems of her own with convicted felons to explain. This is, of course, in addition to Troopergate, the untaxed per diems Governor Palin recieved while at home with her family, and vacation travel for her kids billed to the taxpayers of Alaska, which voters must think about between now and next Tuesday. Do we really want Sarah Palin's Alaska coming to Washington? "

Sen. Ted Stevens Found Guilty in Corruption Case, by Matt Apuzzo and Jesse J. Holland, AP (October 27, 2008)

" Washington - Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted of seven corruption charges Monday in a trial that tainted the 40-year Senate career of Alaska's political patriarch.

    The verdict, coming just days before Election Day, adds further uncertainty to a closely watched Senate race. Democrats hope to seize the once reliably Republican seat as part of their bid for a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

    Stevens, 84, was convicted of all seven charges he faced of lying about free home renovations and other gifts he received from a wealthy oil contractor. Jurors began deliberating Wednesday at noon.

    Stevens faces up to five years in prison on each count when he is sentenced Jan. 26, but under federal sentencing guidelines, he is likely to receive much less prison time, if any.

    The monthlong trial revealed that employees for oil services company VECO Corp. transformed the senator's modest mountain cabin into a modern, two-story home with wraparound porches, a sauna and a wine cellar. Stevens never paid for VECO's work.

    The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Stevens said he had no idea he was getting freebies. He said he paid $160,000 for the project and said he believed that covered everything.

    Stevens asked for an unusually speedy trial, hoping he'd be exonerated in time to return to Alaska and win re-election. He kept his campaign going and gave no indication that he had a contingency plan in case of conviction.

    Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel Stevens on a two-thirds vote.

    "Put this down: That will never happen - ever, OK?" Stevens said in the weeks leading up to his trial. "I am not stepping down. I'm going to run through and I'm going to win this election.

...."

Palin appointed friends and donors to key posts in Alaska, records show, by Charles Piller, LA Times (October 24, 2008)

"Reporting from Anchorage — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, plucked from relative obscurity in part for her reform credentials, has been eager to tout them in her vice presidential campaign.

"I took on the old politics as usual in Juneau when I stood up to the special interests and the lobbyists and the big oil companies and the good old boys," Palin told the Republican National Convention in her acceptance speech. She said that as a new governor she "shook things up, and in short order we put the government of our state back on the side of the people."

By midway through her first term, she had signed an ethics reform bill, increased oil profit taxes and tweaked Big Oil again by awarding a gas pipeline contract to a Canadian company.

In some other respects, a Los Angeles Times examination of state records shows, her approach to government was business as usual. Take, for example, the tradition of patronage. Some of Palin's most controversial appointments involved donors, records show.

Among The Times' findings:

* More than 100 appointments to state posts -- nearly 1 in 4 -- went to campaign contributors or their relatives, sometimes without apparent regard to qualifications.

* Palin filled 16 state offices with appointees from families that donated $2,000 to $5,600 and were among her top political patrons.

* Several of Palin's leading campaign donors received state-subsidized industrial development loans of up to $3.6 million for business ventures of questionable public value.

* Palin picked a donor to replace the public safety commissioner she fired. But the new top cop had to resign days later under an ethics cloud. And Palin drew a formal ethics complaint still pending against her and several aides for allegedly helping another donor and fundraiser land a state job.

Most new governors install friends and supporters in state jobs. But Alaska historians say some of Palin's appointees were less qualified than those of her Republican and Democratic predecessors.

University of Alaska historian Steve Haycox said Palin has been a reformer. But he said she has a penchant for placing supporters, many of them ill-prepared, in high posts. He called it "cronyism" far beyond what previous governors have done and a contradiction of her high-minded philosophy.

Terrence Cole, an Alaska political historian, said Palin had in some cases shown "a disrespect for experience."

Administration officials disputed such criticism. They said campaign contributions were not a factor in state appointments. Frank Bailey, the state's directorof boards and commissions, in speaking for Palin, who was not available to answer inquiries from The Times, said, "We are always seeking the best-qualified folks."

In a little-noted sequel to Palin's controversial dismissal of her public safety commissioner, the governor replaced Walt Monegan with former small-town Police Chief Charles Kopp of Kenai. The appointment unraveled almost immediately in what Cole called a vetting catastrophe.

A previous sexual harassment complaint came to light and Kopp had to resign two weeks after taking over. Alaska paid him $10,000 in severance.

After another of Palin's campaign donors and fundraisers landed a civil service job with the state department of transportation, GOP activist Andree McLeod filed an ethics complaint against the governor and several aides, alleging that improper pressure was used to help Tom Lamal.

Lamal, a public school teacher in Fairbanks until he retired in 2006, was hired as a right-of-way agent despite reports of internal conflicts over whether he was qualified under state law.

E-mail messages between Palin aides, obtained by McLeod under the state public records act, indicate that the hiring was pushed "through the roadblocks" by a deputy to one of Palin's appointees. And Palin aide Bailey sent Lamal a congratulatory note saying, in part, "Well now your foot's back in the door and maybe we can tap you for other things."

Lamal declined to be interviewed for this article.

Palin spokesman William McAllister declined to comment because of an ongoing state personnel board inquiry.

Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in August that her office merely worked to fix a "glitch" that prevented Lamal's hiring because of outdated job requirements, and that no favors were given.

In other state appointments, records show that all five Palin selections for the powerful Natural Gas Development Authority, which oversees a proposed gas pipeline project, were donors. They included Kathryn Lamal, wife of Tom Lamal.

She appointed Kristan Cole, a school friend and a campaign donor, to the Board of Agriculture and Conservation, a farm regulatory position that by state law must go to people with strong business experience. Cole is a real estate agent.

All three appointees to the Board of Public Accountancy, which oversees the accounting industry, gave to her campaign for governor, as did all three appointees to the Local Boundary Commission, which regulates contentious land annexations by local governments.

Palin reappointed donor Steve Frank to the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., which manages Alaska's $29-billion oil revenue nest egg. Frank, a former Republican legislator, is married to another leading donor, Linda Anderson, a lobbyist for power and tourism companies, among others.

The Permanent Fund position earns a $400-a-day honorarium. Most other board and commission appointees receive per diem and travel expenses. Regardless of compensation, experts said, such appointments are coveted for their power and prestige, or as a political stepping stone.

Palin spokesman McAllister said that most Cabinet-level officials she appointed were not donors. In every state, he added, people who "apply to serve in a voluntary role are typically supporters of the governor."

Records show that Palin donors obtained state-subsidized business loans from the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, whose mission is to encourage "economic growth and diversification of the state, including expansion of small businesses."

In one case, Jae G. Lee, a former Los Angeles businessman who is the proprietor of Party Time, a rundown grocery store and bottle shop in Anchorage, sought a $2.7-million state loan to buy an aging strip mall in midtown Anchorage. It was on the market because of a glut of similar malls in the area, all of them losing customers to big-box stores.

Lee and his wife, who had contributed $3,000 worth of office space to Palin's 2006 campaign, won the low-interest, state-backed mortgage although it was unclear how the old mall would add jobs. Lee said he did nothing to improve his acquisition, but with the cheap loan his profits have been robust.

Lee said he did not seek Palin's help to obtain the loan.

Two other state-backed loans with favorable terms and questionable development benefits went to Palin contributor and local dentist Scott Laudon and his partners. The investors got $1.2 million to refinance debt on Northern Lights Village -- a gritty collection of shops including massage and tattoo parlors, a secondhand-clothing store and a video arcade. Its neighbors along a 1 1/2 -mile stretch of Northern Lights Boulevard in midtown Anchorage include a dozen strip malls.

Laudon and other partners also received $3.6 million to buy two automated car washes in Anchorage. The benefit to Alaska, according to the approval documents, was the retention of five jobs -- which would have remained without the subsidy. Laudon declined to comment.

The Times requested documentation on the Lee and Laudon loans, including interest rates, from AIDEA on Sept. 25, but the agency has not released the materials and has declined to discuss details.

The agency "probably looked at it this way: 'This is a good loan that will be paid back,' " said Bob Poe, former AIDEA chief. "That helps them produce income to make other loans, much like a bank." As economic development, however, both loans sound questionable, he said.

Three Palin appointees to the AIDEA board also gave to her campaign for governor. This year the board picked Palin donor Ted Leonard as chief executive of the $1.2-billion agency. His principal credential was having been financial manager of tiny Wasilla, Alaska. Palin appointed him to the city post when she was mayor.

Agency spokesman Karsten Rodvik said that Palin was not directly involved in the selection and that Leonard was the top applicant because of his long and diverse experience in finance and economic development. He also said that AIDEA managers were "not aware" of any influence by Palin or her aides on any loans.

Some of Palin's other appointments have been controversial.

Franci Havemeister, one of several of Palin's childhood friends tapped for leadership jobs, heads the state agriculture division. A former real estate agent, she was ridiculed in Alaska after it was reported that she had cited among her qualifications for the job a childhood love of cows.

And Palin's choice for attorney general, Talis Colberg, stirred considerable puzzlement: He was virtually unknown beyond her circle near Wasilla. Colberg, who had a solo law practice and little management experience, now oversees 500 professionals.

Colberg was criticized by both Republican and Democratic legislators for his handling of the recent investigation of Palin's actions in a controversy involving her ex-brother-in-law -- a state trooper -- and Monegan. A Superior Court judge overruled Colberg's move to quash investigative subpoenas in the case."

Vote Watchdogs Warn of Troubles on Election Day, by Carol J. Williams and Noam N. Levey, LA Times (October 30, 2008)

"  Washington and Los Angeles - Counting down to an election day expected to draw a record-shattering turnout, voting-rights watchdogs are sounding the alarm that a repeat of the Florida fiasco of 2000 could occur in any of a dozen battleground states.

    Lawsuits are already flying in many of these states.

    Voting rights advocates in Colorado, to take just one example, told a federal judge Wednesday that the names of nearly 30,000 voters were recently purged from the state registry in violation of federal law and ought to be restored by election day. In a compromise, those voters will be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

    Across the battleground states, where Democrats had a 2-1 advantage in new registrations, voting-rights groups contend the eleventh-hour verifications demanded by Republican officials are attempts to disenfranchise the new voters.

    The flood of millions of first-time voters could lead to crowded and contentious polling places across the country, triggering last-minute identity checks that could deny ballots to those whose names or addresses don't match other government records.

    "This one is the meltdown scenario," said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Ad vancement Project founded by civil rights lawyers to pursue racial justice.

    Common Cause, the American Bar Assn., the League of Women Voters and a phalanx of other public interest groups are urging states to ensure that the polls are adequately staffed to handle an onslaught bolstered by millions of newly registered voters.

    Voting advocates are worried about its effect in states like Virginia, which has one of the lowest ratios of voting machines to registered voters.

    "Voters will simply walk away if the lines are too long," warned Susannah Goodman, who directs the election reform program at Common Cause, a campaign reform group based in Washington. "They don't want to, but they may have a job they have to get to, and they have to go."

    Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act in 2002 in response to the Florida debacle two years earlier. The law provided $3 billion for new equipment and statewide registries, but the sheer volume of new voters has overwhelmed efforts to verify their eligibility.

    Litigation brought in recent weeks in Ohio, Georgia, Florida and Colorado may serve to alert voters that they may be challenged. But in many states, the verification methods have created more obstacles than they have removed.

    In Florida, an aggressive "no match, no vote" standard has been applied to question whether more than 10,000 of those who have registered since Jan. 1 should be given ballots despite discrepancies between their registration information and other government records, said Tova Wang, vice president for research at Common Cause.

    Voting rights groups, both nonpartisan and Democrat-aligned, have compiled lists of vulnerable voters and tried to track them down.

    "We're engaged in protecting voters from being disenfranchised by virtue of typos and clerical errors," said Adam Skaggs, an attorney with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

    He said that the likelihood of fraud has been "vastly inflated" and that discrepancies are overwhelmingly the result of innocent mistakes or outdated voter registries.

    In Montana, authorities recently sought to drop 6,000 voters from the rolls because of address changes, including soldiers deployed to Iraq, Skaggs noted.

    A Brennan Center study of ballot designs found problems in North Carolina, where voters who choose a one-touch straight-party option on voting machines may not notice that the presidential race isn't included and requires a separate vote. In Ohio, the candidates for the top office are split between two pages, which could lead some voters to invalidate their ballots by choosing one on each.

    In Georgia, the voter registry has been scrutinized for potential noncitizen entries, and thousands of people -- most with Latino names -- have been flagged for identity checks if they seek to cast a ballot.

    Lawsuits challenging election officials' plans to deny ballots in cases of mismatches in at least six states have been shot down by the courts. But appeals are in the works, and concerns over access persist in most of the states analysts consider a toss-up.

    "I think we're still going to see a lot of problems, in part because some voters aren't going to find out until election day that they've been dropped from the rolls," said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at Loyola Law School. "I expect this to happen in Florida, where they had a very aggressive no match, no vote policy."

    Citing news reports from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Florida, the community activist group ACORN warned last week that Republican officials in those states had hinted at intentions to scan foreclosure filings to identify voters who are no longer living at the address on their registration.

    "This shameless challenge adds insult to injury to those who have been hit hardest by the economic crisis," said ACORN, which itself has been accused of fraudulent registrations.

    In response to the flood of early voting problems, the Obama campaign, Cable News Network and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have set up hotlines, with CNN fielding more than 15,000 calls since opening its phone bank on Oct. 15.

    While legal challenges loom over denied ballots and voting machine breakdowns, legal experts said they doubted the electoral vote count would hinge on a single state this time, as occurred in Florida in 2000, when 537 votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore.

    "The good news story is that it's very unlikely in any given year that you're going to have such a close outcome," said Edward B. Foley, an Ohio State University law professor. Just in case, he has developed a proposal for a nonpartisan arbitration tribunal that could be an alternative to ceding that role to the Supreme Court.

    The two presidential campaigns are also preparing to deal with lawsuits over the outcome by joining nonprofit and pro bono attorneys who are fanning out by the thousands to monitor the polls.

    The Obama campaign has been urging supporters to vote early as a way to avoid problems. "We think for the most part local election officials have done a good job," said Jenny Backus, a campaign spokeswoman.

    The McCain campaign has focused in recent weeks on attacking ACORN's voter registration efforts. But spokesman Ben Porritt said the campaign had confidence in most local election officials. "For the most part, these things are handled properly," he said.

    While attention has zeroed in on perceived attempts to deny ballots to certain voters, seasoned election monitors point out that such infringement is rare and usually the result of unintentional human error in a system reliant on lay volunteers.

    More pleased than apprehensive over predictions of historic turnout, League of Women Voters President Mary Wilson said the nonprofit was concentrating in the final days on ensuring polls have enough workers and equipment, and was seeking to downplay the obstacles so as not to discourage voters.

    "It does no good to be talking about barriers to voting when we're this close to the election," she said.

    Wilson hailed the improvements in voter registration procedures mandated by the Help America Vote Act but lamented the unanticipated complications imposed by the verification regime.

    "A person can leave off a digit from his driver's license, or a woman who gets married and uses her maiden name as a middle initial -- they're not going to match," she said. "Couple that with the fact that the Social Security Administration itself says 28% of the time there's not going to be a match with its data entry and you can see that some of the things HAVA brought to us turn out to be barriers in their implementation."

    One benefit of the voting reform law, she added, has been the provisional ballot for voters who show up at the polls only to learn their eligibility is in question. These ballots will be counted if voters confirm their identity within 48 hours, whereas many of those challenged in previous elections were turned away.

    Courts including the U.S. Supreme Court have so far ruled against screening efforts that could deny access, allaying activists' worst fears.

    "I was really scared," said Wendy Weiser, who heads the Brennan Center's voting rights project. "Now, I am cautiously optimistic, or maybe just mildly apprehensive.""

Ohio Provisional Ballots May Prove Pivotal, by Ian Urbina, NY Times (October 30, 2008)

"Columbus, Ohio - If the outcome of next week's presidential election is close, this precariously balanced state could be the place where the two parties begin filing the inevitable lawsuits over voting irregularities, experts say.

    The battles could be over the rules for a recount, or how to deal with voters who were not added to the rolls even though they registered properly and on time. Lawyers could fight over how to count the paper ballots used when the electronic machines break down, or whether a judge was correct in deciding to keep certain polls open late.

    But the most likely source of litigation is the state's heavy use of provisional ballots, which are issued when a voter's identity or registration cannot immediately be verified or when polls stay open late. Ohio has a history of requiring large numbers of voters to use these ballots, which are easy to disqualify and are not counted until after the election.

    "Provisional ballots are really the Achilles' heel of our electoral process, because in a close race that is the pressure point lawyers use to try to undo the results," said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who is one of the nation's foremost experts on voting litigation. "The larger the number of provisional ballots cast in a state, the more vulnerable the Achilles' heel, and Ohio has for a couple of elections used more of these ballots than virtually any other state."

    In 2004, 2006 and this year's primaries, Ohio, unlike most other states, increased the percentage of provisional ballots used by voters. In the 2004 presidential election, which hinged on Ohio, the margin between the candidates was about 118,000 votes, of 5.7 million cast. Of those, more than 158,000 were provisional ballots.

    Even more of these ballots will be cast in Ohio on Nov. 4, voting experts predict, because many newly registered voters may bring the wrong form of identification to the polls, failing to comply with the state's new voter law that requires all voters to show government-issued identification or an approved document with a voter's name and address. Others may go to the wrong polling place, or show up at the polls only to find that they are not listed on the state's new computerized voter registration list, which has already been the subject of intense partisan wrangling.

    Provisional ballots were created by Congress in 1993 to ensure that voters would never be turned away without casting a ballot when they showed up at the polls.

    But federal law said little about how these ballots should later be verified and counted. In Ohio, unlike most other states, the methods for determining which provisional ballots count vary by county.

    "Our goal has been to get in front of this problem," said Jennifer L. Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, who has issued directives over the past two weeks creating uniform standards for how counties must handle the ballots.

    Ms. Brunner has instructed county election officials that they cannot disqualify a provisional ballot if a poll worker mistakenly gives one to a voter.

    Provisional ballots will also come into play if a huge turnout causes long lines in Ohio, leading lawyers to ask the courts to keep polls open late. When polls are kept open after hours, the ballots cast must be provisional.

    Problems with the ballots will not affect the outcome if the race is not close, but federal election officials and voting experts say they are closely monitoring their use and the possibility of lawsuits in Ohio and other swing states.

...."

Election Protection, by Amy Goodman, truthdig.com (October 30, 2008)

"Election Day approaches, and with it a test of our election system's integrity. Who will be allowed to vote; who will be barred? Who will get paper ballots; who will use electronic voting machines? Will polls be open long enough to accommodate what is expected to be a historic turnout?

Veteran activist Harvey Wasserman has co-written four books on elections and voter rights. He says John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. Why look back? Wasserman is concerned about the attempt by the Ohio Republican Party, with help from the Bush White House, to challenge the registration of new Ohio voters:

"The GOP is trying to disenfranchise these 200,000 people by challenging their right to vote, asking the secretary of state here, Jennifer Brunner, to let the counties investigate and knock off the voter rolls, if they choose to, people who have minor discrepancies in their Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers. And the secretary of state has rightfully showed that many of these mistakes come from typographical errors when the numbers are entered in at the agencies."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only the U.S. Department of Justice can purge these new registrants from the voter rolls. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, and President Bush urged U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to take action, potentially purging these 200,000 people. Advocates feared the homeless in Ohio would be disenfranchised because they lack a traditional address or identification (Wasserman notes that many of them may be veterans). U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus ruled that Ohio counties must allow voters who list their addresses as park benches or other non-building locations.

Wasserman's two main concerns about the integrity of the election are mass disenfranchisement through computerized purging and the failures of electronic voting machines, which can skew vote tallies and cause impossibly long lines at polling places (as can the provision of too few voting machines, whether they work well or not). These issues are both coming to a head in Colorado. There, Secretary of State Mike Coffman, a Republican who is also running for Congress, has been sued by Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota and the Service Employees International Union for purging 30,000 voters within a 90-day window before an election. Six thousand seven hundred new registrants were purged for failing to check a box on the voter-registration form. Colorado has seen enthusiastic participation in early voting (some estimates nationally put the number of early voters at an astounding 10 million, with days to go), and also has seen many voters opt for mail-in ballots. However, more than 11,000 voters in Denver did not receive their mail-in ballots because of a mistake made by Sequoia Voting Systems, the company that was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail-processing facility on Oct. 16. Election officials promise the ballots will be delivered.

Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com told me: "Sequoia is one of the big-four voting-machine companies. Of course, they have failed in state after state." Friedman also reports on "vote flipping," a problem with electronic, touch-screen voting machines. "It's West Virginia, it's Tennessee, it's Texas, Missouri, Nevada ... people go in and vote for a Democratic straight-party ticket or for Barack Obama, and the vote flips to a Republican or some other candidate." The companies claim the machines can be calibrated to work properly. Friedman disagrees: "These machines need to be pulled out, because even when they work, the problem is that there is absolutely no way to ever verify that any vote ever cast on a touch-screen machine like this has been recorded as per the voter's intent."

In response to video of Georgia early voters waiting eight hours, Friedman blogged: "Thank you to those voters who were willing to hang in there! Shame on you to those officials who set up this system that can't even accommodate the limited numbers of early voters! God save us all next Tuesday. Stay strong and brave people!"

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has sued Virginia's Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, on the grounds that he is unprepared to deal with a massive onslaught of voters there Nov. 4. Virginia is not among the 31 states with early voting.

Thousands of lawyers and citizen-activists will be monitoring the polling places on Election Day. People are posting videos of election problems at videothevote.org. When you go to cast your vote, take a friend or neighbor, take your ID and take a camera as well. Election protection is everyone's job."

Report: DOJ Lawyer Meets With ACLU On NM Voter Intimidation, by Zachary Roth, TPM Muckraker (October 29, 2008)

"Earlier this evening, a Justice Department spokesman told TPMmuckraker that the department was looking into claims of voter intimidation in New Mexico, stemming from reports last week by us and other outlets that a lawyer tied to the state GOP had hired a private investigator to question Hispanics about their right to vote.

Now, the New Mexico Independent, which originally reported on the intimidation along with TPMmuckraker, adds some detail to that picture.

The news site reports:
 

An attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice met with a staff attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico today regarding reports of voter intimidation here, said a spokesperson for ACLU.

Before flying back to Washington, D.C., the attorney, who works in the voting section of DOJ's Civil Rights Division, picked up copies of the press packet handed out by state Republicans on Oct. 16.

That last sentence refers to a press conference held by the state Republican Party, at which it released the names of 10 voters it claimed had voted illegally in a Democratic primary in June. It was later established that the voters were in fact eligible. But relatives of two of those voters told TPMmuckraker and the New Mexico Independent that they had received intimidating visits from a private investigator apparently hired by Republican lawyer Pat Rogers.

ACLU filed suit on Monday against the state party, alleging that it illegally interfered with the individuals' right to vote.

And now it looks like the Justice Department is on the case"

Republican Voter Suppression: A Guide, by Kate Klonick and Zachary Roth,TPM Muckraker (October 29, 2008)

"There are so many Republican gambits designed to make voting more difficult -- specifically for Democrats, of course -- that it can be hard to keep track of them all. So here's a handy -- and by no means comprehensive -- guide to what's happening in some of the key swing states.

Ohio
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month denied a bid by the state GOP to force Democratic secretary of state Jennifer Brunner to provide local election officials with lists of new voters whose registration information did not match that on other government documents. Voting-rights advocates had feared that making Brunner hand over the lists could lead to a slew of GOP challenges, forcing hundreds of thousands of voters to cast provisional ballots. Republican leader (and Ohioan) John Boehner -- with help from the White House -- has asked the Department of Justice to step in, but few observers expect DOJ to take any action so close to the election.

New Mexico
The state GOP earlier this month held a press conference at which it released the names of 10 voters it said had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June. After ACORN helped established that the voters, almost all Hispanic, were in fact legitimate, TPMmuckraker and others reported that GOP lawyer Pat Rogers apparently hired a private investigator, who intimidated some of the voters by going to their homes to question them about their voting status. Rogers, the P.I. and the state party are now being sued for voter intimidation by several voting-rights groups.

Indiana
The Lake County GOP sued to shut down early voting centers set up by the county election board in Democratic-leaning cities in the northern part of the county. A judge declined to shut down the sites, though an appeal is scheduled to be heard later this week. But in the meantime, early voting at the centers has been proceeding. In addition, the Republican secretary of state, Todd Rokita, has called on law enforcement to prosecute ACORN for submitting 1400 suspicious-looking voter-registration forms in the county.

Nevada
The chair of the state GOP wrote to Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller, asking him to require newly registered voters to cast provisional ballots if they correct mismatches in their voter information at the polls. Miller responded with an interpretation of state law that rejected the GOP's request.

Pennsylvania
The state GOP has filed a lawsuit designed to cast doubt on 140,000 voter-registration applications submitted by ACORN in four counties. Among other things, it would require the state to provide additional provisional ballots in the counties at issue. Democratic Secretary of State pedro Cortes has called the "frivolous", saying it's designed to undermine confidence in the system. The court has not yet ruled on the suit.

Montana
The state GOP announced earlier this month that it was formally challenging the eligibility of 6,000 people in Democratic-leaning counties, based in discrepancies in their addresses. After it emerged that among the challenged voters were a World War II veteran who had moved across town that year, and a member of the Army Reserve about to ship out to Kuwait, the move was condemned even by some prominent Republicans in the state. The challenge was withdrawn, and the man behind, it, Jacob Eaton, the party's executive director, quit.

Florida
In early September, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Republican, instructed election officials to reject voter registration applications that do not pass a computer match test. Voter rights groups say the system can disqualify voters based on nothing more than a missing middle initial on their voter form, and that the late date of the order could cause additional confusion. They fear the move could disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters. And in a rare case of a Republican making voting easier, Governor Charlie Crist yesterday ordered extended hours for early voting centers, after long lines were reported in many parts of the state.

Wisconsin
Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed suit against the state's election board, demanding that it confirm the eligibility of tens of thousands of new voters. In a recent interview with CNN, Van Hollen admitted that the GOP "may have asked lawyers in my office to file the lawsuit." A county court threw the suit out, but Van Hollen soon announced the formation of a "voter fraud task force", which would involve stationing 50 state prosecutors and other law-enforcement agents at the polls on election day, a move state Democrats have denounced as an effort to intimidate voters.

Colorado
A voting-rights group, filed a lawsuit against Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman, alleging that over 35,000 voters were purged from the rolls illegally. The suit, which was heard in court today, claims that voters have been removed from the rolls based on a faulty system for identifying illegitimate voters, and within 90 days of the election -- both of which violate the federal Voting Rights Act. Coffman, who is running for the U.S. Congress in this election, denies that any rules were broken."

WI Dems Call AG's Poll Watchers Intimidation, by Kate Klonick, TPM Muckraker (October 29, 2008)

"Last week, a Wisconsin county court threw out their attorney general's suit against the Government Accountability Board, seeking confirmation on thousands of voter registrations.

But AG J.B. Van Hollen is not going gently into this election night.

Van Hollen announced yesterday that he would be staffing Wisconsin's polls with more than 50 state attorneys and agents to guard against election fraud. He has also "formed a task force with Milwaukee prosecutors to tackle voter fraud cases."

Citing concern over voter fraud, the GOP often sends poll watchers to challenge voters and "gum up the works" at polling places.

Today, Wisconsin Democrats responded to Van Hollen in a statement today, calling him "so desperate to influence the election that he has resorted to sending state prosecutors to intimidate voters at the polls."

Joe Wineke, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, deemed Van Hollen's past actions "hyper-partisan" and charged the AG was pulling " agents away from their real jobs to investigate fabricated stories about widespread voter fraud.""

Silence From DOJ On Voter Intimidation Claims, by Zachary Roth, TPM Muckraker (October 29, 2008)

"Last week, TPMmuckraker and others reported on an apparent voter intimidation effort launched by a lawyer tied to the New Mexico Republican Party -- which included hiring a private investigator to show up at the homes of Hispanics and question them about their right to vote.

On Friday, hours after our story appeared, Gerry Hebert -- a former top voting-rights official at the Department of Justice, who now runs the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center (and is a frequent TPMmuckraker source) -- forwarded the story, via email, to four current members of DOJ's civil-rights division, which enforces voting laws.

Hebert, who served 21 years at DOJ's civil-rights division, including a stint as acting head of the voting-rights section, wrote in his email, which was copied to TPMmuckraker*: "I believe this conduct, if true, violates both the criminal and civil statutes your offices enforce, and thus warrants investigation by DOJ." He asked the four recipients to acknowledge receipt of his email.

But this afternoon, five days later, Hebert told TPMmuckraker that he had received no response whatsoever.

The four officials to whom Hebert addressed his message were:
-Mark Kappelhoff, chief of the division's criminal section.
-Mark Blumberg, a deputy chief of the same section.
-Christopher Coates, chief of the division's voting-rights section.
-James Walsh, an attorney in the division.

Kappelhoff, Blumberg, and Walsh did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Department staff declined to connect TPMmuckraker to Coates directly.

The apparent lack of followup contrasts with DOJ's apparent quick action in launching an investigation into ACORN in connection with voter-fraud, according to an Associated Press report -- attributed to anonymous sources and as yet unconfirmed -- from earlier this month.

Hebert and several other voting experts told TPMmuckraker last week that the activities laid out in our report potentially constitute a violation of federal voting laws.

The ACLU and Project Vote on Monday filed suit against the New Mexico GOP, alleging voter intimidation. The same day, MALDEF, a group that advocates for the rights of Hispanics, filed a similar but separate suit, which names as defendants the GOP lawyer Pat Rogers and the private investigator Al Romero.

Kappelhoff and Walsh, at least, would appear to be unlikely participants in a DOJ scheme to stonewall legitimate voter intimidation complaints. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that both have contributed to Barack Obama's campaign.

Late Update: Scot Montrey, a spokesman for DOJ's civil-rights division, called TPMmuckraker to say: "The department is aware of the allegations and we're looking into them.""

More Than 30,000 Registered Coloradans Barred From Voting, by Naomi Zeveloff, The Colorado Independent (October 29, 2008)

"  Thousands of Coloradans have been denied the right to vote because of a policy that may violate federal law.

    Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman has authorized county clerks to purge newly registered voters under the so-called 20-day rule. Here, county clerks must send non-forwardable letters to newly registered voters. If the mail bounces back to the clerks, then they must remove the voter applicants' names from the rolls.

    Voting rights advocates say that the policy violates the 1965 National Voting Rights Act. The Advancement Project, a voter protection organization, filed suit on behalf of several other groups against Coffman to halt the practice and reverse course on other voter purges. According to the suit, 3,291 of these 20-day applicants have been removed since August 2007.

    "We consider these voters to have been registered when they are entered into the SCORE database," Jenny Flanagan, executive director of Colorado Common Cause told the Colorado Independent, referring to the state's new voter database. "They have met the other requirements for registrations and they are taken off when the cards are returned. There are examples of when there could have been an error."

    Individuals ejected by the 20-day rule are among the 30,000 purged voters that make up the basis of the lawsuit. According to the complaint, Coffman also canceled duplicate registrations and registrations of people who moved. The NVRA specifies that the state may only cancel three types of voters within 90 days of a federal election: deceased people, felony convicts, and those who withdraw their own names.

    Flanagan, who is also a plaintiff in the case, says that the 20-day rule is subject to human fallacy. A would-be voter might make a mistake on his or her own address on the form. But so could a registrar at the clerk's office when entering the data. Postal employees aren't immune to slip-ups either.

    "We believe that it should not be allowed any time," she says. "There are efforts to protect voters during this election, but there are some long term solutions we are seeking. We want to end this practice of canceling registrations and get the state in compliance with the NVRA."

    The NVRA does allow for voters to be removed from state rolls, but only after county clerks have sent a forwardable mail confirmation and waited two election periods to see whether the voters shows up to vote, according to Sarah Brannon, staff attorney with the Fair Elections Legal Network, a group acting as legal counsel on the lawsuit. "[Applicants] can't be removed within 20 days," she says.

    Brannon says that the 20-day rule doesn't disproportionately affect one population or another. But a Colorado Independent report published earlier this month showed that homeless people in particular are impacted by the legislation. Many homeless voters register using shelters or day centers as their mailing address. Counties send confirmation forms to these locations. But if homeless people don't turn up within a week or two to pick up the mail, shelters typically return it to the sender. Which means that the homeless individuals are struck from the rolls.

    Colorado isn't the only state with a 20-day rule on the books. In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Advancement Project - the same group bringing forward the suit in Colorado - successfully challenged a similar law; the state was ordered to stop purging voters whose confirmation cards were returned to county clerks.

    The case will be heard on Wednesday afternoon.

    Coffman's office did not return repeated requests for comment. He has defended his purges in the past; Attorney General John Suthers has also backed Coffman, saying that the cancellations did not violate the NVRA."

Voter Fraud? No, Voter Suppression - Both issues have been studied. Only one is an actual problem, but it's not getting the attention., by David Morris, Star-Tribune (October 29, 2008)

"Why are we hearing so much about voter fraud and so little about election fraud? After all, the odds of someone voting fraudulently are about the same as those of an American being struck and killed by lightning.

A microscopic evaluation of election data in the 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington state revealed that voter fraud occurred approximately 0.0009 percent of the time. An analysis of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio revealed a voter fraud rate of 0.00004 percent.

In 1998, Allan J. Lichtman, a consultant on voting rights, was asked by the state of Maryland to investigate charges that the Republican candidate for governor lost because of some 6,000 fraudulent votes. He writes that he found "not a single fraudulent vote [among] the 1.4 million ballots cast in the election."

A 2007 experts' report to the federal Election Assistance Commission concluded that "false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud." The Department of Justice, which according to the attorney general has "made enforcement of election fraud and corruption offenses a top priority," convicted only 24 people between 2002 and 2005 for voting fraud, an average of eight people a year. And these convictions were of individuals guilty of themselves casting illegal votes, not of instigating widespread voting fraud.

On the other hand, evidence of what I will somewhat imprecisely call election fraud -- voter suppression by election officials and state governments -- is widespread and validated. "Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law," the New York Times recently concluded after its own investigation. The Times' numbers don't include efforts by state officials and private parties to discourage, intimidate or challenge eligible voters.

This is the type of voter fraud we should be hearing about. Why aren't we? The principal reason may be explained in the title of one of the best reports on the subject, "The Politics of Voter Fraud" by Barnard Professor Lorraine C. Minnite.

Expanded voter rolls tend to favor Democrats. One reason is that voter-registration drives are usually conducted in minority and low-income neighborhoods and on campuses, areas that are likely to vote Democratic. Voter-suppression efforts, on the other hand, tend to favor Republicans because minorities, poor families and students will be least likely to overcome the new obstacles put in place.

Is this why in the third presidential debate, John McCain accused ACORN of being involved in voter fraud so massive that it "may be destroying the fabric of democracy" while not saying anything during his entire campaign about the far greater threat from widespread voter purging and voter-suppression initiatives?

Is this why the Department of Justice has rapidly launched a national investigation of ACORN, the nation's largest grass-roots organization advocating for low- and moderate-income families, but has not begun to investigate the illegal activities by states and private parties to reduce voting turnout?

Raising the fear of individual voter fraud brings a short-term and a long-term advantage to those who would reduce the turnout of the disadvantaged and dispossessed. In the short term, it hobbles registration and turnout efforts. In the longer term, it helps to persuade state legislatures to pass laws that make it more difficult to vote.

Such was the case in Florida. In 2004, Florida Republicans accused ACORN of massive voter fraud. The publicity given that charge and the ensuing investigation was as ubiquitous as the publicity now being given to attacks on ACORN. A Florida court found ACORN innocent of all charges. But in the meantime, the Florida legislature passed a law imposing stiff penalties for organizations that fail to turn in voter-registration applications later than 10 days after they were collected. The law's reporting requirements were so draconian the League of Women Voters ended 77 years of voter-registration activity in the state because it feared it could not comply and would be bankrupted if there were problems. (A federal judge later blocked the implementation of the law as unconstitutional.)

The fear of voter fraud has resulted in states enacting burdensome and unnecessary photo ID laws for voting and in a federal law that allows voters to be challenged when their registration data deviates in even a small way from federal databanks (for example, one set of data including a middle initial when the other doesn't).

Republicans have seeded, then inflamed our fears of bottom-up voter fraud, even though voter fraud is a trivial problem and has never had an impact on the outcome of elections. And that fear has tragically diverted our attention from the real enemy: top-down voter suppression initiatives that have indeed determined elections and are truly a threat to the fabric of democracy."

Phony Flier Says Virginians Vote on Different Days, by Julian Walker, Virginian-Pilot (October 28, 2008)

"  Richmond, Virginia - A phony State Board of Elections flier advising Republicans to vote on Nov. 4 and Democrats on Nov. 5 is being circulated in several Hampton Roads localities, according to state elections officials.

    In fact, Election Day, for voters of all political stripes, remains Nov. 4.

    The somewhat official-looking flier - it features the state board logo and the state seal - is dated Oct. 24 and indicates that "an emergency session of the General Assembly has adopted the follwing (sic) emergency regulations to ease the load on local electorial (sic) precincts and ensure a fair electorial process."

    The four-paragraph flier concludes with: "We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but felt this was the only way to ensure fairness to the complete electorial process."

    No emergency action has been taken by the General Assembly. It is not in session and lacks the authority to change the date of a federal election.

    State Board of Election officials today said they are aware of the flier but disavowed any connection to it.

    "It's not even on our letterhead; they just copied the logo from our Web site," said agency staffer Ryan Enright, noting the flier has been forwarded to State Police for investigation as a possible incident of voter intimidation.

    Election officials did not specify in which Hampton Roads localities the flier had been spotted.

    State Police are aware of the complaint and are looking into it, said spokeswoman Corinne Geller.

    In 2007, the General Assembly passed a law making it a Class 1 misdemeanor to knowingly communicate false information to registered voters about the date, time and place of the election or voters' precincts, polling places or voter registration statuses in order to impede their voting. The measure is one of the few such deceptive voting practice laws in the country, according to the watchdog group Common Cause. "

Drinking the ACORN Kool-Aid: How Cries of Voter Fraud Cover Up GOP Elections Theft, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast (October 28, 2008)

"Virtually the entire mainstream electronic media drank ACORN Kool-Aid this month brewed up by the Republican National Committee. Almost no one seriously challenged John McCain's comical assertions that ACORN, a grassroots voter registration group, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

While the Republicans had the distracted media searching for links between Obama and ACORN, RNC operatives were busily completing one of the most massive voter suppression and purging efforts in American history, stealing hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes across the embattled swing states and striving to arrange chaos and endless lines at the voting booths next week.

First the facts about ACORN. Months ago, we obtained, as part of our investigation for Rolling Stone magazine, the Republican's list the GOP alleged were the very worst cases of vote and registration fraud by ACORN and similar groups. We went through the names the GOP asserted were "obviously, undeniably and clearly fraudulent" voter registrations.

First, there was Melissa Tais, a dubious ACORN registrant. Her two voter registration forms show, admittedly, suspiciously different signatures. Republicans suggested Melissa was part of a massive fraud to allow Democrats to vote twice.

They were wrong. Ms. Tais, a Cerrillos, New Mexico, waitress, told us she had signed one form on a table and one form holding the paper in her hand. Hence, a second, wobbly signature.

Then there was Patricia White, who Republicans claimed was a fictitious voter. When we filmed her at home in Albuquerque, she seemed real enough.

And so on, through the entire GOP list -- not one fraud. And these were their best cases out of the five million "illegal voters" who Republican leaders claim have infiltrated America's voting rolls.

The overblown histrionics about ACORN do not surprise those of us who have been watching the RNC's election manipulation antics. For eight years White House operatives have been trying to gin up press stories about voter fraud. David Iglesias of New Mexico was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the White House for their refusal to bring voter fraud prosecutions. "We took over 100 complaints," from the GOP, he told us, "We investigated for almost 2 years, I didn't find one prosecutable voter fraud case in the entire state of New Mexico."

Iglesias, a McCain supporter, has, for the first time, leveled a new and serious charge: Despite finding none of the 200 voters guilty, he says the White House nevertheless ordered him to illegally prosecute baseless cases against innocent citizens, just to gin up voter fraud publicity. His refusal, he says, cost him his job. "They were looking for politicized -- for improperly politicized US attorneys to file bogus voter fraud cases."

Certainly ACORN collected some bad signatures. But despite McCain's claims, now morphed into media theology, none of ACORN's actions will have any impact on any election. ACORN hired 13,000 canvassers to register new voters. A small number of these workers defrauded ACORN by handing in phony registration forms using names they had invented (e.g. Mickey Mouse), or copied from phone books. In one case ACORN canvassers used cigarettes to bribe a homeless man, now a Fox News regular, to register 17 times. None of these activities constituted voter fraud. It is no crime to register 17 times; only the final registration counts. His multiple registrations would not allow the tobacco lover to vote 17 times. Nor is there any evidence the phone book registrants will cast multiple ballots.

Finally, the removal by GOP officials of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from voting rolls over the past year provides ACORN with a sound rationale for obtaining new registrations, even from voters who believe they are already registered.

ACORN took pains to screen its registrations and cull out those it considered dubious. However, federal laws make it a felony for voter registration groups like ACORN to discard registrations even when it believes them fraudulent. So ACORN flagged the forms it considered doubtful and handed them in to the registry. Ironically, it was those flagged forms -- the fruits of ACORN's diligence -- that have been flogged by Republicans as their best evidence of widespread election fraud.

Voter fraud is a phantom according to Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Columbia University. Only 24 cases of federal voter fraud have been uncovered between 2002 and 2005 despite massive government efforts devoted to uncovering evidence of a voter fraud crime wave.

The GOP is ginning up hysteria about non-existent vote fraud by Democrats in order to distract the press from its own campaign to disenfranchise millions of American voters.

The Republicans have created an obstacle course of barriers designed to suppress the vote, purge tens of thousands of Democratic voters from voting rolls, create mayhem and delay at voting venues on Election Day, and stop millions of votes from being counted this election cycle.

Jailed GOP activist Jack Abramoff and his fellow convict, Congressman Bob Ney, wrote the most sinister provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which Congress passed in 2002 creating a series of diabolically cunning new voting impediments. HAVA, for example, allows state voting officials to purge tens of thousands of voters from the polls using algorithms and voter ID requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise black, Hispanic and minority voters, and other Democratic demographics including senior citizens and young people.

In 2004, highly organized GOP tacticians helped disenfranchise no less than 2.7 million American voters. Almost a million of them were African Americans. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has found black voters were nine times more likely to have their votes discarded than white voters and that over one-third of the million provisional ballots cast in 2004 -- ballots handed disproportionately to African Americans -- were never counted but simply thrown into dumpsters.

In a technique known as "caging" RNC operatives send millions of first class letters to black voters across the country marked 'do not forward.' Republican operatives armed with lists then invade black precincts on Election Day to challenge those voters whose letters were returned to the RNC because the voter was not home to sign when the mail arrived. That tactic deliberately targets black voters, resurrecting Old Dixie's Jim Crow procedures designed to rid the lists of black voters and create long lines in black precincts.

In this election, new HAVA mandates permit voting officials to precisely match registration form information with the voter's driver's license and Social Security application. While it may sound reasonable, in practice, any change, even a dropped hyphen, is cause for eliminating the voter from the rolls. Since 2004, Colorado's Republican Secretaries of State have purged one out of every five voters from the rolls. The current Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, a Republican also running for office, recently purged an additional 37,000 voters and discarded 6,400 new voter registrations -- overwhelmingly Democratic -- based upon an obscure technical mistake that Coffman's office encouraged voters to make in the first place.

The GOP "anti-fraud" campaign resulted in one in nine New Mexico Democratic voters finding their names had disappeared from voter roles during this year's caucus.

Despite a recent Supreme Court decision upholding Ohio's refusal to disenfranchise 200,000 legitimate voters based on this absurd demand to "match" voter names to databases, White House operatives are still fighting to purge these names from the rolls. President George Bush last week personally asked his Attorney General Mike Mukasey to renew Republican efforts to disenfranchise these voters.

Contrary to Mr. McCain's assertions, the real threat to democracy is from the GOP itself. ACORN has served as a good distraction from Republican efforts to steal the vote from hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters, a genuine threat that has received almost no media attention.

They're stealing your vote, but you can steal it back. Here are some steps you should take to protect your vote. First, avoid the November 4th minefield. Voters, wherever possible, should vote early and in person. Where feasible, avoid mailing in your ballot, many are rejected for flimsy reasons, and first time voters in many states must include a photocopy of ID. However, if you have a mail-in ballot, don't throw it away. Follow directions, use the correct postage (that's an error that cost a hundred thousand votes last time) and, if possible, walk it in to your elections office.

At the polling station, should you find yourself one of the 2.7 million purged, or your ID rejected, then do your best to resist a "provisional" ballot--one third of which are not counted. Return with proper ID, or call 1-800-OUR VOTE for legal assistance. And never just walk away discouraged. That's just what they want you to do. "

Sense of Unease in Some Black Voters, by Susan Saulny, NY Times (October 28, 2008)

"  Jacksonville, Florida - For weeks now, James Jones has been extra courteous in traffic and at the gas station because he has an Obama sticker on the back of his truck. "Something like that might make a difference for Barack Obama," Mr. Jones explained. "I'm not taking a chance."

    Mr. Jones, a black warehouse worker, bought campaign signs for his yard and made sure his family had valid voter registration cards. He and his wife cast their votes 10 days early to avoid last-minute problems at the polls.

    So imagine Mr. Jones's disappointment this week when he got word of a rumor making its way around his humble southeastern part of town - that early voting is nothing more than a new disenfranchisement scam, that early votes are likely to be lost and never counted.

    "I went to the library where I voted and I said, 'Ma'am, I heard rumors that early voting is dangerous, is that true?' " Mr. Jones, 47, said he had asked an election worker. "She said: 'It's pretty well safe. I wouldn't worry about it.' "

    But in conversations with about a dozen Jacksonville residents in cafes, outside churches and at their homes over three days, Mr. Jones and many of his black neighbors worry anyway, unable to put aside the nagging feeling that somehow their votes will not be counted.

    Wounds have not healed here in Duval County since the mangled presidential election of 2000, when more than 26,000 ballots were discarded as invalid for being improperly punched. Nearly 40 percent of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly Democratic-leaning African-American communities around Jacksonville, a reality that has caused suspicions of racial bias to linger, even though intentional disenfranchisement was never proved.

    Now, in a show of early election enthusiasm, more than 84,200 people have already voted in Duval County, surpassing the number of early votes cast in the last presidential election. Added to 33,800 absentee ballots collected so far, the numbers show that 22 percent of registered voters cast their ballots as of Oct. 27, county election officials said.

    But amid excitement over Mr. Obama's historic candidacy and the chance that the country might choose an African-American president within a matter of days, there is an unmistakable sense of anxiety among blacks here that something will go wrong, that victory will slip away.

    "They're going to throw out votes," said Larone Wesley, a 53-year-old black Vietnam veteran. "I can't say exactly how, but they are going to accomplish that quite naturally. I'm so afraid for my friend Obama. I look at this through the eyes of the '60s, and I feel there ain't no way they're going to let him make it."

    Mr. Wesley refuses to vote early. "I don't believe the machines work properly in general," he said, "and they really don't work properly when they think you're voting for Obama."

    Mr. Wesley's wife, Paris, disagrees and thinks the best thing she can do is get to her polling place before Nov. 4. "I want to go early so that if I see and hear anything that's not in keeping with the rules and regulations, I can make a call," she said. "As far as faith in the system, I don't have faith in the system. I just pray we have people in the polls who will be honest and watchful."

    Some things have not changed since 2000: Florida is still a battleground. Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, are in hot pursuit of the state's 27 electoral votes, which could prove crucial for victory.

    Other important things have changed. In 2004, there were only minor glitches. Duval County has done away with its old confusing ballot and upgraded its scanning machinery. It also has a new elections supervisor, Jerry Holland, who has reached out to blacks and earned their respect.

    The skepticism about early voting is confounding to many officials because it is intended to make voting easier and more accessible, and was recently promoted in Jacksonville by Mr. Obama's wife, Michelle Obama.

    Mr. Holland said that the number of people, including blacks, who had turned out to vote early showed that misgivings were not widespread. Of the 84,273 residents who had voted as of Sunday, more than 30,900 were black.

    "Obviously, we've come a long way since 2000," Mr. Holland said. "For some people, it may have taken eight years to rebuild confidence. For others, it might take another election cycle. The goal is to keep building confidence one voter at a time."

    He added: "We will have record numbers. It may be feasible to get 50 percent of our voters before the election."

    Still, suspicions linger that something - faulty machines, misread ballots, mysteriously lost votes - will deny Mr. Obama some of the support that he has.

...."

Voting Rights Watch: One company's machine behind vote-switching reported in early balloting across the South, Institute for Southern Studie (October 27, 2008)

"With early voting underway across the country, there have been reports of glitches with one company's electronic voting machines in states across the South:

* In Beaufort County, S.C., voters discovered that some races were missing on the final review screen of the touch-screen voting machines. When they tried to re-cast their ballots, it didn't work again, so they had to cast paper ballots. Affected voter Nancy Roe told the Hilton Head Island Packet:

"I'm real political, so I checked the ballot," she said. "If I had only given it a quick glance and punched 'vote,' I never would've known."

* In Davidson County, Tenn., a woman reported having her vote for Obama flipped to Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, according to a post to the Black Box Voting website:

"A poll worker directed me to a touch screen voting machine & instructed me how to use it. I touched "Obama" for president & nothing lit up. I touched 2 or 3 more times & still nothing lit up. I called the poll worker back over to tell him I was having a problem. He said I just needed to touch it more lightly. I tried it 2 or 3 more times more lightly with the poll worker watching & still nothing lit up. The poll worker then touched it for me twice — nothing lit up. The third time he touched the Obama button, the Cynthia McKinney space lit up! The McKinney button was located five rows below the Obama button. The poll worker just kind of laughed and cancelled the vote. He hit the Obama button again & it finally lit up.

Coincidentally, the woman who had her vote flipped is the wife of David Earnhardt, the producer and director of "Uncounted" -- a documentary film about problem voting machines.

* In Palo Pinto County, Texas, at least two voters say touch-screen machines kept switching their straight-party votes from Democrat to Republican, the Mineral Wells Index newspaper reported:

"When I cast an early vote [Wednesday] at Palo Pinto County Courthouse, my vote was switched from Democrat to Republican right in front of my face -- twice!" reported Lona Jones, a Precinct 1 county resident.

An elections judge helped her cancel her vote and switched her to another machine. Precinct workers told her that the machines give them problems.

* In West Virginia's Jackson County, voters report that touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates. The Charleston Gazette reported on the experiences of 81-year-old Calvin Thomas:

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.

"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.

Deputy Secretary of State Sarah Bailey said her office instructed the county to recalibrate the machines so the finger-touch areas line up with ballot. They sometimes become miscalibrated when they are moved from storage facilities, she explained.

* In West Virginia's Putnam County, voters also say e-voting machines switched their votes from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Republican John McCain, and from incumbent Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller to GOP opponent Jay Wolfe, according to the Gazette:

Shelba Ketchum, a 69-year-old nurse retired from Thomas Memorial Hospital, described what happened Friday at the Putnam County Courthouse in Winfield.

"I pushed buttons and they all came up Republican," she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.

"I asked them for a printout of my votes," Ketchum said. "But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it. I did not feel right when I left the courthouse. My son felt the same way."

* Similar vote-switching problems have also been reported in recent weeks in West Virginia's Berkeley, Ohio, Monongalia and Greenbrier counties, according to the paper.

Something that all these locales have in common is the machine involved: the iVotronic (pictured above) manufactured by Election Systems & Software, a Nebraska firm founded by Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel. ES&S is now the world's largest election equipment firm, with more than 170,000 systems installed worldwide -- including about half of the electronic systems used in the United States.

As we reported earlier this year, an in-depth report by an elections watchdog group faulted the ES&S iVotronic for the suspiciously high undervote rate in Sarasota County, Fla. in the Congressional race that Republican Vern Buchanan narrowly won over Democrat Christine Jennings.

There have been other serious problems with ES&S equipment in previous elections. Wharton County, Texas did away with iVotronic machines after the equipment switched votes on state propositions last year. And during the January Republican primary in Horry County, S.C., iVotronic equipment malfunctioned in 80 percent of precincts due to programming problems.

The watchdogs at Black Box Voting encourage people who will be voting on iVotronics and other direct-recording electronic machines to use a cell phone video or video camera to videotape the screen during the whole voting process [please read the important update on this below!]:

It is crucial to capture this on video; it happens often enough that if many people videotape BEFORE spotting vote-flipping, some are likely to catch it. Be discreet, or you may not be allowed to do this.

To find out what kind of voting system your county uses, click here.

UPDATE: It turns out that Black Box Voting's suggestion to videotape the balloting process via DRE equipment could put you on the wrong side of the law in some states, including North Carolina. As the New York Times reported in yesterday's story about what may well be the most recorded election in history, N.C. law says that no one "shall photograph, videotape, or otherwise record the image of a voted official ballot for any purpose not otherwise permitted under law," since the practice could encourage the sale of votes. So before hitting the record button, you might check with elections officials in your state."

Princeton Report Rips New Jersey E-Voting Machines as Easily Hackable, by Todd R. Weiss, Computer World (October 27, 2008)

"  With eight days to go before the presidential election, a report has been released by Princeton University and other groups that sharply criticizes the e-voting machines used in New Jersey and elsewhere as unreliable and potentially prone to hacking.

    The 158-page report, which was ordered by a New Jersey judge as part of an ongoing four-year legal fight over the machines, says the e-voting machines can be "easily hacked" in about seven minutes by anyone with basic computer knowledge. Such hacking activity could enable fraudulent firmware to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another, the report said.

    The controversy involves the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H direct-recording electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting machines made by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems.

    The report comes amid news stories in at least three states - West Virginia, Texas and Tennessee - where voters have told local election officials that they believe the e-voting machines they used tried to "flip" their votes to other candidates.

    The AVC machines can be hacked by installing fraudulent software contained in a replacement chip that can be installed on the main circuit board, according to the report. Such a part replacement is very difficult to detect, it noted.

    Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer science professor who is one of the authors of the report, said that such security vulnerabilities cause doubts about the accuracy and reliability of the machines.

    The plaintiffs, a group of public interest organizations, argue in their lawsuit against the state of New Jersey that the machines should be discarded because they can't meet state election law requirements for security and accuracy. State officials who back the machines argue that the machines are adequate for the job.

    The lawsuit is expected to go to trial in January, but in the meantime, the court allowed the Princeton report to be released to the public.

    The report gives details on how the machines could be manipulated by someone who wanted to change the results of the election, and it strongly criticizes the designs and security of the devices.

    At the same time, Appel said that while such a scenario is possible, "it doesn't mean that somebody is dishonest enough to do it."

    Voting Technology

    "Even so, it's an unpleasant place to be in to have to use these machines that are so hackable," Appel said. "Early next week, I'm going to have to go out and cast my vote on one of these machines."

    The problem, according to the report, is that there are many opportunities in the storage, distribution and deployment of the DRE machines where an unauthorized person could manipulate them and not be detected.

    "Somebody could have hacked it at any time" during those stages before an election, Appel said.

    Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoman for Sequoia Voting Systems, said in an e-mailed response that the company emphatically denies the conclusions of the Princeton report.

    In a 19-page response posted on Sequoia's Web site, the company argues that the researchers who contributed to the report removed factory security hardware from the tested machine before they performed their analyses. The Sequoia response also says that an operator panel cover was not in place when the testing was conducted, which would have made a potential attack "far less likely to succeed before they are stopped, or at minimum, detected."

    The Sequoia response also harshly criticizes the researchers as having an "inflammatory tone" about the company's DRE machines, while "editorializing on the wonders of paper ballots and optical scanning" as an alternative and more trusted method of voting. The company said the Princeton report includes "numerous factual errors and cases of intellectual dishonesty."

    Appel defended the report's conclusions.

    "There's no perfect technology [for e-voting], but I think the consensus of computer scientists is that precinct-counted, optically scanned paper ballots is the best method" in terms of reliability and accurate recount auditing, Appel said. "The voter fills out a paper ballot that is scanned and counted in their precinct. You have your numbers right at the close of the polls, with two independent records - the computerized numbers and the pile of paper ballots in the sealed ballot box." "

Missing Denver Ballots Head to Voters' Mailboxes, by Myung Oak Kim, , Rocky Mountain News (October 27, 2008)

" The vendor for Denver Elections failed to print and ship more than 18,000 mail ballots - 7,000 more than originally thought - but the post office says all of them will be delivered to voters by Wednesday.

    The mistake was discovered over the weekend after a local Postal Service official said Sequoia Voting Systems delivered slightly more than 10,000 ballots Oct. 16 from its Porterville, Calif., printing plant.

    It was initally thought the order was about 11,000 ballots short - a problem that came to light after numerous complaints from voters who said they hadn't received their ballots.

    A review of all ballot orders revealed the actual number of missing mail ballots is 18,055, said Denver Elections Director Michael Scarpello.

    Sequoia printed them over the weekend and dropped them off Monday morning at the Denver mail processing facility.

    U.S. Postal Service spokesman Al DeSarro said at least 90 percent of those ballots will be delivered to homes today [Monday], and the rest will reach mailboxes Wednesday.

    Company spokeswoman Michelle Shafer said the mistake was "completely Sequoia's fault."

    "There was a technical problem with the data file we used to prepare this batch of ballots for mailing that caused us to make this very unfortunate mistake."

    Sequoia has had a troubled history with Denver elections.

    In 2006, the company miscalculated return postage for thousands of mail ballots, understating the required postage by 24 cents. The company also transposed a 'yes' and 'no' answer for a question on thousands of ballots.

    Sequoia's untested electronic pollbook crashed on Election Day, causing lines that lasted several hours. Up to 20,000 voters left polling places without casting a ballot. Denver scrapped that system after the election.

    Shafer said her company is not focused on past problems.

    "We are concerned about resolving this specific issue for Denver and working with them in preparation for Nov. 4, as well as making sure this situation never occurs again anywhere," she said.

...."

Did New Mexico GOP Lawyer Hire P.I. To Intimidate Minority Voters?, by Zachary Roth, TPM Muckraker (October 24, 2008)

"Minority voters in New Mexico report to TPMmuckraker that a private investigator working with Republican party lawyer Pat Rogers has appeared in person at the homes of their family members, intimidating and confusing them about their right to vote in the general election.

Earlier this week, we reported that Rogers -- a lawyer and state committeeman for the GOP, who in previous elections worked closely with the party in pressuring New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to pursue bogus voter fraud cases -- is involved with a new effort to gin up concerns about the issue. Last week the state party falsely claimed that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a local Democratic primary race in June. Rogers, described in an Associated Press report on the allegations as "an attorney who advises the state GOP," told the news wire that the party planned to turn the suspect forms over to law enforcement authorities.

The visits to minority voters by the P.I. appear to be connected to last week's effort.

The story starts last week, when several representatives of the New Mexico Republican party, including Rogers, held a press conference to announce that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June in Bernalillo county, which contains Albuquerque. The party released the names of ten of these people -- almost all of whom are Hispanic.

The allegations quickly fell apart. ACORN announced that it had contacted the county clerk's office, who had verified that all of the voters were in fact legitimate. The group now says it has independently contacted 8 of these 10 voters to separately verify their validity.

At that point, the national GOP, which had at first jumped on the story as rare evidence of genuine voter fraud, seemed to quietly back off.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

Guadalupe Bojorquez, who works in law enforcement in Albuquerque, told TPMmuckraker today that her mother, Dora Escobedo, was one of the ten voters whose names were released by the GOP. After this happened, said Bojorquez, her mother had been contacted by the voter registration group ACORN. Bojorquez, with ACORN's help, confirmed with the county clerk that her mother, who does not speak English, is indeed eligible to vote, and had been when she voted in June.

Nonetheless, Bojorquez said that her mother yesterday received a visit from a man who asked for her personal information, including an ID, in reference to her eligibility to vote. Bojorquez told TPMmuckraker that according to her mother, at one point the man asked what she would do if immigration authorities contacted her.

After Bojorquez's mother, frightened, refused to let him in the door, the man waited outside her house. Eventually, Bojorquez's brother arrived at the house, emboldening Bojorquez's mother to go outside, call Bojorquez, and put her on the phone with the man.

Bojorquez said the man told her he wanted to make sure her mother knew that she shouldn't be voting, and continued to ask for her mother's personal information. When Bojorquez said that no information would be handed over unless the man revealed who he was employed by, he said he was a private investigator hired by Pat Rogers. He told Bojorquez his name was Al Romero, and left a number at which Bojorquez could contact him.

Bojorquez added that in fact, her mother has already voted in the general election, by absentee ballot -- which she is eligible for because she has trouble walking -- so Romero's efforts on that front were in vain.

Another Albuquerque woman had a similar experience.

Jenais Griego told TPMmuckraker that yesterday, as she arrived home with her kids, a man in a beige Chevy Silverado pulled up, removed a notebook from his pocket, and said he was looking for Emily Garcia. Garcia is Griego's grandmother -- Griego said Garcia, who works as a home care-giver, lists Griego's address for her mail -- and, like Escobedo, was one of the voters named by the GOP last week as having voted fraudulently in June.

Griego said she allowed the man in, and when she asked him for identification, he pulled out a card that gave his name as Al Romero. She said the man had a redacted copy of Garcia's voter registration form, and asked whether Garcia intended to vote. He said if she intended to do so, she needed to make sure she was properly registered.

As with Bojorquez and Escobedo, Griego said that Garcia had already confirmed after the GOP press conference that she was indeed a valid voter. An ACORN worker had come to her house to explain that the GOP had questioned her registration, and, along with Griego, they had contacted the county clerk to ensure that she could legitimately vote, and had done so in June.

So when Romero asked Griego whether Garcia intended to vote, Griego replied that she did. At that point, said Griego, Romero became "angry" and "upset," and left abruptly.

Rogers did not return several calls from TPMmuckraker seeking comment. But last week he said that the state party had hired a private investigator in connection with vote fraud*. And asked yesterday by the New Mexico Independent about the confrontations with voters, he replied: "I have no interest in responding to ACORN's accusation."

Reached by TPMmuckraker at the phone number he provided to Bojorquez, Romero said he didn't have time to talk about the matter. He did not respond to repeated follow-up calls."

Republican Leaders Who Participate in Attacks on ACORN Could be Prosecuted as Part of a Criminal Conspiracy, by Mark Karlin, buzzflash.com (October 20, 2008)

"Let the GOP muck-a-mucks across the nation who are participating in a nationwide RNC/McCain diversionary campaign against ACORN be warned: In a new administration of light and truth – instead of Cheney’s dark shadows and Bush’s lies – you may be subject to prosecution for participating in a criminal conspiracy to suppress votes and violate the Voting Rights Act.

We do not exaggerate.

The unrelenting and profoundly dishonest and misleading attempt to brand a national community organizing group as some sort of minority enterprise of ghetto thieves is nothing more than a GOP tradition of using ACORN as a scapegoat to justify voter suppression. And organized voter suppression is a crime. In fact, a creative prosecutor under Obama could apply the RICO Act to the RNC/McCain daily deluge of attempts to get voters to believe that ACORN is engaged in voter fraud and then using that cover to disenfranchise voters.

As most BuzzFlash readers know, voter registration errors and voter fraud are two entirely different issues. If you register to vote as Mickey Mouse, it doesn’t mean you vote as Mickey Mouse. Does anyone believe that Mickey Mouse will show up to vote, except at Disneyworld? Republican voter drives regularly yield tons of false registrants, as do petition drives in states like California. But very few individuals commit actual voter fraud, the casting of a ballot during an election.

In fact, in the last five years the DOJ own’s statistics indicate that there have been way less than 20 people in the entire United States convicted of voter fraud, and none of them were connected with an ACORN registration drive. You read that right, less than 20, according to a Washington Post analysis. In fact, the LA Times announced the only actual arrest we have read of this year for voter registration fraud (not voter fraud), and that’s of a Republican in California!

What the RNC and McCain campaigns are doing is complementing their racist campaign against "the other," the so-called "non-American," and the candidate known as "that one" with a criminal conspiracy to scapegoat a minority community empowerment group that is helping people to obtain their voting rights (1.3 million new registrants for this election, which scares the heck out of the Republican Party). That is what we are supposed to be doing in a democracy; enfranchising people, not disenfranchising people.

We watched a review copy of a just released documentary, "Boogie Man," last night about the infamous Strom-Thurmond-groomed Lee Atwater. Many of Atwater’s despicable legacies are apparent in McCain’s campaign. But one particular tactic and a comment he made are relevant to the criminal GOP assault on ACORN’s voter registration drive. When confronted about the racist Willie Horton ad of 1988, which helped mine the subconscious bigotry in America and propel George Herbert Walker Bush to victory, Atwater brazenly lied and said that the Horton ad (featuring a photo of a scary black male killer) was not about race, but about a prison furlough program that allowed Horton back on the streets.

But, of course, it was indeed about kindling racism and the fear that Democrats "coddle" black criminals and let them prey on whites. (Although in the true Republican tradition of hypocrisy, the furlough program concept was initiated by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.)

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten about the essence of "ProsecutorGate": the Bush Administration firing of U.S. prosecutors who would not initiate sham voter registration and fraud indictments just before the 2004 and 2006 elections. David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, recently spoke out strongly on how the coordinated attack on ACORN – including the involvement of the FBI in violation of their own guidelines regarding such "investigations" so close to an election – reminded him of why he was fired for not participating in a criminal conspiracy to influence the elections.

Most ominously, remember that most of the U.S. Attorneys who did go along with sham pre-election "voter fraud investigations" (how could it be voter fraud if the election hadn't been held yet?) are still in their positions!

A recent New York Times editorial noted: "Meanwhile, Republicans aren’t saying anything about another more serious voter-registration scandal: the fact that about one-third of eligible voters are not registered. The racial gaps are significant and particularly disturbing. According to a study by Project Vote, a voting-rights group, in 2006, 71 percent of eligible whites were registered, compared with 61 percent of blacks, 54 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asian-Americans."

Nor is the Republican Party talking about their multi-faceted approach – largely crafted by Karl Rove – to keep Democratic votes – particularly those of minorities and students – from being counted. They want to have as many new registrants as possible technically disqualified, grant them provisional ballots, and then have McCain declared the winner before the provisional ballots are counted, which they rarely are. The media, in 2000, due to a "turn-around" Florida "Bush victory" call by Bush’s cousin on national television, gave the Bush campaign the foundation to declare that they had "won" Florida and that Gore was trying to "steal" it from them. From then on, Gore was on the defensive, until the Supreme Court "felonious five" legitimatized the theft of the presidency.

For eight years we have lived with the disastrous consequences of the Republican disenfranchisement strategy that got Bush close enough (remember that he lost the popular vote in 2000 by more than 540,000 votes) to steal the election.

The Washington Post quoted McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' claim that reports of investigations into ACORN have suggested "rampant voter fraud as it relates to voter registration." But the Post did not point out that actual instances of illegal votes cast as a result of registration fraud, e.g., using false names, are extremely rare. Federal statistics show that between October 2002 and September 2005, the Justice Department charged 95 people with "election fraud" and convicted 55, of whom only 17 were convicted for casting fraudulent ballots. (The rest were election judges and the like.) Remember that hundreds of millions of votes were cast over these years, and only 17 persons in the United States were convicted of illegally casting ballots in a federal election.

Media Matters has noted how the constant RNC/McCain felonious campaign against ACORN performing a just service for democracy affects the gullible and willing corporate media:

CNN reports leave out relevant facts on ACORN voter registration allegations

Summary: From October 6 through October 15, CNN aired at least 54 segments mentioning allegations that ACORN submitted allegedly false or duplicate voter registration applications this year in a number of states. However, only one of those segments mentioned both of the following two relevant points: 1) that the statutes of most of those states require third parties registering prospective voters to submit all registration forms they receive; and 2) that actual instances of illegal votes being cast as a result of registration fraud are extremely rare. Of the 54 CNN segments addressing the allegations against ACORN, two mentioned only the former of those two points, while one mentioned just the latter.

For those Republican politicians who engage in the unjustified slander of ACORN, which is meant to justify the GOP trying to disenfranchise Americans who have a right to vote for their government, let these enablers of this 8 year assault on democracy (which is just really the new face of "Jim Crow" and poll taxes in another form) know that in an Obama administration, some files (most will have been shredded and the incriminating computer hard drives dumped in the Potomac) will remain that prove the Republican criminal assault on voting rights, and the truth will emerge.

And the soon-to-be former Bush Administration, DOJ, McCain Campaign and RNC officials who played roles in planning and enabling this effort to limit the right of Americans to vote (the poor, minorities and students, in particular) will have to comply with subpoenas to testify before Congress.

If Obama wins by a landslide – which is a possibility – and the election is not close enough to steal for the GOP, many Republicans participating in this assault might rue the day that they participated in ProsecutorGate II, which really was itself only the diabolical extension of the Rove/Jeb Bush Florida campaign of 2000 and Ohio campaign of 2004.

Maybe it is just a dream of those who yearn for the free air of liberty and the rule of law, but perhaps yet the masterminds of the ferocious two-step assault on ACORN’s right to enfranchise voters ( 1) make the organization into an image of black hustlers and link it to Obama, thus inciting a racist image; and 2) then take steps to keep Democrats from voting by making technical challenges to disqualify voters, requiring "Jim Crow" voter identification, and using other more nefarious means to confuse registered voters about their polling places and right to vote) will eventually have their day in court: as defendants charged with the felony of interfering with the right to vote and using intimidation to keep American citizens from electing their government as guaranteed by the Constitution.

A man or woman should never gamble more than he or she can afford to lose.

To the U.S. Attorneys who violated the DOJ standards and the law by following orders and pursuing scam charges of voter registration and voter fraud; to the senior FBI officials who are leaking against department policy that they are "investigating" ACORN; to state Republican officials who are following the RNC requests to pursue voter suppression; to all of you, realize that if Obama wins it is not just your careers that are at stake, you may be looking at a change of address to a federal prison.

And to Michael Mukasey, Attorney General, who thought that he would end his career illustrously with a portrait hung at the DOJ, you may end it instead at a federal detention center in upstate New York."

Texas Voters Urged to Avoid Straight-Party Option, After Vote-Flip Complaints, by Kim Zetter, Wired (October 20, 2008)

"A number of voters in several Texas counties have been complaining that voting machines they used to cast early votes flipped their votes from Democratic choices to Republican ones.

Voters have reported that when they tried to vote a straight-party Democratic ticket, the machine flipped their choices to Republican candidates instead. In some cases, voters reported a problem only with the presidential race; in other cases voters reported the entire ballot being marked Republican by the machine.

The counties where the problems were reported use different kinds of voting machines from three of the top voting machine companies -- Election Systems & Software, Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) and Hart InterCivic.

...."

Populism Arising—but Will It Be the Killer Kind?, by Chris Hedges, truthdig.com (October 27, 2008)

"The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.

I watched these competing populisms flicker Thursday night at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., when I moderated a debate between independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader [1]and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin [2]. The two candidates come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Nader, in essence, is a democratic socialist in the mold of Eugene Debs [3]or Norman Thomas [4]. Baldwin, a founder and minister at the Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., is an evangelical, right-wing populist. 

Baldwin, like Nader, rails against corporatism and our involvement in foreign wars, wants to repeal NAFTA and denounces the curtailment of civil liberties. But Baldwin goes on to support the abolishment of whole departments of the federal government, such as the Department of Education. He calls for U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and NATO, the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration, the outlawing of abortion and removing all restrictions on the purchasing of firearms. One of his catchier campaign slogans is: “To help keep your family safe and your country free, go buy a gun.” He wants to seal our borders, deny amnesty and social services to illegal immigrants and end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. He calls for dismantling the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, overturning the 16th Amendment and the personal income tax, and returning the American monetary system to hard assets: gold and silver.

These candidates, while marginal figures in the current election, express the two forms of populism that will soon find a wide political currency. The anger toward our elites will morph into rage. These new populisms may not be articulated by Nader and Baldwin, but they will be articulated by people like Nader and Baldwin. 

The ideological foundations of free-market economics and a consumer society have collapsed. This collapse is hard for us to fathom. We are still in shock and denial. We cling to old structures of meaning and outdated words to describe them. We have yet to realize that all our political science and economic textbooks have become junk. We have yet to formulate a vocabulary to describe our altered reality. We grasp, on a subliminal level, that laissez-faire capitalism is gone, but we have not viewed the corpse, scheduled the funeral and read the last rites. 

“People get very clearly that Washington found hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out rich people in a way the government does not usually intervene,” said Anthony Pollina [5], The Progressive Party candidate for governor in Vermont. “They understand that the government came up with all this money to support the wrong group of people. People get that in their gut. There is anger. It is not rage yet. There is still a little bit of disbelief. I may be running for governor, but all people want to talk about is how did we come up with all this money to give to rich people on Wall Street and why didn’t they let them pay their mortgage off.”

Millions of people will lose their homes. Jobs and savings will vanish. The government will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis. The greed of huge corporations, especially as they continue to cannibalize the country, will see them, and our elites, become the enemy. Exxon, to give one example, made $40.61 billion in profits last year while we struggled to fill the tanks of our automobiles and trucks. Oil and gas corporations, despite these profits, ruthlessly refuse to fill furnaces in winter when people cannot pay the bills. AIG, the insurance giant, after being saved with an infusion of $85 billion in taxpayer money, squandered $440,000 on an executive visit to a California spa. It spent $86,000 for its executives to hunt partridges in the English countryside and then blithely asked the U.S. government for an additional $38 billion. 

Elites, when they confuse the artificial court life of Versailles with the real world, die. These capitalist entities, grossly out of touch, incompetent, blinded by greed and power and morally and intellectually bankrupt, are committing collective suicide. 

“People are beginning to understand that when the economy is weak you have to put people to work,” Pollina, who is now outpolling the Democratic candidate, said. “We have a crumbling infrastructure in the state and a need for affordable housing. I have put forward three or four different ways to raise revenue to put people to work, including closing a loophole in our capital gains tax. I think people are attracted to me because they are realizing that this is now the most important thing we can do. We have to put people to work. We cannot continue to abandon them.”

The flagrant corruption of our political system—hostage to the hundreds of millions of dollars handed out by the corporations and elites to Democratic and Republican candidates—will become clearer as our initial shock wears off. The new American will be about the basics—jobs, food, health care and a place to live. We will discard the old vocabulary, the one still used by the Democratic and Republic parties, and learn to speak in the fiery language of populism. We will turn with a vengeance on the 1 percent that has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. The populist conflict will see a battle between a frightened and dispossessed majority and the corporations and elites who seek to ruthlessly cling to power and wealth. 

“Over the years people became disengaged,” Pollina said. “They stopped paying attention. This crisis has forced them to pay attention. It directly affects their economic future and ability to put food on the table. Outrage will lead to more involvement. This outrage could, however, fuel a right-wing populism around the country, although not in Vermont. Here I think people will move more to the left. In Vermont they have somewhere else to turn—I am here, Bernie Sanders [6] is here, the Progressive Party is here—but on the national level this could see people turn to the right wing.”

A victory by Barack Obama may embolden right-wing populists. They will be able to use Obama and “liberal Democrats” as a lightning rod for the failings, growing poverty and incompetence of the state. The elite, as happens in all such moments of confusion, revolt and social chaos, will probably be forced to make an uncomfortable alliance with right-wing populists if they want to survive. The center of the political spectrum will melt. 

...."

Spending Stalls and Businesses Slash US Jobs, by Louis Uchitelle, NY Times (October 25, 2008)

"As the financial crisis crimps demand for American goods and services, the workers who produce them are losing their jobs by the tens of thousands.

    Layoffs have arrived in force, like a wrenching second act in the unfolding crisis. In just the last two weeks, the list of companies announcing their intention to cut workers has read like a Who's Who of corporate America: Merck, Yahoo, General Electric, Xerox, Pratt & Whitney, Goldman Sachs, Whirlpool, Bank of America, Alcoa, Coca-Cola, the Detroit automakers and nearly all the airlines.

    When October's job losses are announced on Nov. 7, three days after the presidential election, many economists expect the number to exceed 200,000. The current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is likely to rise, perhaps significantly.

    "My view is that it will be near 8 or 8.5 percent by the end of next year," said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, offering a forecast others share. That would be the highest unemployment rate since the deep recession of the early 1980s.

    Companies are laying off workers to cut production as consumers, struggling with their own finances, scale back spending. Employers had tried for months to cut expenses through hiring freezes and by cutting back hours. That has turned out not to be enough, and with earnings down sharply in the third quarter, corporate America has turned to layoffs.

    "People have grown very nervous," said Harry Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown University and the Urban Institute, tracing cause and effect. "They have seen a lot of their wealth wiped out and as they cut back their spending, companies are responding with layoffs, which hurts consumption even more."

    The unemployment is widespread, with Rhode Island the hardest hit.

...."

Credit Cards: The Plastic Trap, by Dominique Nora, Le Nouvel Observateur (October 23, 2008)

   " "It was too easy."

    After houses, consumer credit? While bankers plug up the breaches created by the mortgage earthquake as best they can, another bubble threatens them: Americans have been living their dreams on credit. And, having overheated up their cards, millions of households will have problems making their payments ...

    Maria, a housekeeper in a San Francisco clinic, came to the Polk Street Money Mart to borrow $150 (110 Euros) on her October month-end salary. Yet the usurious rate practiced by this boutique is posted in big letters on the wall: $35.50 for $200! But Maria has no choice: "I don't have anything to buy diapers with for the baby; the fridge is empty ..." This young woman who is raising her son alone has already gone through the ceiling of two credit cards: "I've got close to a 6,400 Euro balance, while I earn barely 1,400 Euros a month." In the beginning, Maria used her Bank of America card for exceptional expenses only, such as the pediatrician's bill. Then she got into the habit of paying the grocery with it ... "It was too easy." Today, she is suffocating. Because in the United States, credit cards are commonly used to borrow. And everything pushes you to repay no more than a minimum amount every month.

    Thus do millions of Americans find themselves caught in the "plastic trap." And experts are predicting a new deflagration. "In fact, there's a double financial bubble. The real estate credit bubble has exploded ... The next will be about consumer credit," warns Robert Manning, finance professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and author of the best-seller, "Credit Card Nation." The two problems are linked: "Because of the tax advantage, Americans repaid 250 billion Euros of credit card balances with money drawn from real estate between 2001 and 2006," he explains. "During that period, in defiance of the laws of economic gravity, people's real income declined ... but the price of real estate doubled, which completely distorted their perception of their debt capacity." The global balance on American credit cards is up to 700 billion Euros. Now that their houses can no longer be used as "cash machines," and economic activity is slowing down and unemployment rising, what proportion of this debt will turn out to be toxic? In the second quarter of 2008, the national default rate jumped to 7.3 percent. But it seems that that's only the beginning: according to the firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, credit card issuers will have to write off 29 billion Euros of losses this year and 69 billion more in 2009.

    The big commercial banks are very exposed: the trio, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup together have 330 billion in outstandings. On October 6, Bank of America announced a 2.1 billion Euro loss on its credit card division. Meanwhile, Citibank treasurer Gary Crittenden explained that if the economy continued to slow down, "credit card losses could exceed their historic records." But specialized issuers, such as Capital One and Discover, are even more dependent on this activity (62 percent and 97.8 percent, respectively). And here once again, we're talking about a cluster bomb. The big issuers have securitized significant portions of their credit card balances and sold them to third parties: speculative funds and pension funds. Investors are holding 260 billion Euros of assets backed by this kind of debt.

...."

The End of America', by Naomi Wolf (October 31, 2008)

"I don't call Bush a fascist. If you look carefully at my language, I am very considered. What I do talk about is "fascist tactics". One definition of "fascist" is when the state informs against the individual in an effort to exclude democracy. And there's no question that that is what's happening now.

If you look at history, you can see that there are 10 steps for turning an open society into a dictatorship. This process took place in "fascist shifts" ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. And, difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated in the USA by the Bush administration.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantanamo in Cuba, America certainly has its gulag now. Plus, in our film you see footage of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St Paul, where 400 US citizens were arrested for protesting; footage that was buried in the ground by one of the protesters, but survived.

The fact that the President can call anyone an enemy combatant now and hold them in solitary confinement for three years; the fact that you've got torture camps; the fact that they can "render" people - if this isn't using force against the individual in a effort to undermine democratic process, I don't know what is.

On 1 October, Bush deployed the First Brigade in the United States of America - that's 3,000 to 5,000 warriors redeployed from Iraq, battle-hardened, with tanks, with weapons. The army say their mission is crowd control and dealing with unruly individuals. That violates the Constitution and years of making sure the military don't police civilian streets. It's one definition of a police state. Then there's the federalised National Guard, not to mention Blackwater (the private security company).

I'm heartened by how The End of America has resonated with people. At my events now, it's conservatives and liberals attending because everyone gets that something very sinister is going on. That's what the film does: it shows how these individual stories we are familiar with fit into a much larger pattern.

We're not out of the woods, even if there's a miracle of a transparent, accountable, uncontested, not-defrauded Barack Obama victory. We're still in trouble without a citizens' movement to restore these checks and balances, to roll back these laws, because Obama will be subjected to the same pressures our current situation would give any leader.

My book notes that there's a giant profit motive in shredding the Constitution - telecommunications companies, weapons manufacturers, all of them are shifting into surveillance and security technology. And they're writing laws to facilitate security officials. So Obama will be faced with those pressures - and that's why citizens have to be a counterpressure.

The Founders knew that, without checks and balances, the best-intentioned leaders are going to attempt to surveil the opposition, intimidate their commentators, and threaten their journalists with prosecution under the Espionage Act.

I want to sign people up, across party lines, to create a powerful citizens' movement. I just met Michael Kirk, the distinguished documentary director for Frontline, and he said - which is true - that (Dick) Cheney and (David) Addington have buried time-bombs so deep in secret legislation that we're never going to find them, as they wait to be activated during the next Republican regime.

We may have thought of the American Constitution as a very boring part of civics education in middle school, but it is actually this very, very precious radical document that protects us in a very personal way.

For me, there's this comic component: we've been OK with a foreign policy that perverts democracies around the world, so long as our liberties were secure at home. And now we're experiencing the same kind of intimidation here that we tolerated around the world for so long. The urgency of the timing is why there such a huge distribution plan going on in the USA for this film. It's even been made available online for free.

I knew nothing about the film-making process; it's all new to me. But there are these two remarkable Emmy-nominated film-makers, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, who made The Trials of Darryl Hunt, about a man who spent 20 years in prison for a brutal rape/murder he did not commit, and The Devil Came on Horseback, about Darfur. I thought: "Oh wow, if only we can get these women to tell this story." And they got these amazing interviews. These ordinary Americans I'd written about, that I knew from newspaper clippings; they found them, and senior people in the military and journalism. I tried to be as useful as I could, in the sense that I tried to give the best lecture I could, which they intercut through the film. But it's their movie. I knew I'd be well served, so I just watched them work their magic. "

The War against Citizens and Our Freedom, by Naomi Wolf, powellsbooks.blog (October 30, 2008)

"I have been travelling around the country for five weeks now, flying home on breaks to be with my kids. The message — what do we do to fight and win this war against citizens and against our freedom.

While I have had to focus on assimilating new news and information, checking reports, blogging and taping and speaking, my mind is so full of the people I have met and the stories they have told. Each city has crystallized a scene or moment that will stay with me forever. I wish I could show you each of them. They are the real story.

North Carolina: I gave a speech at UNC. A lovely mother of a beautiful 19-year-old girl brings her to me. The young woman is a Ron Paul supporter and she is on fire to change the world. She is one of those shining lights — a star, just radiating a hunger for truth and a readiness to get on her path. The mother is stoic at first — telling me her daughter is determined to go further with her activism and she, the mom, is scared. I don't blame her: in my talk I had referred to the many escalating kinds of harassment and intimidation activists from all walks of life are facing. I blurt out — half-joking — the mom in me speaking, not the citizen — that if she was my child I would lock her up to keep her from getting into all this. The mother notes sadly — and half-joking — that she would like to but can't — the young woman is of age. Suddenly the mother is weeping and I am holding her.  I cannot honestly tell her not to worry. I say I will keep her and her family in my prayers and she says she will do the same for me.

Later, at drinks, a student — who has come of age in the Bush years — notes that "people say you can say anything you want here but it's not really true. You can get blowback." Her professor remarks that a local right-wing talk show has been encouraging listeners to pressure the administration to discourage them from letting people like me on campus to speak. She adds that students are encouraged to tape their teachers to catch them saying anything that might be "political" and that her department head, rather than defying those tape recorders, tells faculty to be cautious in what they say.

In Chicago, a young man — Ian Bicking — comes up to me after my talk. Middle-class, middle-American, the suburban guy next door in every way. He is trembling with emotion. His sister, Monica Bicking, is one of the "RNC Eight."  She was charged as "a terrorist" for protesting at the RNC under the Minnesota Patriot Act and is facing a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees and years of her life fighting the charges even if she is successful in defeating them. Years more if she is found guilty. He is in computers. His girlfriend or fiancee is a potter. A quarter of a million dollars is hard for most anyone to come by. I feel the fear and grief around him that I sense when I read about people whose families are targeted by the State in Chechnya or Turkey. I tell him I will ask people to raise money for her.

I was told before I left by members of the Ron Paul community that many are under continual surveillance and that their materials were confiscated by Secret Service at the RNC. Also in Chicago, the head of the state Libertarian Party says he thinks he is on the Watch List.

Seattle — I tell the audience about the deployment of the First Brigade to — somewhere in the United States. I explain why this is so terrifying a step — we have been protected from military on our streets for 200 years by the Insurrection Act of 1807 and by Posse Comitatus of 1879. This brigade — three to four thousand battle-hardened warriors — have been redeployed here from Iraq, with lethal and nonlethal weapons and an initial stated mission of "crowd control." (A month later, not a single mainstream media outlet has reported on their whereabouts or mission, let alone asked questions.) A young man in the audience tells me his brother is with the First Brigade and they are "engaged in exercises." He will tell me where after the talk. I have his number but have not yet called him. Honestly, I am reluctant to find out. Last time I was in Washington State — Spokane — an audience member had told me and others had confirmed that Blackwater had been engaged in exercises on government land and that Secret Service had taken offices on a floor of a tower in the local University.

I meet another young man — a firefighter — who has started an organization of firefighters for "9-11 Truth." He is with his lieutenant. They explain to me why, as professional firefighters, they are raising questions about the "official story." I am not a firefighter, of course, or a physicist or an engineer, but the emotional tenor of the explanations they give me about what they see seem very solidly grounded in their own professional experience. Both men strike me as individuals of balance and integrity, very practical and sincere men and very down-to-earth. Given the delicacy of the role of firefighters in 9-11, and how much blowback these men could receive, it seems more notable to me that they have come forward with their questions than it does to me that architects or engineers or academics have formed such organizations. They do not strike me as wild-eyed fanatics. They strike me as they guys you would want to have save you from a fire.

San Francisco — I am honored to share a stage with Daniel Ellsberg — who had risked 120 years in prison in order to release the classified Pentagon Papers to American citizens. He noted the last time I was with him that all the things that got Nixon impeached are now legal.

There are about a thousand people there from all walks of life.

I feel hopeful.

More of this journal tomorrow — thanks for joining me on the journey. "

The Front Lines of the War against Citizens, by Naomi Wolf, powellsbooks.blog (October 31, 2008)

"Picking up again from my journal from the front lines of the war against citizens —

Baltimore: we are here at the Baltimore Book Festival. Beautiful fall day, joyful crowds, stalls of booksellers, Baltimore's funky charm. In the Q and A afterwards, regarding the subject of surveillance, an audience member notes that the BALTIMORE BOOK FESTIVAL had been infiltrated and was under surveillance. This was reported and confirmed in the local press. I looked around at the elderly ladies dressed elegantly for the event, at the children running around in the sun, at the crowds at the stall next door who were celebrating the magical speaker and writer Cornel West and thought of how it worked for readers and writers behind the Iron Curtain

All these citizens interested in books: subversives.

San Francisco, the Century Club: a wonderful evening, many older people, many of them conservative, very concerned about what is happening to their nation. Afterwards a well-dressed, tall man comes to talk to me. He looks and speaks exactly like an affluent WASP businessman. 'I was a Democratic donor,' he said. 'Shortly after I gave a fundraiser, the FBI broke into my house. I was arrested and spent two years in Federal prison.' I did not get a chance to ask him what the charges were, but I asked him if I could interview him, if he would go on the record. He said he is afraid to because he is on parole and is just trying to forget those years as a prisoner. But he did add: 'There are labor camps now as part of the prison system.' This is something I had heard before: that certain prisons are being reorganized as formal work camps.

Berkeley: it has gotten to the point at which I just do not want to absorb some of what people are coming to tell me. And I don't have a newspaper behind me or a team of investigative reporters: I can't report these stories out as the New York Times can or the Wall Street Journal to assess if these are lone madmen telling me delusional tales or if they are whistleblowers trying to get the word out without jeopordizing themselves. This one I really did not want to hear: another perfectly ordinary-looking professional man in his forties — well-spoken, apparently well-educated — told me he was a computer engineer.

He said he had been called to set up the computer network system for a facility near Bakersfield that he asserted was massive and that he identified as a FEMA camp. He said: 'I saw it: I was there. I saw the train cars with the shackles on the floor. They are white.' I told him no reporter could do anything with what he was claiming without his being willing to say it on the record or on background at least, and without a second source to confirm it. These camps have been rumored for years but there is no solid reporting documenting any rumors or dispelling them. He said he was now a US citizen but he had immigrated from another country and would not go on the record because he was scared about maintaining his immigration status.

Madman or concerned citizen? I cannot know. I want, of course, to believe he is suffering from a delusional disorder.

Back home, I check my email. A lovely young woman I had met in Chicago had told me, trembling, that she had protested at the RNC — she knew her group had been under surveillance, and a reporter for a New York area newspaper had confirmed to me that at the RNC he and other reporters had seen police officers who then reappeared dressed as protesters and infiltrated their groups. (I had asked him to go on the record and he refused.) The young woman said that she had come home a day or so later to find that her apartment had been broken into and nothing touched. She said she was very scared to come forward but would consider it. I asked her by email if she would go on the record — and I never got an email back.

New York again: I am interviewed by Michelangelo Signorile, the well-known journalist and commentator. He mentions that he was at the RNC and that agents that had no identification whatsoever were stopping cars, including his. He said they were in blue jumpsuits. He noted that they could have been Blackwater or even other foreign nationals, there was no way to know, and they were armed. He remarked very honestly — a point I have been trying to make for some time — that when faced with an armed man with no identifying marker, one is disinclined to resist his demand to search one's car — or to demand anything. I aked if I could quote him by name and he said sure.

I talked last night to a radio host in Portland, Oregon, one of the coolest and most laid-back of cities.

She informs me that Vera Katz, the Democratic mayor, had sent Portland police to Israel to be trained in crowd control and that they had come back much more ready to engage in violent control of protesters. She described new police trucks that had officers or agents hanging off the back of them, like military trucks.

She said that the Oregonian had distributed the hate DVD inciting hostility against Muslims. In spite of many objections from readers and citizens, the paper was unmoved. They cited Free Speech, which is laudable. But I am certain the Oregonian would not distribute violently sexual (or even, perhaps, violently anti-Semitic) DVDs if asked to by an advertiser. I suggested she check with the publisher abut that and meanwhile urged her listeners to boycott their local newspapers' advertisers until there would be real investigative reporting of the First Brigade and other Constitutional issues.

Matthis Chareaux comes over to my house — the wonderful 24-year-old Afghanistan vet who refused to redeploy after five years' service to a war that he points out many members of Cngress say is illegal. He went to Congress and said he was not going because he could not obey an illegal order and he said, 'I will be in Brooklyn if you want to come arrest me.' For months he did not hear of any legal or other action against him. A few days ago he receivd a letter telling him he is facing a court-martial. Major David Antoon says that more deserters or soldiers who refuse to redeploy or resist 'stop-loss' orders are prosecuted than war criminals in this conflict. He tells me that his friend Nicholas Morgan is still in the hospital, having been trampled by police officers on horseback when the Iraq Vets against the War went to the last Presidential debate to ask why veterans' issues were not being addressed. You can send checks for Matthis' legal fees or Nicholas' medical bills to IVAW.org.

Matthis also tells me something I just do not want and am not psychologically prepared to hear. For a year now I have been warning people that Bush can deploy the national guard and declare martial law only by declaring a 'state of emergency.' He does not need Congress to do so and he can define it however he like. Matthis caims that we are ALREADY under a declared state of emergency. WHAT? I think. He shows me his redeployment letter which references the 'state of emergency' that Bush declared several years ago in response to North Korean access to 'fissile material.' I am not a lawyer, so cannot tell if these two terms have the same meaning and value under the law or if this is entirely irrelevant. One more crucial lead I am supposed to follow up on — fearing, again, to find out more in case Matthis is not, in fact, overreacting or overreading. But either way, this is the first I had heard of that Presidential action regarding North Korea. Why are citizens informing me of far more significant developments than the national newspapers and othr media outlets are? I know some of the answers, but they make me very sad. In East Germany citizens had to tell one another what was really happening because state news sources, of course, could not be relied upon. Matthis says that as an Army journalist he was hearing firsthand reports of the torture of prisoners six months before the Abu Ghraib scandal and was told repeatedly not to go anywhere with the story. He had sent an anonymous letter to Human Rights Watch about it.

He says that when soldiers ask their Army therapists about what they can do to avoid redeployment — if they have PTSD, for instance, and they know they cannnot do it after years at the front --

the counselors say: become a fugitive, redeploy, or kill yourself. I tell him I do not believe that. He says several friends of his is IVAW have reported that response firsthand from their shrinks. I still don't believe it.

Today in the Times I read a new report that the suicide rate among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is at an all-time high, and no one really knows why."

The Evidence Establishes, Without Question, That Republican Rule Is Dangerous, by John Dean, findlaw.com (October 31, 2008)

"Occasionally, during the past eight years of writing this column, I have addressed the remarkably dangerous manner in which Republican Party officials rule the nation when they control one or more of the three branches of the federal government. Over the same period, I've also made this argument, even more directly and loudly, in three books on the subject.

In this column, I will be more pointed on this subject than I have ever been, while also repeating a few key facts that I have raised earlier -- because Election Day 2008 now provides the only clear remedy for the ills of Republican rule.

The Republican Approach to Government: Authoritarian Rule

Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.

Republicans' authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.

Authoritarian conservatives are primarily anti-government, except where they believe the government can be useful to impose moral or social order (for example, with respect to matters like abortion, prayer in schools, or prohibiting sexually-explicit information from public view). Similarly, Republicans' limited-government attitude does not apply regarding national security, where they feel there can never be too much government activity - nor are the rights and liberties of individuals respected when national security is involved. Authoritarian Republicans do oppose the government interfering with markets and the economy, however -- and generally oppose the government's doing anything to help anyone they feel should be able to help themselves.

In my book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches [1], I set forth the facts regarding the consequences of the Republicans' controlling government for too many years. No Republican -- nor anyone else, for that matter -- has refuted these facts, and for good reason: They are irrefutable.

The McCain/Palin Ticket Perfectly Fits the Authoritarian Conservative Mold

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican candidates, have shown themselves to be unapologetic and archetypical authoritarian conservatives. Indeed, their campaign has warmed the hearts of fellow authoritarians, who applaud them for their negativity, nastiness, and dishonest ploys and only criticize them for not offering more of the same.

The McCain/Palin campaign has assumed a typical authoritarian posture: The candidates provide no true, specific proposals to address America's needs. Rather, they simply ask voters to "trust us" and suggest that their opponents - Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden - are not "real Americans" like McCain, Palin, and the voters they are seeking to court. Accordingly, McCain and Plain have called Obama "a socialist," "a redistributionist," "a Marxist," and "a communist" - without a shred of evidence to support their name-calling, for these terms are pejorative, rather than in any manner descriptive. This is the way authoritarian leaders operate.

In my book Conservatives Without Conscience [2], I set forth the traits of authoritarian leaders and followers, which have been distilled from a half-century of empirical research, during which thousands of people have voluntarily been interviewed by social scientists. The touch points in these somewhat-overlapping lists of character traits provide a clear picture of the characters of both John McCain and Sarah Palin.

McCain, especially, fits perfectly as an authoritarian leader. Such leaders possess most, if not all, of these traits:

Incidentally, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also can be described by these well-defined and typical traits -- which is why a McCain presidency is so likely to be nearly identical to a Bush presidency.

Clearly, Sarah Palin also has some qualities typical of authoritarian leaders, not to mention almost all of the traits found among authoritarian followers. Specifically, such followers can be described as follows:

The leading authority on right-wing authoritarianism, a man who devoted his career to developing hard empirical data about these people and their beliefs, is Robert Altemeyer. Altemeyer, a social scientist based in Canada, flushed out these typical character traits in decades of testing.

Altemeyer believes about 25 percent of the adult population in the United States is solidly authoritarian (with that group mostly composed of followers, and a small percentage of potential leaders). It is in these ranks of some 70 million that we find the core of the McCain/Palin supporters. They are people who are, in Altemeyer's words, are "so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds."

The Problem with Electing Authoritarian Conservatives

What is wrong with being an authoritarian conservative? Well, if you want to take the country where they do, nothing. "They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result," Altemeyer told me. "The problem is that these authoritarian followers are much more active than the rest of the country. They have the mentality of 'old-time religion' on a crusade, and they generously give money, time and effort to the cause. They proselytize; they lick stamps; they put pressure on loved ones; and they revel in being loyal to a cohesive group of like thinkers. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going to go away."

I would nominate McCain's "Joe the Plumber" as a new poster-boy of the authoritarian followers. He is a believer, and he has signed on. On November 4, 2008, we will learn how many more Americans will join the ranks of the authoritarians.

Frankly, the fact that the pre-election polls are close - after eight years of authoritarian leadership from Bush and Cheney, and given its disastrous results -- shows that many Americans either do not realize where a McCain/Palin presidency might take us, or they are happy to go there. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me, for there is only one way to deal with these conservative zealots: Keep them out of power.

This election should be a slam dunk for Barack Obama, who has run a masterful campaign. It was no small undertaking winning the nomination from Hillary Clinton, and in doing so, he has shown without any doubt (in my mind anyway) that he is not only qualified to be president, but that he might be a once-in-a-lifetime leader who can forever change the nation and the world for the better.

If Obama is rejected on November 4th for another authoritarian conservative like McCain, I must ask if Americans are sufficiently intelligent to competently govern themselves. I can understand authoritarian conservatives voting for McCain, for they know no better. It is well-understood that most everyone votes with his or her heart, not his or her head. Polls show that 81 percent of Americans "feel" (in their hearts and their heads) that our country is going the wrong way. How could anyone with such thoughts and feelings vote for more authoritarian conservatism, which has done so much to take the nation in the wrong direction?

We will all find out on (or about) November 5th. "

""Earlier this month, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter announced his opposition to Amendment 48, which seeks to grant a fertilized egg the status of a human being, complete with equal rights. The groups pushing the amendment advertise it as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, but it targets far more than that. In fact, even those opposed to legal abortion, like Ritter, have good reason to reject the proposal.

    The creators of Amendment 48 have been coy since the start. They haven't fully explained the implications of their plan and with good reason-it's extreme. Amendment 48, if passed, would undermine our right to have a baby by establishing the legal groundwork to outlaw IVF treatment. It threatens our right to plan a family by adding the most commonly used forms of birth control alongside abortion to the list of banned procedures. The state, under this proposal, could intervene in a woman's life, even a woman with cancer and deny her life saving medical treatment if it could endanger a fertilized egg.

    This constitutional amendment is not about protecting life. Amendment 48 does nothing less than rob us of the ability to make many of life's most important decisions.

    The architects of the proposed amendment know this. The initiative's sponsor Kristi Burton asserts, "As far as birth control, IVF and abortion and all that, our amendment doesn't ban anything." But then she slyly admits, "That would be up to the legislature and courts. If our amendment passes and that's (a fertilized egg) considered a person you'd have to view those issues in that way." Ms. Burton knows full well that the only purpose to granting a fertilized egg full human rights is to target the right to birth control, IVF and stem cell research. If it were simply about targeting the right to an abortion, then Amendment 48 would have attempted to define life as starting at the moment a pregnancy begins and not before, as Amendment 48 does.

    The groups supporting Amendment 48, as listed on the Personhood Colorado website, represent the most extreme wing of the right to life movement. These groups and individuals lead campaigns against contraceptive access. They don't believe that individuals should decide hat's best for themselves according to their values. For example, the American Life League hopes to ban contraception entirely and this year launched a campaign called "The Pill Kills." Its purpose was to confuse the public into thinking the most common and effective forms of birth control, like the birth control pill, cause abortion. They held protests outside of family planning clinics nationwide trying to convince Americans to stop using contraception.

    Another backer, Human Life International, targets the poorest and most desperate places on earth. In these distressed countries, it seeks to block access to birth control and to de-fund relief agencies that distribute contraception. The Pro-Life Action League, another Amendment 48 supporter, held a conference several years ago entitled "Contraception is Not the Answer." Many of the individuals signed on in support of Amendment 48 are most famous for their anti-contraception work and activities. Dr. David Hager is credited with helping to block over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. He led the FDA to ignore the advice of its own scientists and for the first time in its history make a decision based exclusively on ideology. Neil Noesen, another supporter, is a Wisconsin-based pharmacist who made national news by denying a woman her prescription for birth control and refusing to transfer it to a nearby pharmacy that would fill it. Supporter Dr. William Colliton published an article entitled "Birth Control Pill: Abortifacient and Contraceptive" in which he said, "There is an unarguable logic connecting the contraceptive act and the abortive act. They are both anti-life."

    Access to birth control options including emergency birth control is the only proven way to reduce unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. That's why even 80% of self-described "pro-life" Americans support access to contraception.

    Voters must know that Amendment 48 threatens much more than the right to a safe and legal abortion. For women to achieve equality, they must have access to birth control. We need to respect people's ability to make their own life decisions and not impose our values and views upon others. The extreme team assembled in support of Amendment 48 knows its hidden purpose and potential-and they are committed to making sure that before Election Day you don't. "

Obama, McCain Views on Unequal-Pay Case Are Revealing, by Kia Franklin, Newsday (October 21, 2008)

"Roe v. Wade wasn't the only important Supreme Court case mentioned during the final presidential debate at Hofstra University last week. The candidates also had a tense exchange over a less-famous case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which involved a woman named Lilly Ledbetter, who received unequal pay at her job for years without realizing it.

    The discussion of Ledbetter's battle against discrimination reveals a great deal about each candidate's commitment to protecting the legal rights of ordinary Americans.

    Sen. Barack Obama mentioned the Ledbetter case as an example of how an out-of-touch judiciary can erode important civil rights and legal protections, like those that make pay discrimination illegal. Ledbetter broke down barriers by becoming the first female supervisor in her section at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Gadsden, Ala. She served in that position for many years before making the startling discovery that she was being paid far less than her male counterparts simply because she was a woman. After an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation ruled in her favor, Ledbetter filed a pay discrimination lawsuit, which she won at the trial level.

    But what should have been a significant victory for Ledbetter soon turned into a miscarriage of justice when the Supreme Court reversed this decision, finding that because Goodyear had successfully hidden its first act of unequal pay for 180 days - in her case, it was actually many years - Ledbetter had lost the right to sue.

    Ledbetter received an anonymous note about the discrimination shortly before she filed suit in March 1998. She had been working at Goodyear since 1979, so almost 20 years went by before she had any idea she had suffered discrimination.

    Because many employers forbid employees from comparing salaries, and employees are unlikely to discover pay discrimination very quickly, this new interpretation of the 180-day statute of limitations - that it starts from the first act of discrimination, not when a victim first becomes aware of the discrepancy - essentially protects the ability of corporations to discriminate.

    The Supreme Court's ruling strayed from years of precedent. And it now guarantees corporations the freedom to discriminate with impunity, while restricting access to the civil court system for many ordinary Americans who often have no other legal recourse.

    As Obama noted, Congress attempted to correct the ruling with the Fair Pay Act. This pay equity legislation was designed to clarify that the statute of limitations runs for 180 days from the time when a person first becomes aware of the discriminatory act. It passed the House but failed in the Senate, demonstrating that it's not just the judiciary that's out of touch with the needs of ordinary Americans, many of our legislators are, too.

    Sen. John McCain argued that Ledbetter was decided properly and dismissed the pay equity bill, on which he did not vote, as a "trial lawyers' dream." But is it a trial lawyer's dream, or is it a nightmare for ordinary people who find themselves on the wrong end of corporate abuse?

    The critical question is: Which result would have best promoted the interests of average Americans? The answer favors Obama's point of view: The Supreme Court's ruling in Ledbetter, and Congress' failure to correct that decision, deprives Americans of the right to go to court to seek justice when they are harmed by the artfully concealed illegal acts of others. Under no reasonable interpretation does that constitute justice.

    Lilly Ledbetter's story resonates for a reason. It is a poignant reminder that we need a national conversation about what all American citizens, whose taxes pay for the courts, should be able to expect from the civil justice system. The question for Obama and McCain to answer now is: How will you make justice attainable for ordinary Americans? As Ledbetter herself put it recently, "It isn't a Democrat or Republican issue, it's a fairness issue."

    Voters should think about this before Nov. 4. Since the next president will undoubtedly make Supreme Court appointments, he needs to embrace the judicial values that will benefit a majority of ordinary Americans, not corporate interests. "

Preying on the Right - With her eyes on 2012, Sarah Palin is aiming at the same evangelical base that carried George Bush to the White House, by Sarah Wildman, Guardian/UK (October 23, 2008)

"Sarah Palin wants a shot at the top. I don't mean Palin for Pres 2008. I mean 2012. She's been tacking hard to the right, amping up her fiery evangelical credibility factor, paying homage to those that would back a reaction candidate against a first-term Obama administration, and drawing differences between herself and her flagging running mate.

Palin has taken her evangelical pandering a step further, calling in to James Dobson's radio program and gushing to the host. The founder of conservative religious nonprofit Focus on the Family [1], Dobson is a key player in the evangelical movement who way back in January vowed not to support McCain - a man he didn't feel was true enough to the Christian cause. He was brought back around to the ticket when Governor Palin came on board. David Brody, senior correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, called Sarah Palin's talk yesterday with Dobson the Evangelical's "Caching" [2] moment. "I can feel the power of prayer and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation and I so appreciate it," Governor Palin told Dobson:

Dr Dobson you have been on the forefront of all of this, on all of this good for so many years and your reward is going to be in heaven because I know that you take a lot of shots also but please know that on our end as kind of outsiders looking in at what you have accomplished all these years, if it were not for you so many of us would be missing the boat in terms of hearing the message and understanding what it is that we can do to further the cause of life and of ethics in our nation, those things that we should be engaged in. We owe so much to you.

It wasn't Palin's first pitch to the evangelicals of late. Panicked by their drop in poll numbers, the McCain campaign has clearly given her free range to pander to her natural constituency, hoping to flush those voters to the polls in 12 days. The big forgotten news of the weekend was Palin's visit to the Christian Broadcasting Network [3]. For those who can't guess from the name - CBN is exactly what it sounds like: Christian news for Americans who want their news filtered through a primarily evangelical light.

Asked about her support for a federal constitutional amendment [4] making marriage a union between "one man" and "one woman", Palin threw her full support behind the ban, despite McCain's softer position and her own position on abortion, which is that states should decide on the issue. Newsweek [5] points out today a list of other ways Palin has pushed herself away from McCain.

Moving away from her ticket, Palin explained her position. "In my own state, I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman," Palin said. "I wish on a federal level that that's where we would go because I don't support gay marriage. I'm not going to be out there judging individuals, sitting in a seat of judgment telling what they can and can't do, should and should not do, but I certainly can express my own opinion here and take actions that I believe would be best for traditional marriage and that's casting my votes and speaking up for traditional marriage that, that instrument that it's the foundation of our society is that strong family and that's based on that traditional definition of marriage, so I do support that."

Was this to reassure those who were confused by her quasi-gay friendly comments during her VP debate? She looked so uncomfortable that night, backed into a corner that would have required her either to really articulate a position that gives gay men and lesbians second class citizenship, and thus turn off the majority of Americans, or turn away from the evangelicals she is trying to shore up both for November 4, 2008 and for the 2012 primaries.

Younger evangelicals actually aren't nearly as rabidly bigoted about their gay neighbours as their elders are. But older evangelicals have made this a bread and butter issue for the last five years. The entire premise is nasty - an effort to turn back all those changes creeping across the country by overriding them. That means the recent decision in Connecticut [6] would be rendered as null and void as Mayor Gavin Newsom's efforts in San Francisco some years back before California went the way of Massachusetts. (Those Californian advances are also peril, if the insidious Proposition 8 [7] passes on November 4.)

For a pol who likes the press as much as she doesn't, these "spontaneous" chats with the Christian journalists of America read like a run to the hard right of Obama - in 2012 as much as 2008. Let's hope the hoopla around her suddenly pricey clothing [8] habits ends that dream now."

Keep Religion Away From the Ballot, by Larry Beinhart, Albany Times-Union (October 24, 2008)

"The Constitution, Article VI, Section 3, states "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, said, "An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against."

Here's Theodore Roosevelt: "If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious freedom, and it is an emphatic negation of this right to cross- examine a man on his religion before being willing to support him for office."

Yet we have now instituted such tests. We line up the presidential candidates and cross-examine them about their faith. They respond with Sunday school sagas about how they met God and pander to us with stories about how prayer will help them lead. How did this come about?

In 1979, four conservative activists, Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie (all Catholics) and Howard Phillips (a Jew who'd become an evangelical Christian) were looking for wedge issues to break up the Democratic Party. Right-wing economics and foreign policies had no popular appeal. So they came up with abortion, opposition to gay rights and (thinly disguised) racism, concerns that could be found clustered among religious conservatives. They recruited a minister, Jerry Falwell, funded him with corporate money and started the Moral Majority.

It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The Religious Right became the base of the Republican Party, and the GOP gained control of federal government for the first time since the Great Depression.

Democrats were slow to respond. But politics is a business of learning what voters want to hear and then finding sincere ways to say it. Now, they've joined the choir. Meanwhile, sincerely religious liberals who hate the way faith became identified with right-wing politics were politicized in response.

Is faith a good guide to how someone will perform in office? George W. Bush, a born again Christian, claimed that God contacted him and said, "George," (they're on a first-name basis) "invade Afghanistan." So he did.

Although George failed to apprehend Osama bin Laden, God was apparently delighted, called back and said, "George, liberate Iraq."

Bush had a lot of support in all of this. Many people felt that he had been chosen by God to lead America in this moment of crisis and told him so. Here we are, a trillion dollars later, missions not accomplished, our armed forces too used up to respond to a new threat and our nation on the verge of bankruptcy.

If we accept it as true that God chose George and gave him specific instructions, and then look at the results, we have to form a very poor judgment of God, indeed, both as a human resources administrator and as a military strategist. Or, we might say that faith is not a good guide to competence in office.

I liked Jimmy Carter. Many did not. They felt that he was too goody-goody and too slow to resort to force -- the very qualities that came out of his version of born again Christianity. American presidents of little or no faith include Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln (though he could use biblical language to great effect), John Adams and George Washington. Yes, George Washington.

Washington did go to church, five or 10 times a year. But when people tried to box him into making a religious stand, he deftly evaded them. He gave moral advice to his adopted children, but, so far as we know, never urged religion on them.

He wrote: "Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated.

So if you are judging candidates by their religious stands, perhaps we should look to the model of the old George, the one who kept whatever faith he had to himself, and be more than a little worried about the candidate who more closely resembles our George. The one who gets bad guidance from God. "

EPA Weakens New Lead Rule After White House Objects, by Renee Schoof, McClatchy Newspapers (October 23, 2008)

" Washington - After the White House intervened, the Environmental Protection Agency last week weakened a rule on airborne lead standards at the last minute so that fewer polluters would have their emissions monitored.

    The EPA on Oct. 16 announced that it would dramatically reduce the highest acceptable amount of airborne lead from 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter to 0.15 micrograms. It was the first revision of the standard since EPA set it 30 years ago.

    However, a close look at documents publicly available, including e-mails from the EPA to the White House Office of Management and Budget, reveal that the OMB objected to the way the EPA had determined which lead-emitting battery recycling plants and other facilities would have to be monitored.

    EPA documents show that until the afternoon of Oct. 15, a court-imposed deadline for issuing the revised standard, the EPA proposed to require a monitor for any facility that emitted half a ton of lead or more a year.

    The e-mails indicate that the White House objected, and in the early evening of Oct. 15 the EPA set the level at 1 ton a year instead.

    According to EPA documents, 346 sites have emissions of half a ton a year or more. Raising the threshold to a ton reduced the number of monitored sites by 211, or more than 60 percent.

    The EPA also required states to place monitors in areas with populations of 500,000 or more. But the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that pushed for tougher lead standards to protect public health, said that a single monitor in a large city was different from a monitor placed near a plant.

    "We don't expect the urban monitors to be effective to get the hot spots that the site-specific monitors can get," said Gina Solomon, an NRDC scientist and a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "The monitoring network has a lot of gaps in it."

    Airborne lead can be inhaled, but the main way people are exposed is when they ingest it from contaminated soil - for example, when children play in a contaminated area and put dirty hands to their mouths.

    The EPA originally estimated that at the half-ton annual emissions cutoff, it would need from 150 to 600 monitors, said EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn.

    Under the final rule with the 1-ton cutoff, the requirement will be 135 site-specific monitors and 101 urban monitors in areas of 500,000 or more people, she said. There are 133 monitors now.

    Milbourn said that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson set the requirement for monitoring at sites that emit 1 ton or more of lead a year because it was "an approach that would reduce the burden to states but would still assure monitoring around those sources" that might violate the air-quality standard.

    The Battery Council International, a trade group that represents U.S. lead battery makers and recyclers, told the EPA in public comments in August that the proposed half-ton threshold was "unjustifiably low."

    Milbourn said that state and local officials should monitor any site they think might violate the new EPA standard.

    "In other words, states may go beyond the minimum monitoring requirements," and EPA will help them identify sources that emit less than a ton per year but still might produce amounts of lead in the air that are higher than the rule allows, she said.

    Lead in the air was greatly reduced three decades ago when the government ordered it removed from gasoline, but it is still emitted by lead smelters, cement plants and steel mills.

    Scientific studies have found that lead is dangerous at much lower levels in the human body than previously thought. The studies show that children's nervous systems are especially vulnerable, and that lead exposure can result in IQ loss and damage to many internal systems. "

New Debate on Wolf's "Endangered" Label, by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post (October 25, 2008)

" The Bush Administration is trying again to take the gray wolf of the Northern Rockies off the federal endangered species list.

    Having lost a court battle with conservationists this summer, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to reopen for public comment its 2007 proposal to de-list the wolves, currently considered "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act.

    "The position of the Service is, we think the wolves no longer need the protection of the Endangered Species Act. We're asking the public to weigh into that," Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for Fish and Wildlife, told The Post in an interview today.

    Wolf advocates immediately protested.

    "This is the Bush Administration's last-gasp attempt to remove protections for wolves," said Louisa Wilcox, senior wildlife advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Livingston, Mont.

...."

White House Asks for Scrutiny, by Mary Pat Flaherty, Washington Post (October 25, 2008)

"  The White House has asked the Department of Justice to look into whether 200,000 new Ohio voters must reconfirm their registration information before Nov. 4, taking up an issue that Republicans and Democrats in the battleground state have been fighting over in court for weeks.

    The voter names are in dispute because their registration information conflicts with other official data.

    The action comes a week after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by the Ohio Republican Party over the same issue. Republicans have argued that the mismatched information could signal fraudulent registrations, but Democrats have countered that eligible voters could be knocked off the rolls over discrepancies as minor as a transposed number in an address or birth date.

    President Bush yesterday asked Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey to review concerns over the voters raised by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

    Boehner wrote to Bush yesterday, saying, "I strongly urge you to direct Attorney General Mukasey and the Department of Justice to act." Boehner said in his letter that if the voters remain on the rolls without added checks, "there is a significant risk if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted."

    In a news release, Boehner said that a letter he had sent Monday to Mukasey on the matter did not receive a reply. Boehner has asked Mukasey to order Ohio's Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to make it easier for county elections officials to access the state list of mismatched voters. Brunner has argued that would require reprogramming election computers and would create chaos in the days before the election.

    White House press secretary Dana Perino characterized Bush's referral of the matter to Justice as a routine step that would be taken for any such request from a congressional leader.

    Voting rights advocates, however, immediately raised concerns. "This is taking the politicization of this to a new level, and the last thing we need is for the elections officials and voters of Ohio to be put in a chaotic situation in the last days before the election," said Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

    The voters' registrations have been at the heart of a dispute between the Ohio Republican Party and Brunner.

    Information for the new voters does not match state driver's license or Social Security records. Federal law demands that states have a computerized database to check the records, but leaves it to states to determine what constitutes a match and what to do with mismatches. Voters who have not resolved discrepancies by Nov. 4 could be forced to cast provisional ballots, which are counted only if their registration information can be cleared up.

    Brunner this week directed local elections boards not to eliminate voters solely on a mismatch, and yesterday issued orders urging boards not to force voters to use provisional ballots over minor issues.

    "The statewide voter database was never intended to be a litmus test for voter eligibility," said Jeff Ortega, a spokesman for Brunner. "Every Ohioan must provide ID to prove their identity before their vote is counted. Ohioans can be completely confident in our preparations for a successful November election."

    Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) said he was "disappointed that the president chose to interject partisan politics into the election. My confidence in Secretary Brunner's work remains unchanged."

    Intervention on election matters has been a troubling issue at the Department of Justice and figured in the controversy over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. "

Bush, Boehner Want DOJ to Look Into Ohio Voting, by Matthew Murray, Roll Call (October 24, 2008)

" President Bush is asking the Justice Department to look into whether 200,000 Buckeye State poll-goers must use provisional ballots on Election Day because their names do not match state databases.

    White House spokesman Carlton Carroll confirmed Friday that the president will forward a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), requesting that the Justice Department look into whether the state's voter rolls comply with the Help America Vote Act.

    In a letter dated on Friday, the House GOP leader wrote that with Election Day "less than two weeks away, immediate action by the Department is not only warranted, but also crucial."

    "I respectfully request that you use your authority to direct Attorney General Michael Mukasey and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate these actions and direct the appropriate authorities in each state to comply with the Section 303 requirements of HAVA," Boehner wrote.

    "Unless action is taken by the Department immediately, thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of names whose information has not been verified through the HAVA procedures mandated by Congress will remain on voter rolls during the November 4, 2008 election; and there is a significant risk - if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted."

    The U.S. Supreme Court last Friday threw out a Republican-led effort in Ohio that would have required 200,000 voters to cast provisional ballots on Nov. 4 because of misspellings, incorrect addresses or other inconsistencies in their records.

    Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and other Ohio Democrats argue that requiring individuals with inconsistent registrations to cast their ballots provisionally may lead to unfair post-Election Day scrutiny of their eligibility. "

Voters' Rights Groups Sue State, by Jenna Portnoy, Courier Times (October 24, 2008)

"Voters already worried about queuing in long lines on Election Day in Pennsylvania shouldn't have to wait even longer because of busted voting machines.

    That's the position of voters rights advocates who filed suit Thursday hoping to force elections officials to distribute emergency paper ballots when voting machines - 50 percent or more per polling place - are not working.

    A directive from the Pennsylvania Department of State says the ballots must be available only if all machines go down. Bucks County will follow this advice, said Stacey Hajdak, who relayed county solicitor Glenn Hains' ruling.

    But the lawsuit, filed against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro A. Cortes, seeks to ensure that voters receive the paper ballots if half or more of the machines stop working.

    Leslie Amoros, Cortes' spokeswoman, declined comment until the department can review the suit, which was filed in federal court in Philadelphia.

    The plaintiffs - the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People State Conference of Pennsylvania, individual voters who waited in long lines during the primary, and Montgomery County's Election Reform Network - are represented by Voter Action, a national voting rights organization, and the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia.

    The groups focused on Pennsylvania because of problems reported in the spring primary and the recent issuance of the directive.

    "Thousands of members have faced serious delays in voting when machines have broken down in the past, and this problem will be much more severe this year when unprecedented numbers of voters will be coming to the polls," said J. Whyatt Mondesire, the president of the NAACP State Conference of Pennsylvania.

    Steve Strahs, co-founder of the Election Reform Network, said some voting districts could see a whopping 10 percent to 15 percent increase in turnout, which is significant considering typical turnout numbers and limited election workers.

    "This is an election projected to have an unprecedented turnout," he said. "We could have 80 percent or more. A precautionary measure to facilitate the flow of voters it seems to us is only a good thing."

    Nothing stops individual counties from distributing the paper ballots if needed, Strahs said.

    "The vulnerability for long wait lines and frustrating disenfranchised voters is great," he said. "The opportunity to provide emergency paper ballots is an important tool to minimize the frustrations."

    Early voting in southern states such as Georgia has led to two-hour-long waits in some places and provides "a specter of what may be coming in Pennsylvania. We hope not," Strahs said.

    Bucks County is preparing for larger-than-usual turnout by renting 80 machines to supplement the 765 the county already owns, Elections Director Deena Dean said.

    Madeline Rawley, a Doylestown Township resident and member of the Coalition for Voting Integrity, pushed for the county to rent even more machines, but none are available from distributor Electec Inc. of New Jersey.

    Sandy Schiff, another voting advocate from Doylestown, said she worried about the security of the machines.

    "It's a perfect opportunity, if you're paranoid, to do something," she said.

    Rawley said paper ballots should be used as soon as one machine goes down. Provisional ballots, in the meantime, are used when a voter does not appear to be registered, but wishes to vote. "

Indiana Judge Rules Against Closing Early Voting Sites, McClatchy Newspapers (October 23, 2008)

"A Lake county, Indiana, superior court judge yesterday ordered early voting sites in heavily Democratic cities Hammond, Gary and East Chicago to remain open in a decision that could affect the presidential election in the battleground state.

    In her decision, Judge Diane Kavadias Schneider dismissed complaints from local Republican officials trying to block the sites on the grounds they violated local election rules and created a risk for voter fraud.

    Since local Republicans first sought to close the sites two weeks ago, the case has drawn attention from the presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Barack Obama because Indiana is a swing state.

    "This is one of a dozen-plus legal actions that our campaign is paying attention to," said Ben Porritt, a spokesman for the McCain-Palin campaign. "Most importantly, the goal of our campaign is to ensure that all eligible voters have an opportunity to vote, and their votes be counted. We obviously back early polling locations, as long as they are done according to state law. While we disagree with this decision, we will continue to monitor any further legal action that takes place."

    Yesterday's ruling was hailed by Democrats because it means more voters in a heavily Democratic region of Indiana have easier access to the polls. In the past, voters had to go to Crown Point, roughly 24 miles (38.6 kilometres) away from East Chicago, to cast early ballots.

    "Early voting has been a great success so far in Lake county. Thanks to Judge Kavadias Schneider's ruling today, thousands of Indiana voters had their rights protected and the opportunity granted to take part in early voting," said Jonathan Swain, the Indiana spokesman for Obama's campaign.

    "No matter which candidate or which party they are voting for, all Hoosiers who are eligible to vote deserve the right to have their voices heard in this critical election."

...."

What Voter Fraud?, by Allan J. Lichtman, commondreams.org (October 23, 2008)

"This year the Republicans are rolling out one of their oldest and most misleading charges: that Democrats and their supporters are planning to flood the polls with illegal voters. Although the GOP first raised a hue and cry against Democratic voter fraud more than 40 years ago they have failed to turn up any credible evidence to support their allegations. The purpose of such charges has been to discredit their Democratic opponents and discourage minorities and poor people from voting.

In the 1964 presidential contest between Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Barry Goldwater, Republicans launched "Operation Eagle Eye," ostensibly to guard against illegal voters. The party planned to station 100,000 "eagle eyes" at polling places across America to spot fraudulent voters. In fact, this "ballot security" operation was targeted at minority neighborhoods in 36 cities and circulated handbills which warned that authorities could arrest voters who had an outstanding parking ticket or a traffic violation. Operation Eagle Eye turned up not a single fraudulent voter and had little impact Johnson's landslide victory.

During the next twenty years similar ballot security operations failed to uncover voter fraud, but continued efforts to discourage voting by Democratic-leaning groups. This practice of "voter suppression" became so notorious that in response to a 1986 lawsuit file by Democrats the National Republican Party agreed to a consent decree in federal court that prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud activities that targeted minority voters. Of course, they could still level charges of voter fraud against Democrats and liberal groups.

In 1998, I had the opportunity to examine first-hand charges of voter fraud, when Republican gubernatorial candidate for governor of Maryland Ellen Sauerbrey alleged that fraudulent votes cast by dead people, prison inmates, and unregistered persons accounted for the 5,993 vote victory of Democrat Parris Glendening. As the state of Maryland's consultant on voting rights I was asked by Attorney General Joseph Curran to determine whether there was any truth to Sauerbrey's claims.

My own work uncovered some unintentional errors by election officials, but not a single fraudulent vote among the 1.4 million ballots cast in the election. Likewise several weeks of judicial discovery and a trial in State District Court failed to uncover any illegal voters. The trial judge Raymond G. Thieme, who said in open court that he voted for Sauerbrey, tossed out her lawsuit. The case reached comic opera proportions when several allegedly dead voters began talking, including some who said they voted for Ms. Sauerbrey.   

The administration of George W. Bush has made the discovery and prosecution of voter fraud a top priority.  But its labors uncovered a molehill not a mountain of fraud. From 2002 to 2007 the federal government has charged only 120 persons nationwide with voter fraud. These were all isolated cases against single individuals or small groups involved with local contests. Not single case implicated the Democratic or Republican parties or affiliated groups in efforts to influence the outcome of statewide, congressional, senatorial, or presidential elections.

In the current campaign Republicans have charged that ACORN, a liberal community organizing group, has committed fraud in its efforts to register new voters nationwide. In an extraordinary fit of hyperbole, John McCain said in the third presidential debate that ACORN "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

ACORN has been registering voters for many years. This year alone it registered some 1.3 million voters. Inevitably some forms will be false or inaccurate. But the submission of such forms only becomes voter fraud if efforts are made to cast votes based on fraudulent registrations.

Critics have derided ACORN for submitting registration forms in the names of Disney characters or Dallas Cowboy players. But does anyone seriously believe that the organization is planning to sneak voters into the polls under the name of Mickey Mouse or Tony Romo? A bipartisan report prepared for President Bush's Election Assistance Commission in 2007 examined the alleged link between voter registration and electoral fraud. It concluded that "false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud."

In a properly functioning democracy all votes must be fully and fairly counted. But the last thing that the American people need in the final days of this crucial presidential election is another debate over phony charges of voter fraud."

How to Stop the Rigging of Election '08, by Sarah Van Gelder, Yes! Magazine (October 23, 2008)

"Don't be fooled by all the accusations about ACORN [1]. The real voting scandal is the voter suppression methods [2] that likely swayed election results in 2000 and 2004, and are in process again [3] as you read this.

Most of the news has focused on John McCain's accusations that ACORN is perpetrating a major vote fraud. The problems with ACORNs work that have surfaced involve registration, not voting. The truth is that ACORN, a group that organizes poor people, has been registering record numbers to vote: a jaw-dropping 1.3 million -- mostly low-income people, people of color, and young people.

ACORN readily admit that a tiny fraction of the 13,000 canvassers they hired turned in faulty registrations. "If they had too many mistakes or problems, we fired that person," Brian Mellor, senior counsel for Project Vote [4], said in an article in the New York Daily News [5]. But the organization has no choice about turning in the faulty forms; most states require that every registration form filled out be handed over to election officials.  "I personally went to the office of the Clark County [Nevada] board of elections in July and told them we're bringing these forms in, we've separated the ones that have problems," he said [5]. "You should investigate and prosecute those you feel necessary. They told us they weren't interested." Nevada state officials raided the ACORN office in early October.

But there's little chance that these errors will result in improper voting on election day, much less affect outcomes. According to researcher Lorraine C. Minnite, of Columbia University [6], a total of 24 people, across the U.S., were found guilty of voter fraud between 2002 and 2005 -- an average of eight per year.

This video [7] features ACORN leaders and others responding to the charges of election "fraud."

....

This issue of voter fraud is a smokescreen designed to cover a much more serious issue with a long and ugly history: the suppression of the vote of groups that tend to vote Democratic -- especially the poor, minorities, and young people. Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie [8] said as much when I interviewed him last year.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy Jr. [9] show that thousands of voters have been disenfranchised in key swing states, dating back to the 2000 election, and continuing today. Techniques include purging voter registration rolls in targeted districts, challenging voters, requiring excessive identification, and discarding ballots.

There are also cases where heavily Democratic districts get few voting machines, resulting in long lines, while Republican precincts in the same county are well stocked, with no waiting to vote. Reports are already coming in [10]of scare tactics repeated from the last two elections, especially flyers and posters warning that voters will be arrested at the polls if they have so much as an unpaid parking ticket.

Then there are the infamous black box voting machines [11], which, computer scientists warn, can't be secured or audited. There are already reports of voting machines in West Virginia [12] flipping Obama votes to John McCain during early voting.

This country has a long and ugly history of suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people, and today's voter suppression tactics follow in that shameful tradition.

So what do we do protect the votes now that the election is just days away?

YES! Magazine is sending out an email to thousands of our readers entitled 12 Ways to Protect the Vote [13]. Click on this link [14] for simple things you can do, and forward on these simple instructions for safeguarding your vote.

Here are other resources available at the YES! [15] website. Click here [16] for information on:

...."

Florida's GOP Lawmakers Blamed For Early-Voting Lines, by Charles Rabin, Larry Lebowitz and Michael Vasquez, McClatchy Newspapers (October 23, 2008)

"Saying early voting cost too much money with rules that weren't uniform, Republican legislators led a charge three years ago to set new statewide standards limiting the number of polling sites and their hours of operation.

Long lines have confronted Floridians trying to vote early. This one snaked outside a library in Orlando on Monday. (McClatchy)

Those revamped rules trimmed early voting from 12 hours per workday to eight.

Justice Department Targets ACORN but Ignores GOP Voter Suppression. Bv Steven Rosenfeld, alternet (October 23, 2008)

Olbermann: Divisive Politics Is Anti-American, by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC (October 20, 2008)