Campaign 2008

CHOO-CHOO! All Aboard!

Chip — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:40:34 -0400

LAST DAY TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN SOME STATES

In many states, today is the DEADLINE for voter registrations. If you haven't registered yet, you better scoot on down to your county election commission. And if you have been our doing your civic duty and registering voters, today is the day in these states that you must turn in all your forms. Registration deadlines:

TODAY October 6 - AZ, AR, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IN, KY, LA, MI, MT, OH, PA, TN, TX, UT, VA, WY
October 7 - IL, NM
October 8 - MO
October 10 - ID, NY, NC, OK
October 11 - DE

Election Day Resources

Vote Like Mike

davidswanson — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:22:41 -0400

By David Swanson

Michael Moore's new book is called "Mike's Election Guide 2008," and it's a nice combination of the comical and the useful. The comical comes first. Chapter One consists of Mike's answers to random election-related questions, and his answers are for the most part funny, insightful, informative, and sometimes brilliant.

The background Moore provides on John McCain's fits of temper is frightening, and includes this "statement from McCain, spoken loudly and freely while riding in 2000 with the press in his Straight Talk Express: 'I hated the gooks and will continue to hate them as long as I live,'" and this one made by McCain to his wife in response to a comment from her about his hair: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Moore also provides good answers to such key questions as "Is it true Democrats drink from a sippy cup and sleep with the light on?"

But there are some sloppy moments in Chapter One, including a claim that Kerry lost Ohio to Bush in 2004. Later in the book, Moore proposes paper ballots as one of the very few key reforms needed by our nation, and yet he repeatedly makes clear his unargued belief that electronic machines have not yet done any damage.

Moore also provides a good description of the hideous crime in which McCain was involved when shot down and imprisoned in Vietnam. He was bombing civilian areas in a war of aggression. Yet, Moore begins this section with these grotesque lines:

"[McCain] was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of our nation. And for that, he was tortured and then imprisoned in a North Vietnamese POW camp for nearly five-and-a-half years."

While Moore contradicts this nonsense in the very next sentence, the wise advice he offers in the following chapter begins with an admonition against saying untrue but positive things of just this sort about McCain even if followed by explanations.

Moore also proposes a questionable solution to the prevalence of bad politicians:

"Remember those weaselly weird kids who always ran for class president or student council? They should have been stopped right then and there. Because they grow up to be the awful politicians we can't stand. It was our responsibility back in junior high to smack the devil out of them and give them a good swirly -- but we didn't."

This from a man who elsewhere in the book calls himself a pacifist and whose awareness of the crazy violent potential of American young people is made clear in his film "Bowling for Columbine."

Moore also wants children to be less supervised and thinks they should play "Al Qaeda vs. Army" as a way to toughen them up. But he would impose mandatory firearms training on them. Again, this is the guy who made "Bowling for Columbine." How irresponsible can one man be?

Fortunately, Moore's ideas make more sense as he grows more serious in chapters Two through Six. Chapter Two is called "How to Elect John McCain: Or, How Many Democrats Does It Take to Lose the Most Winnable Presidential Election in U.S. History?" Moore's theme is toughness, and he nails it.

Chapter Three is 10 things Moore would like President Obama to do right away after his inauguration. Some of them are things Congress should do, rather than the president. Some of them are things Obama would never ever do without a massive public movement to compel him. Some of them are absurd trivialities apparently thrown in for comic relief. But most of them are dead-on and crucially important.

Chapter Four is six proposals to fix our electoral system. Now Moore is firing on all cylinders. He nails what I consider six of the most important systemic reforms needed, and includes as one of them a reform I favor but rarely find authors supporting: limitation on the length of election seasons.

Chapter Five advocates prosecuting Bush, Cheney, and their co-conspirators, and it even includes an admirable passage opposing hate and retribution while arguing for punishment as deterrence and precedent.

Chapter Six is the longest and most useful, if least comical, part of the book. Moore presents very brief synopses of 12 Senate and 30 House races in which he thinks a seat can be moved to the Democratic column. Of course, Moore elsewhere expresses contempt and disgust for Democratic leadership. He proposes reforms backed by very few Democrats. He insists that only a threat of electoral defeat can influence a Congress member. And yet, here he gives glowing portraits of, in some cases, very questionable candidates because they are Democrats. The oddity of this is highlighted by the fact that this week more Democrats than Republicans voted for Paulson's Plunder.

But Moore, to his credit, is proposing lesser-evilism as an electoral strategy within a system he wants to reform, and is proposing citizen engagement in between and apart from elections as well. And to his credit, and consistent with his reform proposals, Moore has released this book only weeks before the elections. While I consider elections to usually rank very low on the list of priorities for civic involvement, I place them very high during the next four weeks. If you want to know which candidates to help, or even just want to start familiarizing yourself with the likely new characters in the 111th Congress, get this book.

No Surprise in the Senate Bailout Vote

dlindorff — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:30:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The US Senate did what the Founding Fathers expected it to do when
they devised the idea of an upper house of Congress. Playing the role
of Britain’s House of Lords to the House’s House of Commons, it ignored
the rabble (that’s us, the voters) and voted the opposite way of the
House of Representatives, which on Monday had voted down the Bush
Administration’s proposed $700-billion to $1-trillion give-away to Wall
Street financial companies.

The Senate vote in support of the measure, which went 74-25 (the
ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy missed the vote), reflects the fact that, first
of all, Senators, who run representing entire states, are very
difficult to unseat because of the huge cost of mounting a media
campaign against an incumbent, and second that two-thirds of them even
don’t face voters this November, (and one third not for another four
years).

The House, in contrast, which defeated a similar bill earlier in
the week by 228-205, while still largely an incumbent’s sinecure, is
still a place where every member faces the voters every two years.

So now the bill goes back to the House for a second round of voting
tomorrow, this time in a version devised in the Senate to try and
convince 12 of Monday’s nay voters to switch to yea. The sweeteners: a
rise in the size of bank deposits insured by the (already
over-stretched) Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from the current
$100,000 to $250,000, and some $115 billion in new tax breaks, some for
business, and some for wealthy taxpayers (a raising of the threshold
for applying the alternative minimum tax).

In other words, the minimum cost of this bailout, has been raised
from the $700 billion that the House rejected last time to $815
billion! And it’s a fair bet that more sweeteners will be added once
the bill goes to the House floor. (It should be noted that neither of
the measures added in the Senate has anything to do with a rescue.
Moreover, the first, upping the FDIC insured deposit limit, is simply a
time-saver for the rich, who could have simply moved around money to
separate banks to accomplish the same thing, while the second only
succeeds in driving the US budget further into the hole.)

The pressures on House members from lobbyists, House leaders of
both parties, and from the White House, will be enormous. The question
is whether public pressure, which was unprecedented over the past week,
jamming the Capital switchboard and crashing the Capital website, will
be equally enormous.

If voters again flood their representatives with calls and emails
demanding that they not support this rip-off bill, it is still possible
that the bailout will die and Congress and the White House will have to
go back to square one to work out a more reasonable and fair way to
salvage the US financial system than simply putting the results of 15
or more years of reckless Wall Street greed all on the backs of average
taxpayers.

As I have written earlier, the proper way to go about this would be
for both the Senate and the House to schedule and hold hearings on the
crisis and on ways to develop a rescue of the economy and the financial
system. Such hearings should include testimony from the victims of Wall
Street’s misdeeds—the homeowners who are losing their houses, the small
businesses that can no longer borrow funds to finance expansion or to
meet short term cash needs, the retirees and workers who are seeing
their pensions pillaged. They should include testimony from the
hundreds of economists, including Nobel Laureates like Joseph Stiglitz,
who are warning that the bailout as currently designed will not work
and could make things worse. And they should grill executives of the
major financial institutions about how they drove things to this
perilous state.

Then they should craft a response that meets the needs of the
public, not just the bankers and their investors, that will help to
rebuild the economy and the financial system on a sounder footing, and
that will punish those who abused the system and who have brought it to
its knees.

The Senate vote (which included yes votes from both major party
presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, both the
beneficiaries of large campaign donations from Wall Street interests)
was a victory for those who caused this crisis, and who hope to receive
all the money being put on the table.

The House vote will be a test of whether the public still has any
power at all to have its interests considered in what is still referred
to as this American democracy.

The advocates of this ripoff, from the President on down, have been
using cheap scare-mongering to try to win the day, claiming that if a
bill isn’t passed immediately, the country will spiral into a
depression like the 1930s. This is ridiculous. The country has been in
a credit crisis for months, and if Congress spend another month or two
deliberating and devising a good bill, it would not put the country in
any greater danger of collapse than it is already in. In fact, this
rush to pass a bad bill is far more likely to lead to disaster.

So once again, whether or not you have called your US
representative, get on the phone and do it again. Demand that they vote
“No” and say if they do not, you will vote against them in November.
The numbers to call are: 202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498. If
you cannot get through, look up in your local phone book blue pages the
number of a local constituent office for your representative, and call
there. In fact, do that anyway, too. You can also send an email to your representative.

Today and tomorrow are the last chance to stop this travesty from happening. Act today, and don't forget to spread the word.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36551';
digg_title = "No Surprise in the Senate Bailout Vote";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n The US Senate did what the Founding Fathers expected it to do when they devised the idea of an upper house of Congress. Playing the role of Britain’s House of Lords to the House’s House of Commons, it ignored the rabble (that’s us, the voters) and voted the opposite way of the House of Representatives, which on Monday had voted down the Bush Administration’s proposed $700-billion to $1-trillion give-away to Wall Street financial companies.\r\n\r\n The Senate vote in support of the measure, which went 74-25 (the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy missed the vote), reflects the fact that, first of all, Senators, who run representing entire states, are very difficult to unseat because of the huge cost of mounting a media campaign against an incumbent, and second that two-thirds of them even don’t face voters this November, (and one third not for another four years).\r\n\r";
digg_skin = 'standard';

We Need to Demand Hearings!

dlindorff — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:03:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

We've seen what happens when Congress forgoes the time-tested
process of deliberative and investigative hearings and simply takes a
floor vote on a Bush Administration-backed measure. First there was the
October 18, 2001 resolution for use of military force against Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Because there were no hearings on that measure, its
loose, deliberately ambiguous wording has been used ever since by the
Bush/Cheney crew as authorization for their global so-called "War" on
Terror, including the claim that the president has the dictatorial
power ignore treaties, US law, and bills passed by the Congress.
Shortly thereafter, there was the Patriot Act, a compendium of
anti-Democratic measures that had failed to win passage in Congress
over the years which were cobbled together in the dead of night by
Bush/Cheney zealots and passed on a voice vote the next day by a
Congress too cowed to hold hearings on the measure. Then, in October
2002, there was the second authorization for use of military force
resolution, this time against Iraq, which has ended up miring the US in
a disastrous five-year-long war without end that has killed 4500
Americans, chewed up 40,000 more, and killed in excess of one million
innocent Iraqi civilians.

Had there been serious hearings on any of these three terrible
measures, there is a chance none of them would have passed, or that at
least, had they been passed, they would have been reworded to tie the
administration's hands. The first AUMF could have limited military
actions to attacking Al Qaeda. Period. The Patriot Act's constitutional
overrides could have been exposed early, and challenged. And the
administration's lies about the alleged threats posed by Iraq could
have been challenged in public by other witnesses, plus a clear
requirement could have been included that any attack on Iraq would need
UN authorization.

Now Congress is being pressured to pass an equally horrific bill
with no hearings. We know that 200 leading economists, including at
least three Nobel Laureates, one of them former World Bank economist
Joseph Stiglitz, are opposed to the bailout, saying throwing a trillion
dollars at Wall Street won't work and will be a waste of taxpayer money
or worse. We know that it fails to address the root problem--the
housing and mortgage crisis. We know that it could be a crippling blow
to the dollar. Yet without hearings to expose this giant scam, the only
ones getting through to members of Congress are Wall Street lobbyists,
their pockets stuffed with campaign cash.

Citizens can't even get past the Capitol switchboard, which is
jammed with angry callers trying to get through to their
representatives and senators.

The point that needs to be made is that there is no great urgency to
pass a bill. The administration's claim that the bottom will fall out
of the economy and that the country will be plunged into a depression
if the bill isn't passed immediately is nonsense. The Great Depression
took years to develop after the 1929 stock market crash.

The current market could collapse, and there'd be plenty of time to
act to revive the national economy. Meanwhile, the credit crisis, which
is serious, has been underway for months and months. It is not
something that came up last week and needs to be resolved tomorrow (as
if that were possible by the mere passing of a give-away bill). There
is plenty of time to hold the kind of hearings that will let members of
Congress, and the American public, learn about the causes of the
crisis, of its impacts, and about what the various strategies are that
might most effectively address it.

So the public demand should not be for passage of a "good" bailout
bill. It should be for a halt to this rush to passage of any bill. The
demand should be for "No Bill Without Hearings!"

So call Congress (202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498) and
tell your representative and your two senators that you don't want them
railroaded. Tell them you demand hearings before legislation. And tell
them, again, that you will vote against anyone who votes for the
current bailout for Wall Street. (Hint: If you can't get through, then
call one of their local offices, which are listed in the blue pages of
your phonebook, or go visit a local office.)

Don't forget to write letters, too, to your local paper demanding hearings and a reasoned response to the crisis, not a bailout.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Virgil Goode Shames Virginia's Fifth District

davidswanson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:20:03 -0400

Rep. Virgil Goode Gives His Opponent a Beard and Dark Skin on Top of Lying About His Positions

davidswanson — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:54:05 -0400

Weasel Watch

dlindorff — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:49:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It is going to be entertaining, to say the least, to watch John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom endorsed the crooked, stacked rip-off bailout bill being scaremongered into law by the Bush Administration.

Now that it is clear that the American public overwhelmingly
recognizes this bill as a corrupt attempt to rob them and reward the
crooks and shysters on Wall Street, how will McCain and Obama weasel
out of their endorsement of the proposal?

They can certainly count their lucky stars that the vote was in the
House and not in the Senate, where they would have already had to take
a public stand up or down on the measure, but let's be clear--both men
have said they suppport the negotiated proposal that was put to the
House today, and which went down to a stinging defeat, 228-205, despite
the solid support of the House Democratic leadership.

Meanwhile, to see how your representative voted, click here. You'll know what do to...

An Open Letter to John McCain

loftlore — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:35:47 -0400

An open letter to Senator John McCain

Dear John:

I watched your performance in the Presidential debate this Friday past.
It struck me that you are still having trouble understanding the simple
problem that is the war on Iraq. Senator, I have thought long and hard
to find a way to explain the problem to you. What can I write to
enlighten you? What you need is an analogy! What you need is an example
that will help to explain the situation. I hope this will help.

Senator, let's imagine that while you are looking for a restroom you
have a momentary lapse of attention. A lapse such as this could happen
to anyone. The longer one lives the more likely that such a lapse will
occur. Imagine this lapse finds you in a restroom designated for the
use of the opposite gender. You have stumbled into the women's restroom.

Senator, should this ever happen to you, please apply the following
suggestions. In this case of mistaken-toilet identity, you should
not complete the mission. It is no shame to admit your mistake and
leave. In fact, leaving is the good and proper thing to do. Should you
become aware of your mistake in the middle of completing your "mission"
I suggest that you, er, put your gun away and exit. Do not "surge" in
an effort to complete the "mission". Leave as soon as you can. A
struggle to "win", to finish the job under these awkward circumstances,
ignores a vital detail - you are in the wrong toilet.

Should you choose to do the right thing and exit, remember, it's okay
to be embraced. Being embraced is nature's way of putting emphasis upon
a lesson learned. We all make mistakes. Some make more than their fair
share, but that's life. You'd risk shame, however, if you insisted on
staying where you shouldn't be. Under these circumstances "mission
accomplished" is no victory.

Do you understand, Senator? We, the United States, should never have
entered Iraq. Staying where we should never have been in the first
place is not heroic. We are not welcome in Iraq. The rightful occupants
of Iraq wish us to leave. We should leave. We, as a nation, need to get
out.

I hope this analogy has helped you understand why your position on Iraq is, well, flawed.

Stephen Hudler
loftlore.com

"Ya can't blink, Charlie"

Kathleen1106 — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:41:08 -0400

Has anyone else noticed McCain's rapidly blinking eyes when he is speaking? I noticed this quite a while ago. My daughter just told me that she heard Jon Stewart mention it!

The ratio of his blinks, compared to my own blinking is 12:1 and sometimes 15:1

What do you think about that...H-M-M?

Foreign Policy Debate All About War

davidswanson — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:15:52 -0400

By David Swanson

There was only one foreign policy asked about in Friday night's foreign policy debate: war and potential wars.

Obama began the debate by allowing McCain to get away with claiming the mantle of "accountability" on the issue of a bailout that rewards fraud in financial markets. Why? Because Obama won't oppose the bailout.

Then he let McCain get away with complaining about a huge increase in the size of government, without pointing out that the larger "size" of government is wars and military spending supported by McCain (and Obama).

Obama finally spoke up on a serious and good difference with McCain on taxes, even going so far as to speak in favor of taxing businesses rather than people, but allowed McCain to seize the high ground on earmarks and "pork barrel spending."

In most cases, Obama spoke on one topic and McCain on another. This was not a debate in which both were required to speak on the same points.

Obama openly promised shock-doctrinal success for the bailout, telling us that he will have to cut back spending for useful projects. But he took the opportunity to speak about the need for all the things he may or may not fund.

McCain again spoke in favor of cutting spending. He even mentioned that military spending is the highest area of spending!!!! He proposed eliminating cost-plus contracts in the military!!!

Obama said, as he said many times, that he agreed with McCain, but he went to the topic of waste in Medicare and completely avoided the topic of the military.

McCain proposed a spending freeze on everything except military, and Obama rightly refused to agree! He suggested he wouldn't freeze early childhood education but he would end the war in Iraq. This blip went by very quickly, though, and then McCain ran his mouth for a long time on energy alternatives.

But Obama came back stressing health care as a priority over tax cuts for billionaires. McCain claimed Obama wants to deny people choice of doctors and claimed that he, McCain, supports the needs of veterans -- both untrue, but who would know it?

What are the lessons of Iraq? McCain said the lesson is that you need more troops. Obama said the war should never have been begun, that we should have focused on a war in Afghanistan. Nobody suggested there was any problem with aggressive wars and empire.

McCain repeated his surge hype, and Obama went along and agreed the surge was the big success it's alleged to be, but stressed that the whole "war" was a disaster.

When McCain claimed Obama voted against "funding troops" Obama replied well, although without challenging the absurd lie that funding a war is funding the soldiers. Obama by this point was looking less nervous and more energetic.

Obama favored putting more troops in Afghanistan, claiming that occupying Afghanistan is a response to 9-11. And he added Pakistan -- he would send more troops there too. (Authorized by what Congress and what U.N.?) McCain opposed cutting off aid to Pakistan or launching military strikes into it, or at least announcing your attention to do so.

Obama came back nicely (other than the illegal militaristic policies he advocated) and went after McCain for advocating the extinction of North Korea and singing songs about bombing Iran.

But then McCain ran on and on and on. Did he talk many more minutes of this debate than Obama or just seem like it?

Lehrer just jumped in to claim the amount of time was even for the two. Credible?

Next topic: Iran. It was all war, all the time, in this debate. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and later Russia and another 9-11.

McCain claimed Iran getting a nuke would mean a second holocaust, that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and that Iran is putting IEDs in Iraq (there's an oldie but goodie).

Obama blamed the occupation of Iraq (without saying "occupation") for Iran developing nuclear weapons, but agreed on the claim that Iran is doing that and with everything else -and said so again: "I agree".

Obama disagreed with refusing to talk to Iran. McCain claimed Ahmadinejad is currently in New York talking about destroying Israel. I guarantee Obama won't challenge that.

He didn't. He cited his agreement with war-criminal Henry Kissinger on meeting with Iran without pre-conditions. And McCain backed Obama into the corner of claiming that he never meant that he, as president, would meet with Ahmadinejad.

Next topic: Russia. Obama talked semi-tough on Russia regarding Georgia. McCain talked tougher and denounced Russia as a criminal nation going to war for oil and empire and violating the norms of international behavior. (How would he know about such things?)

Obama again: "I agree." But he also said he'd warned of the problem before it was a crisis. Obama, admirably, brought in the relevance of green (and nuclear) energy.

Last question, after a list of wars and possible wars, before ever getting to diplomacy, peace, friendship, aid, global warming, poverty, trade, or immigration: Do you think we'll have another 9-11?

McCain praised the 9-11 Commission. Then he declared that we must never ever torture a prisoner again, despite his record of the past two years of supporting torture, which I guarantee neither Obama nor Lehrer will mention.

They didn't. Obama praised airport security but said more is needed in ports, etc. And he hyped the fear of terrorists with nukes (while 9-11 was done with box cutters; and scared people support McCain).

McCain claimed that Star Wars ended the Cold War, which nobody will question.

They didn't. Then McCain went back to the surge nonsense yet again. Obama agreed, yet again, but again faulted the focus on Iraq rather than Afghanistan. Obama added China to the list of countries to worry about.

McCain compared Obama to Bush (!) by claiming that he is as stubborn in refusing to praise the surge as Bush is in other things.

Obama, to his credit, refrained from again praising the surge, and instead rightly talked about America's decline in world opinion in recent years.

Lehrer gave McCain the last word, and he put in his prison stay in Vietnam and called himself a champion of veterans, his actual record notwithstanding and never mentioned.