SmartRemarks

Even as Dick Armey’s dick army continues to do the disruptive dirty work of its corporate-funded organizers (an onion Rachel Maddow has ably peeled for public view), even as its footsoldiers continue to spout fear-drenched talk-radio-esque bullshit about euthanasia, baby killing, and the evil plans of that Fascist Socialist Muslim Negro in the White House (who’s really from Kenya, you know!), even as they’re devoutly convinced they speak for Real America notwithstanding the fact that most real Americans are repulsed and embarrassed by what they see these people doing (and oh, yeah, disagree with them on the issues, too)…

… some folks at the top of the Establishment, those who understand the real interests at stake here (hint: it’s not the footsoldiers) and who are actually capable of making calm, methodical arguments (i.e., they don’t think whoever shouts loudest wins), are showing their hand just a little too boldly.

Case study: Fortune Magazine editor-at-large Shawn Tully’s recent pieces attacking what he dismissively terms “Obamacare.” Just as the right-wing culture warriors are perpetually projecting onto the left their own penchants for intolerance and bullying, likewise class war in America is almost always a top-down phenomenon, even as its practitioners try to cast it as the exact opposite. And Tully’s offerings on this subject demonstrate that phenomenon writ large, in glowing red letters.

Note that I acknowledged his writing only as calm and methodical. I didn’t say it was logically sound. Let’s delve into the details…

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And now, in the “surely too strange to be true” category…

(Or perhaps the “even a stopped clock” category?…)

Hat tip to the site “Political Irony,” which clued me in to this piece from Esquire, surveying the opinions of several white supremacist and neo-Nazi leaders. Apparently voting for McCain is something most of them just couldn’t stomach, and they were actually willing to go on the record about it. Sample quotes:

Tom Metzger, Director of White Aryan Resistance:

The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who’s in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person–more dangerous than Bush. Obama, according to his book, Dreams Of My Father, is a racist and I have no problem with black racists. … I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person.

Erich Gliebe, Chairman of the National Alliance:

I don’t think McCain even acknowledges that a white race exists. He’s all about granting amnesty to illegal aliens. The fact he wants to keep us in wars in the Middle East for 100 years, that’s not a good thing. I give Obama credit, he seems to have stuck to his guns as far as pulling the troops out of Iraq. He’s a very intelligent man, an excellent speaker and has charisma. John McCain offers none of that.

Rocky Suhayda, Chairman of the American Nazi Party:

White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals–basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush. Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women… that’s the kind of negro that I can respect.

Even the lone holdout can barely tolerate McCain: Ron Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Imperial Klans of America, says “If [Obama] wins, I’ll laugh. I don’t like McCain, but he’s the only one I can vote for.”

On the other hand, the one black supremacist they talked to, a fellow called Yahanna, can’t stand Obama:  says he, “McCain is definitely the better shot for black people.”

In other news, cats and dogs are lying down together, and the tinfoil hat industry is bucking economic trends with a huge upsurge in quarterly profits. We are definitely living in unusual times…

Looking around, Friday was a day of curiously juxtaposed ups and downs, as on the one hand there was the pleasant schadenfreude of seeing the wheels continue to come off not only John McCain’s campaign but those of other desperate Republicans as well, while on the other hand we all mourned the passing of the inimitable Studs Terkel.

But rather than focus on anything too serious, I thought I’d take a short break to look at the less weighty side of political life. On the day that Obama took at least a few hours’ break to take his kids to a Halloween party, I dug up an interview with him from that long-ago time before the conventions, in (of all things) Entertainment Weekly, asking him about his choices in (yep) entertainment.

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I really find it hard to believe… even if the McCain campaign has no ethical compunctions about this sort of thing, you’d think they’d be tactically smarter by now.

But no:  according to the L.A. Times, McCain’s people are now dredging up a months-old story and accusing the paper of “suppressing” a video showing Barack Obama at a years-old farewell party for Rashid Khalidi, in an attempt to connect Obama to another supposed “terrorist.” Read the rest of this entry »

As my last couple of posts should demonstrate, I can’t write about all politics all the time. I wouldn’t want to. But this is a political season, and there’s no doubt that the topic is on the front burner. We can all understand the reasons why.

We are seven days away from a momentous change in this country. One week from today, all the waiting and the suspense and the anticipation will be over, and Barack Obama will be elected president.

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There’s been more heat than light in recent days about alleged election fraud of various kinds. Today at electoral-vote.com there’s a good piece about some of the real problems involved here (emph. mine):

Challenges Could Disenfranchise Millions of Voters

The Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 debacle in Florida, mandates that states have a statewide data base of eligible voters to help people vote and to prevent fraud. However, these data bases are full of minor errors and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of voters may be disenfranchised as a result. To make this clear, consider the five newly registered voters listed below on the left. The data for the same people (matched by social security number) appears in the drivers license data base below on the right.

Unless very carefully programmed, the software might reject all these new voters on the grounds of suspected fraud because the data don’t agree. Could the software be made smart enough to do “fuzzy matching?” Of course, but only if the people writing it were instructed to do so. In addition, in many states criminals have recently been purged from the rolls–along with everybody else with the same name as any criminal. But there is much dispute as to which crimes disqualify one, what about people who have served their time, and people who have been pardoned? Even if the laws are clear, which they generally aren’t, the data bases are so riddled with errors and the clerical personnel so ill-trained, that the whole issue of voter registration could be a time bomb that explodes on election day.

There have already been numerous lawsuits filed by the state Republican Parties challenging thousands of newly registered voters, most of whom are Democrats. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday against a GOP lawsuit trying to disqualify 200,000 new voters in Ohio whose voter registration data does not agree with other state data bases (like the examples above). In a Montana case, a federal judge ruled that the Republicans had filed the case “with the express intent to disenfranchise voters.” In some cases it is the Democrats going to court to prevent a (usually Republican) secretary of state from purging eligible voters. In other words, attempting to disenfranchise voters has become just another campaign tactic. It is virtually always the Republicans trying to purge (new) voters because the new voters are so heavily weighted towards the Democrats. If they can eliminate 100,000 voters, they will probably get rid of 80,000 Democrats and 20,000 Republicans, which is clearly worth the effort.

There are also good pieces about related problems today in the Los Angeles Times…

SACRAMENTO — Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed…

…and the New York Times.

In recent weeks, the McCain campaign has accused [ACORN] of perpetrating voter fraud by intentionally submitting invalid registration forms, including some with fictional names like Mickey Mouse and others for voters who are already registered.

Based on the information that has come to light so far, the charges appear to be wildly overblown — and intended to hobble ACORN’s efforts. …

According to ACORN, most of the forms that are now causing controversy are ones that it flagged and that unsympathetic election officials then publicized. …

But for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.

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.

Much of the blame for this lies with overly restrictive registration rules. Earlier this year, the League of Women Voters halted its registration drive in Florida after the state imposed onerous new requirements.

The answer is for government to do a better job of registering people to vote. That way there would be less need to rely on private registration drives, largely being conducted by well-meaning private organizations that use low-paid workers. Federal and state governments should do their own large-scale registration drives staffed by experienced election officials. Even better, Congress and the states should adopt election-day registration, which would make such drives unnecessary.

GOP operatives are doing nothing more here than seeding the ground with FUD so that when Obama wins the White House and Dems gain Congressional seats, they can whine after the fact about how it’s allegedly “fraudulent.” Even if they’re sincere in their concern about possible voter fraud, they’re still straining at gnats while swallowing camels, given the vastly larger number of legitimate voters at risk of being disenfranchised. It’s despicable, and it needs to be opposed.

Fortunately Democrats and civil liberties organizations in general have learned from 2000 and 2004, and they’re not taking this lying down. There are quite a few countersuits and legal defense operations going on out there, prominently including the Obama campaign’s recent demand that the special prosecutor investigating the Justice Department scandal “include a review of any involvement by Justice Dept. and White House officials in supporting the McCain-Palin campaign [and RNC's] systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud.”

As John McCain continues to trail Barack Obama badly in the polls, Republicans are reacting in different ways. Quite a few prominent conservatives are openly abandoning McCain, or at least singing the death knell for his campaign. From one perspective, this is just a matter of reasonably intelligent people seeing the writing on the wall, and (at least) distancing themselves from the debacle or (perhaps) acknowledging that they really, genuinely don’t have a good ticket. From another perspective, though, it’s a matter of rats leaving a sinking ship, and these “disloyal” figures are to be excoriated by True Conservatives.

What’s happening is that “movement” conservatives are getting a taste of the anxiety and self-doubt that non-conservatives have been suffering for years, as I wrote the other day. The difference is, they’re not used to it.
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Tonight was the fourth and final debate of this electoral season (third between the presidential contenders), and McCain went into it a very long way from victory. In a campaign where those fond of sports metaphors have accused him of throwing too many “hail Mary” passes already, tonight was his last chance.

He still didn’t score.

Enough of that, though; frankly I hate sports metaphors. Politics isn’t a game, and tonight’s debate certainly wasn’t particularly entertaining.

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Just a month ago (although it seems like a political lifetime now), progressives, liberals, and Democrats of every stripe were wailing and gnashing their teeth at how popular Sarah Palin was with the public, and what a surge John McCain had made in the polls, and how Barack Obama would surely snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and dash everyone’s hopes. The mainstream punditocracy and the blogosphere alike were awash in armchair quarterbacking, urging free advice of every sort on the candidate:  Obama needed to be angrier, to show his passion. He needed to be more soothing, to avoid frightening (white) voters. He needed to attack Palin. He needed to ignore Palin. He needed to rebut deceptive attacks. He needed to avoid seeming defensive. He needed to move to the left, to reassure his base. He needed to move to the right, to capture independents. He needed to be all things to all people simultaneously, and yet never forget to show the strength of his convictions. He needed to reframe everything.

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Tonight’s second presidential debate is being billed as a “town hall” format. But here are the rules:

Tuesday’s match-up at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., will be moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw, with the questions to be culled from a group of 100 to 150 uncommitted likely voters in the audience and another one-third to come via the Internet. … Brokaw selects the questions to ask from written queries submitted prior to the debate, according to the “contract.”

An audience member will not be allowed to switch questions. Under the deal, the moderator may not ask followups or make comments. The person who asks the question will not be allowed a follow-up either, and his or her microphone will be turned off after the question is read. A camera shot will only be shown of the person asking — not reacting.

While there will be director’s chairs (with backs and foot rests), McCain and Obama will be allowed to stand — but they can’t roam past their “designated area” to be marked on the stage. McCain and Obama are not supposed to ask each other direct questions.

So no follow-ups from anyone, period—not the audience, the moderator, or the candidates. That’s a pretty damn tightly controlled “town hall.” At least the first debate, with Jim Lehrer, allowed for a certain amount of give-and-take. This one sounds like nothing but a forum for reciting talking points.

(And where do they find that many “uncommitted” voters at this stage of the game, anyway?)

Nevertheless, I’ll be watching it, and coming back here later to update this post with reactions. My expectations, however, are not high.
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