By MATT APUZZO , Associated Press / Minneapolis Tribune
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state's public safety commissioner. The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn't the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.
The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.
Monegan says he was dismissed as retribution for resisting pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor's sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.
by David Neiwert - Crooks and Liars
Max Blumenthal and I recently spent several days on separate visits to Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin's hometown where she was mayor from 1996 to 2002. We talked to a number of local residents and pored over a number of city documents, looking into Palin's associations with a far-right political faction in Wasilla. (We working thanks to a grant from The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.)
The report is now complete and can be read in its entirety at Salon.com. You can also see above the video Max made of his interview with one of the faction's main leaders, a man named Mark Chryson, who headed up the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party during the same time period. It pretty much speaks for itself.
Essentially here’s what we found:
That Gov. Palin, when a Wasilla city council member, formed an alliance with some of the more radical far-right citizens in Wasilla and vicinity, particularly members of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party who were allied with local John Birch Society activists. These activists played an important role in her election as Wasilla mayor in 1996.
Once mayor, one of Mrs. Palin’s first acts was to attempt to appoint one of these extremists (a man named Steve Stoll) to her own seat on the city council. This was a man with a history of disrupting city council meetings with intimidating behavior. She was blocked by a single city council member.
Afterward, Mrs. Palin fired the city’s museum director at the behest of this faction.
She fomented an ultimately successful effort to derail a piece of local gun-control legislation which would simply have prohibited the open carry of firearms into schools, liquor stores, libraries, courthouses and the like. The people recruited to shout this ordinance down included these same figures, notably the local AIP representative (who became the AIP’s chairman that same year).
She remained associated politically with the local AIP/Birch faction throughout her tenure as mayor on other issues, particularly a successful effort to amend the Alaska Constitution to prohibit local governments from issuing any local gun-control ordinances.
In general, we found that not only did Mrs. Palin have numerous associations with these extremists, she actively sought to empower them locally and to enact their agendas both locally and on a state level.
We sent an e-mail to the McCain/Palin campaign asking for their reaction to these findings, and have so far received no response. If and when we do, we'll update.
We haven't any insight into Palin's accusations that Barack Obama "palled around with terrorists" by associating with William Ayers. But we do know there are serious questions about her own dalliances with the far right during the same time period. We didn't find any evidence that Palin herself subscribed to their "New World Order" conspiracy theories, but it's clear she was comfortable with not only aligning herself with them politically, but putting them in positions of actual political power and influence.
Citizens for Ethics
Washington, DC - Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate whether Senator John McCain (R-AZ) violated federal law and Senate rules by failing to disclose gambling winnings on his Senate financial disclosure reports.
According to a recent article in The New York Times , Sen. McCain is an avid gambler, who frequents casinos as often as once a month. The article states that in the winter of 2000, at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, “[Sen. McCain] and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.” Sen. McCain also reportedly spent a weekend at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2007, playing craps while there.
In July, Time reported that over the past decade, Sen. McCain has gambled on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and on the Las Vegas strip, allegedly playing “for a few thousand dollars at a time.” In 2005, The New Yorker reported that while in New Orleans in the spring of that year, Sen. McCain gambled at Harrah’s Casino.
Federal law and Senate rules require all income to be reported on annual financial disclosure reports. The Senate Ethics Manual states that winnings, such as those derived from a lottery or a game show, are gifts that must be reported as income. Knowingly filing a false report is a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.
Nevertheless, Sen. McCain reported no income derived from gambling on the personal financial disclosure reports he filed with the Senate between 2000 and 2007.
In contrast, other members of Congress, including Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) all reported winnings on their financial disclosure reports.
CREW’s executive director Melanie Sloan stated, “Given Sen. McCain’s long history of gambling, the fact that he never included gambling income on his financial disclosure forms suggests he is either the unluckiest gambler ever or, more likely, he failed to report the income.”
Sloan continued, “The Senate Ethics Committee should investigate whether Sen. McCain deliberately failed to report gambling winnings, and if so, the matter should be turned over to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation.”
by Jonathan Martin - Politico.com / Common Dreams
The unmistakable momentum behind Barack Obama's campaign, combined with worry that John McCain is not doing enough to stop it, is ratcheting up fears and frustrations among conservatives.
A selection from the array of anti-Obama paraphernalia. Activists outside rallies openly talk about Obama as a terrorist, citing his name and purported ties to Islam in the fashion of the viral e-mails that have rocketed around the Internet for over a year now. And although true progressives and leftists find the notion that either Pelosi or Obama will lead us towards a 'hard-left' agenda, the real story here is the nature of how the right-wingers of America will react to an Obama Presidency.And nowhere is this emotion on plainer display than at Republican rallies, where voters this week have shouted out insults at the mention of Obama, pleaded with McCain to get more aggressive with the Democrat and generally demonstrated the sort of visceral anger and unease that reflects a party on the precipice of panic.
The calendar is closing and the polls, at least right now, are not.
With McCain passing up the opportunity to level any tough personal shots in his first two debates and the very real prospect of an Obama presidency setting in, the sort of hard-core partisan activists who turn out for campaign events are venting in unusually personal terms.
"Terrorist!" one man screamed Monday at a New Mexico rally after McCain voiced the campaign's new rhetorical staple aimed at raising doubts about the Illinois senator: "Who is the real Barack Obama?"
"He's a damn liar!" yelled a woman Wednesday in Pennsylvania. "Get him. He's bad for our country."
At both stops, there were cries of, "Nobama," picking up on a phrase that has appeared on yard signs, T-shirts and bumper stickers.
And Thursday, at a campaign town hall in Wisconsin, one Republican brought the crowd to its feet when he used his turn at the microphone to offer a soliloquy so impassioned it made the network news and earned extended play on Rush Limbaugh's program.
"I'm mad; I'm really mad!" the voter bellowed. "And what's going to surprise ya, is it's not the economy - it's the socialists taking over our country."
After the crowd settled down he was back at it. "When you have an Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there gonna run this country, we gotta have our head examined!"
Such contempt for Democrats is, of course, nothing new from conservative activists. But in 2000 and 2004, the Republican rank and file was more apt to ridicule Gore as a stiff fabulist or Kerry as an effete weather vane of a politician.
"Flip-flop, flip-flop," went the cry at Republican rallies four years ago, often with footwear to match the chant.
Now, though, the emotion on display is unadulterated anger rather than mocking.
Activists outside rallies openly talk about Obama as a terrorist, citing his name and purported ties to Islam in the fashion of the viral e-mails that have rocketed around the Internet for over a year now.
Some of this activity is finding its way into the events, too.
On Thursday, as one man in the audience asked a question about Obama's associations, the crowd erupted in name-calling.
"Obama Osama!" one woman called out.
And twice this week, local officials have warmed up the crowd by railing against "Barack Hussein Obama."
Both times, McCain's campaign has issued statements disavowing the use of the Democrat's full name.
A McCain aide said they tell individuals speaking before every event not to do so. "Sometimes people just do what they want," explained the aide.
The raw emotions worry some in the party who believe the broader swath of swing voters are far more focused on their dwindling retirement accounts than on Obama's background and associations and will be turned off by footage of the McCain events.
John Weaver, McCain's former top strategist, said top Republicans have a responsibility to temper this behavior.
"People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain," Weaver said. "And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive."
"Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold."
But, if it were up to them, such hard-edged tactics are clearly what many in the party base would like to use against Obama.
That McCain has so far seemed reluctant to do so has frustrated Republicans.
"It's time that you two are representing us, and we are mad," reiterated the boisterous Republican at McCain's town hall in Wisconsin Thursday. "So go get 'em!"
"I am begging you, sir, I am begging you - take it to him," pleaded James T. Harris, a local talk radio host at the same event, earning an extended standing ovation.
"Yosemite Sam is having the law laid down to him today in Waukesha, Wis.," quipped Limbaugh on his show Thursday, referring to the GOP nominee. "This guy, this audience member, is exactly right," the conservative talk show host said of the first individual.
"You are running for president. You have a right to defend this country. You have a responsibility to defend this country and not just fulfill some dream you had eight years ago running for president against Bush. It's time to start naming names and explain what's actually going on, because, Sen. McCain, the people of this country are dead scared about what we face if you lose."
John J. Pitney Jr., a political science professor at California's Claremont McKenna College and former Republican operative, suggested core Republicans were acting out their longstanding frustrations with their self-proclaimed maverick nominee.
"McCain has always frustrated the Republican base," Pitney said. "In this campaign, he has alternated between partisan attacks and calls for bipartisan cooperation. It's nice that he thinks he can round up congressional votes the way a border collie rounds up sheep. But you can't be a border collie and a pit bull at the same time. The crowds want a pit bull."
There is also the belief that taking out Obama is the only way to win.
"They know that when McCain has taken off the Senate mantle and put the stick to Obama (celebrity ad, as a case in point), we get movement in the polls," said Rick Wilson, a GOP consultant not working on the presidential race. "They want McCain to call out Obama - on the Fannie/Freddie mess, on Wright, on Ayers, on guns, on [the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] - because they know that if McCain says it, it penetrates the MSM filter. ... Only McCain and Palin can really drive that message."
The two have begun to get more aggressive on many of these topics, with both discussing Ayers in multiple venues Thursday. The RNC is also going up for the first time with an ad featuring the former domestic terrorist.
It was enough to stir hope that McCain may stay on the offensive, even in Limbaugh, who has often criticized the Arizona senator for working with Democrats more than attacking them. The radio host praised his sometimes-nemesis for singling out Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) as partly responsible for the credit crisis.
"McCain/Palin fired back today in Waukesha, and 15 years of frustration is coming out joyously in the voices of GOP supporters at these rallies," Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail, arguing that Republicans were fed up with having been portrayed as the bogeyman for myriad issues since the Clinton years.
But to the exasperation of many in the party, Obama's pastor, the most damning of all his associations, remains off-limits, at the express desire of McCain. Palin ignored Wright and focused on Ayers when she was asked about the two in an interview Thursday with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham. And McCain focused on Ayers only when he was asked an open-ended question at the town hall about Obama's "associations."
"It is a shame McCain took Wright off the table," lamented one prominent Republican operative not working on the race. "He is a legitimate issue, and we may look back and realize he was the issue that could have changed the race."
For now, though, party members don't seem to be looking back with regret as much as fearing what lies ahead.
"McCain is behind in the polls, and the Republicans have no chance of regaining control of Congress," Pitney noted. "Republicans are facing the prospect of unified Democratic control of the government for the first time since the first two Clinton years. And even then, Clinton's agenda had moderate elements (e.g., [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and deficit reduction). With Obama, [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi in power, Republicans worry about a hard push for a hard-left agenda."
By Robert Parry - Consortium News
Once Barack Obama emerged as a viable candidate for President – given the nation's grim history of violence toward African-American political figures – the worries began about Obama’s safety, and they have not gone away.
Now, with the McCain-Palin campaign’s recent decision to go intensely negative on Obama, those risks appear to be growing, putting added pressure on the Secret Service detail assigned to protect Obama.
In particular, Sarah Palin’s reckless talk about Obama “palling around with terrorists” has helped validate the anti-Obama hate that has long obsessed the American Right. She also accused Obama of insulting American troops in Afghanistan, a twisting of Obama’s words that was then reprised in a McCain-Palin attack ad.
Though avoiding some of Palin’s most incendiary rhetoric, John McCain has played this dangerous game, too, asking ominously “who is the real Barack Obama?” – suggesting that there are dark secrets in Obama’s past that would make him a threat to the nation.
Warm-up speakers at Republican rallies have insisted on emphasizing Obama’s middle name “Hussein” as another epithet.
Not surprisingly, McCain-Palin supporters have responded to this “red meat” by shouting words like “treason,” “communist,” “kill him.” At a Palin event in Florida, some excited backers yelled ugly taunts at journalists, including an African-American working in a TV crew.
For her part, Palin appears oblivious to the dangerous political storm that she is stirring up. Caught up in her new celebrity – and lost in her own ambition – she acts as if there are no consequences for putting ugly words together and spewing them into the fervid world of the angry American Right.
Many observers are more surprised about McCain, who vowed at the end of the GOP convention to become a President who would end “partisan rancor” – although his convention was filled with partisan rancor targeting Obama.
Now, facing slumping poll numbers, McCain has jettisoned what’s left of his promise to run a respectful campaign as well as his prized slogan “Country First,” in exchange for a new goal of winning at all costs.
Like Palin, McCain seems not to care that he is feeding the anger of white racists and the paranoia of xenophobes who have long recycled false allegations about Obama’s religion and his loyalty to the United States.
The Real McCain?
This “new” McCain has startled many of his old fans in the U.S. press corps who bought into his image as a bipartisan reformer who was victimized by George W. Bush’s dirty tactics in 2000. Some now shake their heads about an aging politician letting his ambition – or fear of defeat – overwhelm his larger sense of decency.
But other assessments hold that McCain is simply reverting to the real McCain, the spoiled son of one four-star admiral and the grandson of another, the brat who earned the nickname “McNasty” and who exploited his family influence to rise in military rank despite a poor record as a student and a pilot.
A new account of McCain’s life by Tim Dickinson published in Rolling Stone describes not only McCain’s playboy youth – his gambling, womanizing and tendency to crash planes – but debunks a central element of his personal narrative, that his ordeal as a Vietnam War POW transformed him into a person who puts “country first.”
The article opens with an anecdote from 1974 when former POW McCain encounters another ex-POW, Air Force Lt. Col. John Dramesi, at the prestigious National War College, where McCain had pulled strings to get in.
Dramesi, who unlike McCain had refused to make an anti-American “confession” for the North Vietnamese, describes his plans to seek an assignment in the Middle East because he fears it will become a future danger zone for U.S. interests.
McCain is dismissive of Dramesi’s plans, saying he was off to Rio de Janeiro.
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?" Dramesi asked.
McCain, who was then a married father of three, responded, "I got a better chance of getting laid."
Indeed, if one looks at McCain’s life through a single prism of self-interest, all the twists and turns of his career – including his ventures into reform, bipartisanship and even his coziness with the mainstream press – make sense.
As Dickinson observes in his biographical article, “the real John McCain … has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.”
In this view, McCain is like his erstwhile Republican rival, George W. Bush, a screw-up scion of a dynastic family who learned how to come across as an “everyman” and who became adept at playing the political game. McCain, like Bush, also wanted to outdo his more accomplished father.
Country Last
So, it shouldn’t be too surprising that McCain – finding himself in a political hole – would do whatever it takes to climb out, even if that means smearing an opponent, further polarizing the country and inciting some extremists with violent tendencies.
This evidence of the “real McCain” should have been long apparent, certainly since he recruited to run his campaign many of the Bush veterans who threw mud at Al Gore, John Kerry and McCain himself – the likes of Karl Rove protégés Steve Schmidt to the top job and Tucker Eskew, who smeared McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary.
Then, when McCain needed to solidify his Republican base and inject some excitement into his campaign, the 72-year-old cancer survivor selected Sarah Palin, a first-term governor of Alaska with virtually no foreign policy experience, as his running mate.
For a while, the Palin pick worked politically giving McCain a boost at his convention and in the polls. However, increasingly, American voters look at Palin as eminently unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
But McCain is undaunted. Despite concerns among medical experts that his melanoma could recur, he continues to defend his vice-presidential choice, now unleashing her as the lead attack dog against Obama.
McCain’s ambition, which burns as brightly as Palin’s, seems to have few limits. Nor does his disdain for his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, whom McCain sneeringly referred to in Tuesday’s debate as “that one.”
But the most worrisome question in these last four weeks of the campaign is whether McCain and Palin will continue with dangerous rhetoric that might encourage some unstable character to take matters into his own hands.
If something like that does happen – or even if McCain-Palin somehow manage to turn their ugly messaging into a tainted victory – the ultimate loser will be the United States, which will be left even more deeply divided than it is today.
Instead of putting “Country First,” the ugly tactics of McCain and Palin are putting “Country Last.”
By Jared Bernstein, Huffington Post / Alternet
McCain's economic plan contradicts his recently held fundamental views and is far out of touch with the needs of the country.
About a year ago, I had a memorable chat with a high-ranking Republican operative. The presidential primaries were revving up, and he asked me which Republican candidate I feared the most. Without hesitating, I answered McCain.
My rationale was simple. While he was increasingly out-of-step with the public on the war, so were all the other Republican candidates. But unlike them, McCain had repeatedly stood up to his party on matters economic, especially the Bush tax cuts, and he did so with resonant language.
In 2001, when the richest one percent of households held 18% of all income, he said he could not "in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans."
In 2003, when we had gone through a recession, were waging an expensive war, and the federal budget had flipped from surplus to deficit, he voted against another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest, this time arguing that "At a time of war, at a time of economic stagnation, at a time of rising national debt ... one might expect our national leaders to pursue policies calling for shared sacrifice to achieve shared benefits. Regrettably, that is not the case."
The most recent data show that in 2006, 23% of all income is held by the richest 1%, the highest level on record but for one year: 1928. Spending on the war has not abated, and the budget deficit is on the rise. Middle-class Americans, who allegedly weighed so heavily on McCain's conscience circa 2001, are much more squeezed now than they were then.
The economy is surely in recession. Financial markets are deeply screwed up, and on Friday we learned that the job market contracted by another 159,000 last month, the ninth month of consecutive job losses.
In other words, if the Bush tax cuts didn't make sense in 2001 and 2003, they make a whole lot less sense now.
Yet McCain doesn't merely want to extend these cuts forever. He wants to expand them dramatically, by cutting the corporate tax rate by about a third, at the cost of $735 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center (TPC). As Biden effectively emphasized in last week's debate, that move delivers $4 billion in annual tax cuts to the Exxon-Mobil's of the world.
What happened? How does McCain's erstwhile good conscience countenance this policy? The answer, or at least the spin, was revealed to me a few weeks ago in a debate I had with his top economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin. When I pointed out that these cuts do nothing to help the middle class, while needlessly raining more wealth on the "haves," Doug disagreed. Based on the fairy dust of supply-side, trickle-down economics, he asserted that these cuts would lead to more jobs and income for middle-class families. Contrary to McCain's position a few years back, the campaign now frames a cut in corporate taxation as their middle-class tax cut.
(Fact check: Data from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office show that middle class people hold a mere 3% of all corporate income, compared to 88% for the top fifth, and about 60% for the top 1%. In our new State of Working America, we show that an important factor driving the almost unprecedented level of inequality right now is the double whammy of a) the growth of corporate income, like dividends and capital gains, versus labor market income, i.e., earnings, and b) the increased concentration of corporate income among the richest households.)
The only way McCain can implement this fiscal policy without generating unsustainable debt levels is to cut deeply into government spending. His and Palin's hated earmarks won't get you there (in Palin's case, of course, the hatred is newly founded). His promise to freeze certain aspects of discretionary government spending gets you even less savings than the earmarks. They'll have to go after the entitlements, and since Social Security is actually a relatively small problem in this regard, for their plan to work, they have to cut the heck out of Medicare and Medicaid.
This brings you to their truly unfortunate health care plan, which I wrote about last week in this space.
So, my first point is that McCain and his team have crafted an economic plan that contradicts the candidate's recently held fundamental views and is far out-of-touch with the needs of the country. That might not have posed a big problem except for the fact that a series of events, including the middle-class squeeze generated by stagnant incomes and rising prices, recession, and financial meltdown, have made the economy front and center in this campaign.
How did McCain end up with an economic platform, especially on taxes, that is so out of sync with his past views as expressed in the above quotes, an agenda that is anything but "mavericky."
The answer comes from the Palin debate last week. Since Ms. Palin is a newcomer on the national scene with scant governing experience, little knowledge of the major issues, and few deeply held views, she serves as a talking head for the people behind the curtains, the staff and advisors running the campaign. When McCain spouts this stuff, he's filtering it through years of intense experiences, as a veteran, a former POW, and member of the Senate for 26 years. With Palin, it's unfettered, thin, talking points.
What we learn -- and yes, I fully grant you that we knew this well already, but the debate was a strong reminder -- is that the same neocons that wrote the Bush agenda wrote McCain's. Despite the fact that the electorate has moved on, they can't help themselves.
For example, they briefed Palin to spout the supply-side, anti-government, Reaganisms that are so deeply out of sync with where things are at right now. As we speak, the economy is reeling from market excesses and lax oversight, driven by an ideology that guaranteed us that unchained from its government overseers, the invisible hand would guide us to the economic promise land. Instead, it's guided us over a cliff.
Yet, here's how Palin reminded the audience about the true meaning of patriotism: "Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper."
That recipe has certainly worked wonders over the past eight years.
Palin channeled the other great neocon tactic: talk it, don't walk it. I don't think she mentioned "Wall St." without the preface of "greed and corruption," but she failed to offer one concrete proposal to address that. To the contrary, she and McCain still want to turn part of the dollars flowing into Social Security over to the stock market.
Obama, on the other hand, back in March articulated a six point plan that had it been in place, would arguably have prevented much of what's going wrong in markets today.
The campaign's fondest hope is, of course, that the economy would just go away so they could get back to arguing foreign policy, where polls are more favorable toward their guy. But it's too late for that, and anyway, most people scored the first presidential debate a draw in matters of foreign affairs, as Obama effectively tied McCain to Bush's failed Iraqi policy.
More importantly, as the election nears, the undecided voters who will decide this thing seem to be recognizing the importance of the Obama "change" mantra. Unlike myself, most people don't have the time and interest to track the income shares of the top 1%, but for a while now, vast majorities have recognized that the country is on the wrong track, and for all its verbiage, the Obama campaign is really quite simply about getting it back of the right one.
We can have great arguments about whether his plan to end the war, his tax policies to favor the middle class while raising taxes on, and only on, the very high end, or his health care plan are, in fact, the right ones. But at this point, one of their key selling points is that they take us on a different path than the one we're on.
That's largely policy wonkery, I grant you, but let's close out with some reflections on character. Lo those many months ago, when I chatted with my conservative counterpart, I feared McCain because I viewed him as having the character to stick to his convictions, many of which I disagreed with, but that's not something you see enough of in politics these days.
He's lost that. It started with the policy reversals discussed above, was amplified by the outright lies of the campaign, and culminated in the cynical, reckless, and politics-over-country choice of a running mate who is dangerously unprepared to step into the presidency.
At this point I really wonder: what's in it for him? Why does McCain want to be president? Those who have followed him for years don't recognize his agenda, his tactics, his positions (e.g., the great populist regulator!). How could a man of seemingly deep conviction morph into this caricature? His campaign is empty, with no spiritual or intellectual core; its tactics have devolved into a series of crass surprises and Hail Mary passes.
I get Obama in this regard. To get the country back on track, to reconnect middle-class living standards and growth, to rein in market fundamentalism, to rectify a series of unjust and even fatal policy choices, to restore America's standing in the world, he seeks to implement his change agenda.
But I don't get McCain. I hope the country doesn't get him either.
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
If the November vote is close, key swing states that have been illegally rejecting voters could become recount battlegrounds like Florida.
With less than four weeks to go before the 2008 presidential vote, new practices in key swing states to update voter rolls are coming under fire for mistakes that could involve rejecting tens of thousands of legitimate voters, suggesting that close vote counts in these states could lead to legal fights echoing Florida's presidential recount in 2000.
According to a New York Times report on Oct. 9, key swing states -- including Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Missouri -- have been using federal Social Security data to verify voter registration information from established and potential voters. The Social Security data, which is used to authenticate voters' identity but is known to be error-prone, has been used to purge "tens of thousands" of voters already on voter rolls, the Times reported, as well as to reject numerous new voter registration applications.
Of 7.7 million inquiries by states to the Social Security Administration to verify voter applications in 2008, nearly 2.4 million resulted in "non matches," according to the agency, which Monday issued a statement urging election officials in six states -- Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio -- to "review their procedures."
This past summer, AlterNet reported that Michigan, Kansas and Louisiana were using drivers' license databases in a similar manner to purge voters. In both instances, whether using Social Security or motor vehicle data, it is difficult to fully know how voter rolls will be affected because different states and counties have differing procedures on purging and removing voters, and because this process is often secretive.
What's clear to leading voting rights attorneys, however, is that this "name-matching" process not only violates the guiding federal law on removing voters, the National Voter Registration Act, and violates the guiding federal law on accepting vote registrations, the National Voting Rights Act, but also creates a new basis to challenge presidential results if the vote count is close on November 4.
Unless there is litigation to force states to follow these federal laws before Election Day and restore purged voters and accept registrations from new voters, a close vote count in swing states could see post-Election Day legal fights over provisional ballots. These are ballots issued to voters whose names are not on voter lists and are later validated before they are counted. Thus, a fight over provisional ballots in 2008 could echo the fight over hanging chads -- or punches in paper ballots -- in Florida in 2000.
"I think it is a real risk," said Brenda Wright, legal director of The National Voting Rights Institute at Demos, a public interest law firm. "If you have a situation where people are showing up who think they are registered to vote, that is where provisional ballots come in. The question is will those ballots be counted. If there are thousands of provisional ballots in a number of states, there's a danger that they may not all be counted."
"There will be an effort by the civil rights community to figure out what to do," said Jon Greenbaum, Voting Rights Program director at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
"There is the potential the perfect storm is developing," said Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, another public-interest law firm. "New voters should be added to the rolls immediately, and then vetted and sent letters if there are problems."
The scenario of post-Election Day litigation is not speculation. Across the country, GOP partisans already have filed lawsuits over voter registration issues or said they planned to pursue polling place challenges of individual voter registrations in states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. In federal court in Ohio, a hearing was held Thursday on a GOP suit seeking to force the state to use the Social Security data to vet new voters.
"It does add a whole other dimension to the potential debates on what is the vote," said Kimball Brace, director of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm. "I was Al Gore's expert in Florida on this. ... In 2000, we were concerned with the voting equipment, and what happened with under- and over-votes. Now, if you are a lawyer looking at challenges, you don't only look at that but at the voter side as well."
Roots of the Problem
The name-matching issue has its roots in the federal legislation that was passed after the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida -- the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Under that law, states were instructed to compile statewide voter lists in contrast to lists that previously were maintained at the local level. States also were allowed to use Social Security data to verify registrations, but only as a last resort after other forms of voter ID could not be corroborated.
The problems that have arisen since the law took effect are multiple, but they seem to have one common factor: The practices now at issue evolved with little or no guidance from federal election officials, such as the Election Assistance Commission, or without any comment from the Justice Department, which enforces federal voting rights law.
The Help America Vote Act told states to create statewide voter registration databases, said Tova Wang, vice president for research at Common Cause, but did not tell states how to use them. Similarly, states were not told how to use provisional ballots.
Thus, states began using Social Security and motor vehicle databases to screen voter lists and purge voters instead of following the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to contact a voter over a four-year period before removing them and to conduct no purges closer than 90 days before an election. Indeed, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights' Greenbaum said his organization was filing a lawsuit on Thursday in Georgia over that state's use of motor vehicle databases to purge voters outside of the National Voter Registration Act process.
On the issue of screening new voter registration applications, the states are overlooking the Voting Rights Act, which tells them to accept voter registration forms that might be missing some voter information, a Capitol Hill staff attorney for a committee with election jurisdiction said, citing 42 USC 1971. But this staffer and other voting rights attorneys said the Justice Department's selective enforcement of civil rights laws during George W. Bush's presidency allowed states to maintain voter rolls under their own standards.
Moreover, because the voter purging process and new voter registration vetting process is so secretive -- and states are not required to remove or reject voters due to non matches with these databases, Wang said it was hard to know what lays in store for voters on Election Day.
"HAVA had all the best intentions," said Wang, who, when pressed, said she was tempted to characterize the current situation as "anarchy" because of an absence of clear rules and procedures.
"You do have to ask, where is the Justice Department," Wright said.
The Name Matching Problem
The biggest problem with using Social Security or motor vehicle data to update voter rolls is government agencies often have different data for the same individual.
"It is a problem we are very worried about because this database matching so often produces false non-matches," said Wright. "It could be something as simple as you have a hyphenated name, or an apostrophe is missing for O'Leary. There are so many ways to be a non-match when there is no real world discrepancy."
Kimball Brace, whose firm parses election data, cited himself as an example. "I figured I could be eight different people if I wanted to," he said, saying he could appear as Kim, Kimball and so on.
These distinctions are hardly academic, but instead, are at the heart of current litigation that will affect who gets to vote and which votes will count in November. In Ohio, the Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, and state Republican Party, had a federal court hearing on this very issue on Thursday.
"Ohio Republicans sued the secretary of state to use database matching," Wright said. "Brunner pointed out that she is being accused of violating the law for not taking names off the rolls and the Social Security Administration just sent out a notice that Ohio is overusing Social Security Association matching to take people off."
The best practice, said the Campaign Legal Center's Hebert, who used to be Voting Section Chief at the Justice Department, would be to add people’s names to voter rolls and then subsequently seek to contact them to clear up discrepancies, which is what the NVRA prescribes.
The reason the name matching issue is so politically explosive is the number of potentially affected voters could be many times the size of the president's margin of victory against Democrat John Kerry in 2004. According to the Social Security Administration, the number of "non-matches" for voter registrations, from January through September 2008, was: 265,691 in Georgia; 39,489 in Missouri; 716,252 in Nevada; 74,797 in North Carolina; 289,603 in Ohio; 72,137 in Pennsylvania; and 57,887 in Florida.
In the meantime, as election officials across the country continue to process voter registrations with an eye to election day, the Social Security Administration this weekend is proceeding with a planned three-day shutdown of its computer systems for maintenance purposes -- despite requests by the Senate Rules and Administration Committee to postpone that maintenance until after Election Day.
by GARRISON KEILLOR - SYNDICATED COLUMNIST - Seattle Post Intelligencer
We are a stalwart and stouthearted people, and never more so than in hard times. People weep in the dark and arise in the morning and go to work. The waves crash on your nest egg and a chunk is swept away and you put your salami sandwich in the brown bag and get on the bus. In Philly, a woman earns $10.30/hour to care for a man brought down by cystic fibrosis. She bathes and dresses him in the morning, brings him meals, puts him to bed at night. It's hard work lifting him and she has suffered a painful hernia that, because she can't afford health insurance, she can't get fixed, but she still goes to work because he'd be helpless without her. There are a lot of people like her. I know because I'm related to some of them.
Low dishonesty and craven cynicism sometimes win the day but not inevitably. The attempt to link Barack Obama to an old radical in his neighborhood has desperation and deceit written all over it. Meanwhile, stunning acts of heroism stand out, such as the fidelity of military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at Guantanamo Bay -- uniformed officers faithful to their lawyerly duty to offer a vigorous defense even though it means exposing the injustice of military justice that is rigged for conviction and the mendacity of a commander in chief who commits war crimes. If your law school is looking for a name for its new library, instead of selling the honor to a fat cat alumnus, you should consider the names of Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Lt. Col. Mark Bridges, Col. Steven David, Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel and Maj. Michael Mori.
It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone's mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged. When she said, "One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let's commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars," people smelled gas.
Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne'er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself -- one stink bomb after another, and now Governor Palin.
She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain's first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for forty grand a pop, and she'll become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?" And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.
Your broker kept saying, "Stay with the portfolio, don't jump ship," and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money market where at least you're not going to lose your shirt, but you didn't do it and didn't do it, and now you're holding a big bag of brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe desperate people who are talking trash. Anybody who got whacked last week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead us out of the swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English language. They'll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.
Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty" (Viking).
by Anthony Faiola - The Washington Post
The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.
Pedestrians are reflected in an electric stock market board in Tokyo. Punctuating its worst week in history, Japan's main stock index plummeted nearly 10 percent. European indexes followed suit. (Photo: AP)Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.
The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system.
Yet the administration may feel it has no choice. Credit, the lifeblood of capitalism, ceased to flow. An economy based on the free market cannot function that way.
The government's about-face goes beyond the banking industry. It is reasserting itself in the lives of citizens in ways that were unthinkable in the era of market-knows-best thinking. With the recent takeovers of major lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the bailout of AIG, the U.S. government is now effectively responsible for providing home mortgages and life insurance to tens of millions of Americans. Many economists are asking whether it remains a free market if the government is so deeply enmeshed in the financial system.
Given that the United States has held itself up as a global economic model, the change could shift the balance of how governments around the globe conduct free enterprise. Over the past three decades, the United States led the crusade to persuade much of the world, especially developing countries, to lift the heavy hand of government from finance and industry.
But the hands-off brand of capitalism in the United States is now being blamed for the easy credit that sickened the housing market and allowed a freewheeling Wall Street to create a pool of toxic investments that has infected the global financial system. Heavy intervention by the government, critics say, is further robbing Washington of the moral authority to spread the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism.
The government could launch a targeted program in which it takes a minority stake in troubled banks, or a broader program aimed at the larger banking system. In either case, however, the move could be seen as evidence that Washington remains a slave to Wall Street. The plan, for instance, may not compel participating firms to give their chief executives the salary haircuts that some in Congress intended. But if the plan didn't work, the government might have to take bigger stakes.
"People around the world once admired us for our economy, and we told them if you wanted to be like us, here's what you have to do -- hand over power to the market," said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. "The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis. And of course it raises questions about our credibility. Everyone feels they are suffering now because of us."
In Seoul, many see American excess as a warning. At the same time, anger is mounting over the global spillover effect of the U.S. crisis. The Korean currency, the won, has fallen sharply in recent days as corporations there struggle to find dollars in the heat of a global credit crunch.
"Derivatives and hedge funds are like casino gambling," said South Korean Finance Minister Kang Man-soo. "A lot of Koreans are asking, how can the United States be so weak?"
Other than a few fringe heads of state and quixotic headlines, no one is talking about the death of capitalism. The embrace of free-market theories, particularly in Asia, has helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty in recent decades. But resentment is growing over America's brand of capitalism, which in contrast to, say, Germany's, spurns regulations and venerates risk.
In South Korea, rising criticism that the government is sticking too close to the U.S. model has roused opposition to privatizing the massive, state-owned Korea Development Bank. South Korea is among those countries that have benefited the most from adopting free-market principles, emerging from the ashes of the Korean War to become one of the world's biggest economies. It has distinguished itself from North Korea, an impoverished country hobbled by an outdated communist system and authoritarian leadership.
But the repercussions of crisis that began in the United States are global. In Britain, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher joined with President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to herald capitalism's promise, the government this week moved to partly nationalize the ailing banking system. Across the English Channel, European leaders who are no strangers to regulation are piling on Washington for gradually pulling the government watchdogs off the world's largest financial sector. Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, they are calling for broad new international codes to impose scrutiny on global finance.
To some degree, those calls are even being echoed by the International Monetary Fund, an institution charged with the promotion of free markets overseas and that preached that less government was good government during the economic crises in Asia and Latin America in the 1990s. Now, it is talking about the need for regulation and oversight.
"Obviously the crisis comes from an important regulatory and supervisory failure in advanced countries . . . and a failure in market discipline mechanisms," Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said yesterday before the fund's annual meeting in Washington.
In a slideshow presentation, Strauss-Kahn illustrated the global impact of the financial crisis. Countries in Africa, including many of those with some of the lowest levels of market and financial integration and openness, are now set to weather the crisis with the least amount of turbulence.
Shortly afterward, World Bank President Robert Zoellick was questioned by reporters about the "confusion" in the developing world over whether to continue embracing the free-market model. He replied, "I think people have been confused not only in developing countries, but in developed countries, by these shocking events."
In much of the developing world, financial systems still remain far more governed by the state, despite pressure from the United States for those countries to shift power to the private sector and create freer financial markets. They may stay that way for some time.
China had been resisting calls from Washington and Wall Street to introduce a broad range of exotic investments, including many of the once-red-hot derivatives now being blamed for magnifying the crisis in the West. In recent weeks, Beijing has made that position more clear, saying it would not permit an expansion of complex financial instruments.
With the U.S. government's current push toward intervention and the soul-searching over the role of deregulation in the crisis, the stage appears to be at least temporarily set for a more restrained model of free enterprise, particularly in financial markets.
"If you look around the world, China is doing pretty good right now, and the U.S. isn't," said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "You may see a push back from globalization in the financial markets."
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3 comments:
Hahahah like this is a big deal or something compared to the crimes of Obama? Wow, get a life. If this is all you can dig up after sending 50 lawyers to Alaska to sift through her garbage....
The report says it's 'jaundiced' because it was done by an Obama supporter.
Also the trooper himself did not initiate this, and admits he was out of control, and he also SUPPORTS SARAH.
We are all laughing at this.
How about your racist boy Obama and his ties to Nazi sympathizer and communist George Soros? I hope your stocks are not falling because the market is going to crash further now that peoplel are scared this horrid Obama might win.
BFD I think the real question should be did Palin have the right to fire this Clown....AND What a wonderful world it will be under Obama...Right
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