2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign Discussion Thread-Part 10.

[U2Fanatic4ever]

this is true.^

I work with some well educated people here in maryland who are born and raised here. They too have so many deep down prejudices, and beliefs bashed into their heads by their church friends, family and others that they truly believe them. I like these people as human beings and we go to lunch every day but their thinking well I don't even try to start any kind of major political discussion cuz its pointless. They know i am a democrat and they keep their spewage to a minimum because I am around.

[yolland]

.

The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9


GOP Renews Complaints Over Voter Registrations

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- As most states finalize voter rolls this week, Republican officials are reviving alarms about vote fraud. One of the biggest instances of suspicious registrations is here in New Mexico, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a preliminary investigation into 1400 potentially fraudulent voter registrations in the state's most populous county.

It's far from clear that the number of suspicious registrations is enough to affect the outcome of the presidential vote, even in tight states, elections officials say. They say enforcement efforts are likely to spot any big collections of fake registrations before votes are cast. What's more, a fake registration doesn't necessarily mean an ineligible vote is tallied. Officials say canvassers sometimes make up registered names to impress bosses or earn bonuses, but that doesn't result in anyone ineligible casting a vote.
.......................................
In Nevada on Tuesday, state election officials raided the offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as Acorn, after receiving information about falsified registration cards. "We have complaints every election that fraudulent registration forms are being turned in, and no one does anything about it. People have lost faith in the electoral process," said Democrat Ross Miller, Nevada's secretary of state.
.......................................
Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the clerk of Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, has turned over to law enforcement the 1400 voter-registration cards that raised suspicions of fraud. Ms. Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat overseeing her first presidential vote, says her office's review of cards works. "That's 1400 cards here sitting in a file; they're not entered into the system," she said. A mile from Ms. Oliver's office, Acorn operates a major New Mexico registration effort. Young workers there worked late one night this week preparing to submit registration forms. Acorn and other groups have registered nearly 80,000 new voters in a drive focused on the state's Democratic-leaning urban areas.

Acorn is a frequent target of Republican voter-fraud allegations, and it had workers in two states last year convicted of submitting fake registrations. Acorn says it works hard to root out bad apples. A sign at the organization's office here reads: "Anyone committing fraud will be reported to the Bureau of Elections, prosecuted and terminated immediately." Acorn's quality-control manager at the office, Bianca Brown, says employees check each application and have a call center attempt to confirm the information with applicants. She says such reviews caught a person who registered as Batman and another who has tried to register 70 times. Acorn says it has fired about 80 workers in New Mexico since December 2007 over potentially fraudulent registrations. New Mexico law requires Acorn to turn in all applications, no matter how suspicious-looking, within 48 hours. Elections officials do their own quality control on registrations, but Acorn officials say their own process helps the government save time.

The New York Times, Oct. 10


On Obama, Acorn and Voter Registration

Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign on Friday stepped up its efforts to tie Senator Barack Obama to a community organizing group that has been accused of involvement in problematic voter registrations in several hotly contested states, including Colorado, Indiana, Nevada and North Carolina. The group, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, has long been a favorite target of conservatives. It made news this year when it was revealed that a brother of Acorn’s founder had embezzled almost $1 million from the organization but that Acorn had failed to disclose the theft for eight years.

“Barack Obama has made very inconsistent remarks about what his relationship with this organization is,” Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said in a conference call. Mr. Davis said Mr. Obama had worked as Acorn’s lawyer and conducted training events for its leaders. He also noted a payment the Obama campaign made in February to an Acorn affiliate, Citizens Services Inc.
......................................................
“Rumors of Acorn’s voter fraud have been greatly exaggerated and to a large extent manufactured,” Bertha Lewis, the organization’s interim chief organizer, or chief executive, said Monday in a conference call to announce that the organization had registered 1.3 million people to vote. Ms. Lewis said it was Acorn itself that informed state officials about some questionable registrations collected by its employees that are now under investigation. Acorn said it had terminated the workers involved.

In 1995, Mr. Obama was on a team of lawyers that represented Acorn in a lawsuit to compel Illinois to comply with federal laws intended to enhance access to the polls. The team also represented Equip for Equality, a group that promotes the rights of the disabled, and four individuals. Mr. Davis said that as their lawyer, Mr. Obama had “an intimate relationship” with Acorn “against the State of Illinois and the federal government.” In fact, the Justice Department was on the same side as Acorn in the lawsuit, as were other organizations, including the League of Women Voters. Those plaintiffs won the case.

Mr. Davis urged reporters to question Mr. Obama about training sessions he had done for Acorn. “What were you teaching them?” Mr. Davis asked. “Were you teaching them how to evade the law?”

Lewis Goldberg, a spokesman for Acorn, said Mr. Obama conducted two leadership training sessions of roughly an hour each for Acorn’s Chicago affiliate over a three-year period in the late 1990s. He was not paid for that work, Mr. Goldberg said.

Even before Friday’s conference call, Republicans had made much of an $832,598 payment made in February by the Obama campaign to Citizens Services Inc., a consulting firm affiliated with Acorn. “This organization is not just related to but deeply ingrained in the Acorn organization, a front group for Acorn,” Mr. Davis said. The Obama campaign initially reported that the payment was for “staging, sound, lighting” and other advance work when it reported its expenditures with the Federal Election Commission. It filed amended reports in August and September to reflect that those payments were for get-out-the-vote efforts. Mr. Davis contended that the original filing was an effort to “hide the fact” that money was paid to Acorn. But F.E.C. officials have said such amended filings are common.

Citizens Services typically contracts with Acorn and its affiliates for work like that done for the Obama campaign. Mr. Goldberg, the Acorn spokesman, said that less than $80,000 of the Obama campaign’s payment to Citizens Services went to Acorn. Jeff Robinson, executive vice president of Citizens Services, did not return a call inquiring how the rest of the money was spent.

[Popmartijn]

I've never understood this whole registering process. Why isn't everyone (who's eligible to vote) automatically registered? On some governmental level they have to know who's living where. If the IRS can find you, why not the voting institute?

[cydewaze]

Originally Posted by Popmartijn

I've never understood this whole registering process. Why isn't everyone (who's eligible to vote) automatically registered? On some governmental level they have to know who's living where. If the IRS can find you, why not the voting institute?

The republicans generally try to limit the number of registered voters, since of course when the turnout is higher they don't do as well. It could also be argued that the democrats try to get everyone (and their dog, and their dead aunts and uncles) registered. We've had things like "motor voter" which automatically registers you to vote when you get your drivers license (which republicans also fought against) and there's even been some proposals to make voting day a national holiday, which hasn't made it very far either. The republicans have even been making a concerted effort to deny people voting rights who are legally entitled to do so.

The "official" line, of course, is that they want to make sure everyone who is registered is actually a live person who is eligible to vote, so that voting fraud is limited.

[Utoo]

- Automatic registration when you apply for a driver's license
- Voluntary registration for all eligible voters without driver's licenses
- Saturday & Sunday voting, or national holiday for Election Day


All things that really seem like they should be no-brainers in a democratic nation.

[indra]

Originally Posted by Utoo

or national holiday for Election Day

I used to work at GE and election day was one of our paid holidays. That was so cool.

[Earnie Shavers]

I'm surprised it's a weekday. Ours are always Saturdays.

[Diemen]

Mr. Davis urged reporters to question Mr. Obama about training sessions he had done for Acorn. “What were you teaching them?” Mr. Davis asked. “Were you teaching them how to evade the law?”

[Babydoll]

Obama doesn't have a drop of Arab blood in him. It's so stupid. I was infuriated when I saw that clip yesterday.

Does it imply that any Muslim can't be trusted? Does this mean anyone who is Muslim is automatically an Arab?

[sue4u2]

Originally Posted by Popmartijn

On some governmental level they have to know who's living where. If the IRS can find you, why not the voting institute?

The IRS can't necessarily find you. If it was that easy there would be no problem with tax evaders or illegal aliens. Neither can the census bureau when they come around to homes or families who don't disclose the number of people living in one's home or apartment or their real names. The business of getting around government probing is a thriving business in itself.

[Bono's shades]

Originally Posted by Babydoll

Obama doesn't have a drop of Arab blood in him. It's so stupid. I was infuriated when I saw that clip yesterday.

Does it imply that any Muslim can't be trusted? Does this mean anyone who is Muslim is automatically an Arab?

I might have actually respected McCain if he had said something like, "Obama's not an Arab or a Muslim, but even if he were that would be no reason to be afraid of him or not to trust him."

The level of mainstream bigotry towards Muslims in this country is really shocking. I've got relatives who, sadly enough, think just like those people at the McCain/Palin rallies and town meetings.

[Babydoll]

Yep. Instead he comes up with a reply of "No, he's a decent man." WTF?

Are Arabs or Muslims incapable of being decent then?

[financeguy]

McCain tussles with Palin over whipping up a mob mentality - Times Online

WITH his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign.

McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies.

Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat” rather than conduct a campaign that would be out of character – and likely to lose him the election.

Palin, 44, has led the character attacks on Obama in the belief that McCain may be throwing away the election and her chance of becoming vice-president. Her supporters think that if the Republican ticket loses on November 4, she should run for president in 2012.

[jesseu2]

YouTube - Sarah Silverman and The Great Schlep

[indra]

Originally Posted by Earnie Shavers

I'm surprised it's a weekday. Ours are always Saturdays.

I think here that could well result in even lower turnout. I mean, really, who wants to take the time out of a Saturday to vote when you can go do interesting and important stuff. You know, like see movies or baseball or football games or shop or other such stuff.

Plus I've always thought any excuse for a public holiday is a good thing.

[Utoo]

I've been passing this around to all who think the Ayers thing actually merits discussion:

YouTube - [HQ3] Countdown: Keith Olbermann - Guilt by Association - 10/08/08

[Moser]

Originally Posted by Utoo

I've been passing this around to all who think the Ayers thing actually merits discussion:

Ow.

[sue4u2]

And then there's this:

The Return of Rove

John McCain has surrendered his campaign to the same political fearmonger who smeared him out of the race in 2000

MATT TAIBBI Posted Oct 16, 2008 7:15 AM

The Return of Rove : Rolling Stone

The first whiff of this kind of tactic in the current race came at the end of June, when the McCain campaign launched its new slogan "Country First," making McCain the first presidential candidate in history to make "My Opponent Is a Traitor" his rallying cry. Then there was the unveiling of a new ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Following that came a coordinated campaign to ridicule Obama for the somewhat bombastic décor of the stage for his convention speech, with the campaign issuing leaflets mocking the vertical columns as a "Temple of Obama."

Somehow this doesn't surprise me, at all.

[JOFO]

Except this time it's not gonna work; Obama is up by 10 points as of today.

The more hate and fear they try, the more Obama's place is solid.

Solid.

[yolland]

The Class War Before Palin

By DAVID BROOKS
New Yok Times, October 9


Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences. Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect. Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition—small-town values with coastal reach. In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads. Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect. Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party—the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, Rebel-in-Chief, Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions—Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone. The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all—men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission—because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission—by telling members of that class to go away.