James Salter's Blog

Poll Position

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:20:59 EDT

It's looking good according to the newest polls from the battlegrounds! But like the song says "...you can't trust freedom when it's not in your hands when everybody's fighting for their promised land." With this in mind, we can never underestimate the power of the republican disenfrancizing machine. VIGILANCE!!!

From Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Carrie Dann
*** Swing states swinging to Obama: Most of the national polls -- including our NBC/WSJ survey -- are now showing Obama with a double-digit national lead. And here come a slew of brand-new state polls that also suggest Obama is in command of this presidential contest. The University of Wisconsin’s Big Ten Battleground polls have Obama up 10 points in Indiana (51%-41%), 13 points in Iowa (52%-39%), 22 in Michigan (58%-36%), 19 in Minnesota (57%-38%), 12 in Ohio (53%-41%), 11 in Pennsylvania (52%-41%), 13 in Wisconsin (53%-40%), and nearly 30 in Obama’s home state of Illinois (61%-32%). Meanwhile, there are new Quinnipiac surveys that show Obama up five points in Florida (49%-44%), 14 in Ohio (52%-38%), and 13 in Pennsylvania (53%-40%). And finally, new CNN/Time surveys find Obama ahead by five points among likely voters in Nevada (51%-46%), four points in North Carolina (51%-47%), four in Ohio (50%-46%), and 10 points in Virginia (54%-44%). The lone state survey that shows McCain ahead: CNN/Time’s West Virginia poll, where McCain’s nine (53%-44%).

Block the Vote

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:12:28 EDT

From Rolling Stone:Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST

Posted Oct 30, 2008 11:10 AM
• Video: Behind the Story With Kennedy Jr. and Palast

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.

But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico."

There's a reason Iglesias couldn't find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration's main point person on "ballot protection" has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. "The claim of widespread voter fraud," Minnite says, "is itself a fraud."

Allegations of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who traditionally support Democrats. "The Republicans have a long history of erecting barriers to discourage Americans from voting," says Donna Brazile, chair of the Voting Rights Institute for the Democratic National Committee. "Now they're trying to spook Americans with the ghost of voter fraud. It's very effective — but it's ironic that the only way they maintain power is by using fear to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote." The recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters include:

1. Obstructing Voter-Registration Drives

Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms. Facing potentially huge penalties for trivial administrative errors, the League of Women Voters abandoned its voter-registration drives in Florida. A court order eventually forced the legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to $1,000. But even so, said former League president Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines "create an unfair tax on democracy." The state has also failed to uphold a federal law requiring that low-income voters be offered an opportunity to register when they apply for food stamps or other public assistance. As a result, the annual number of such registrations has plummeted from more than 120,000 in the Clinton years to barely 10,000 today.

2. Demanding "Perfect Matches"

Under the Help America Vote Act, some states now reject first-time registrants whose data does not correspond to information in other government databases. Spurred by HAVA, almost every state must now attempt to make some kind of match — and four states, including the swing states of Iowa and Florida, require what is known as a "perfect match." Under this rigid framework, new registrants can lose the right to vote if the information on their voter-registration forms — Social Security number, street address and precisely spelled name, right down to a hyphen — fails to exactly match data listed in other government records.

There are many legitimate reasons, of course, why a voter's information might vary. Indeed, a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that as many as 20 percent of discrepancies between voter records and driver's licenses in New York City are simply typing mistakes made by government clerks when they transcribe data. But under the new rules, those mistakes are costing citizens the right to vote. In California, a Republican secretary of state blocked 43 percent of all new voters in Los Angeles from registering in early 2006 — many because of the state's failure to produce a tight match. In Florida, GOP officials created "match" rules that rejected more than 15,000 new registrants in 2006 and 2007 — nearly three-fourths of them Hispanic and black voters. Given the big registration drives this year, the number could be five times higher by November.

3. Purging Legitimate Voters From the Rolls

The Help America Vote Act doesn't just disenfranchise new registrants; it also targets veteran voters. In the past, bipartisan county election boards maintained voter records. But HAVA requires that records be centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state — partisan officials — who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible. Ironically, the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida — the same corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place. Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000 voters, most of them African-Americans, because their names resembled those of persons convicted of a crime. The state eventually acknowledged that the purges were improper — two years after the election.

Rather than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them. Maez, the elections supervisor in New Mexico, says he was the victim of faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state. Hector Balderas, the state auditor, was also purged from the voter list. The nation's youngest elected Hispanic official, Balderas hails from Mora County, one of the poorest in the state, which had the highest rate of voters forced to cast provisional ballots. "As a strategic consideration," he notes, "there are those that benefit from chaos" at the ballot box.

All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to the states on "list maintenance" methods.

4. Requiring Unnecessary Voter ID's

Even if voters run the gauntlet of the new registration laws, they can still be blocked at the polling station. In an incident last May, an election official in Indiana denied ballots to 10 nuns seeking to vote in the Democratic primary because their driver's licenses or passports had expired. Even though Indiana has never recorded a single case of voter-ID fraud, it is one of two dozen states that have enacted stringent new voter-ID statutes.

On its face, the requirement to show a government-issued ID doesn't seem unreasonable. "I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I've got to show a little bit of ID," Karl Rove told the Republican National Lawyers Association in 2006. But many Americans lack easy access to official identification. According to a recent study for the Election Law Journal, young people, senior citizens and minorities — groups that traditionally vote Democratic — often have no driver's licenses or state ID cards. According to the study, one in 10 likely white voters do not possess the necessary identification. For African-Americans, the number lacking such ID is twice as high.

5. Rejecting "Spoiled" Ballots

Even intrepid voters who manage to cast a ballot may still find their vote discounted. In 2004, election officials discarded at least 1 million votes nationwide after classifying them as "spoiled" because blank spaces, stray marks or tears made them indecipherable to voting machines. The losses hit hardest among minorities in low-income precincts, who are often forced to vote on antiquated machines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its investigation of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected, a ratio that holds nationwide.

Proponents of HAVA claimed the law would correct the spoilage problem by promoting computerized balloting. Yet touch-screen systems have proved highly unreliable — especially in minority and low-income precincts. A statistical analysis of New Mexico ballots by a voting-rights group called VotersUnite found that Hispanics who voted by computer in 2004 were nearly five times more likely to have their votes unrecorded than those who used paper ballots. In a close election, such small discrepancies can make a big difference: In 2004, the number of spoiled ballots in New Mexico — 19,000 — was three times George Bush's margin of victory.

6. Challenging "Provisional" Ballots

In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional" ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

Many voters are given provisional ballots under an insidious tactic known as "vote caging," which uses targeted mailings to disenfranchise black voters whose addresses have changed. In 2004, despite a federal consent order forbidding Republicans from engaging in the practice, the GOP sent out tens of thousands of letters to "confirm" the addresses of voters in minority precincts. If a letter was returned for any reason — because the voter was away at school or serving in the military — the GOP challenged the voter for giving a false address. One caging operation was exposed when an RNC official mistakenly sent the list to a parody site called GeorgeWBush.org — instead of to the official campaign site GeorgeWBush.com.

In the century following the Civil War, millions of black Americans in the Deep South lost their constitutional right to vote, thanks to literacy tests, poll taxes and other Jim Crow restrictions imposed by white officials. Add up all the modern-day barriers to voting erected since the 2004 election — the new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.

"Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.

Contributing editor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the nation's leading voting-rights advocates. His article "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002] sparked widespread scrutiny of vote tampering. Greg Palast, who broke the story on Florida's illegal voter purges in the 2000 election, is the author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." For more information, visit No Voter Left Behind and Steal Back Your Vote.

McCain Morphology

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:59:27 EDT

What Monster Did McCain Become Last Night?

A horrified America watched John McCain stagger up from his debate chair last night and turn into a monster. He almost caught our Barack Obama! What was happening? Clearly, the special anti-monster juice McCain drinks before public appearances was starting to wear off. They got him in the titanium-lined SWAT van just before he fully transformed. But fully transformed into what?

HORRIBLE MEDIEVAL WEREWOLF: This would actually explain a lot, including, probably, why McCain is always talking about medieval Ireland, when he was a boy, before he was bitten by a werewolf, which put a terrible end to his happy carefree days of being a Celtic warrior who always crashed his horse into the enemy’s village.

HORRIBLE CHILD-EATING DEATH CLOWN: No wonder McCain’s handlers try to get him away from those debate audiences so quick! He was just moments away from turning into this evil-ass thing, the New Hampshire Primary Murder Clown, Rich Uncle Pennywise! Imagine being stuck on Secret Service duty with this campaign. Imagine having to bury the bodies every night.

EVIL GORGON MEDUSA: Walnuts has always roamed the Earth, in his various guises, but by night, he shows his true death’s head, the GORGONEION from Hades, where he spent Five and a Half Million Years. (This is also the face he makes when he has sexytime! Your tax dollars pay for his Viagra!)

DISGUSTING CLASSIC-ROCK GIMMICK CAR: There is nothing more hideous than 700-year-old arena rocker Gene Simmons, so it stands to reason that John McCain is the demon father of the KISS monster. Legend says shitty ‘71 Volkswagen Beetles with home paint jobs and huge styrofoam monster skulls/tongues were frequently on the scene before the Crusaders lost Jerusalem to the Arabs led by Bill Ayers the Terrorist Muslin.

EVIL SILENT-MOVIE GERMAN VAMPIRE: And now, a quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me… a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demonaic fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat.”

Yes, that sounds about right.

THE BEAST: But our demonic experts here on the Wonkette staff finally concluded McCain was turning into this hell-beast of yore, as seen here in a 16th Century woodcut. These demonic shit-monsters once roamed the Eastern Seaboard, until they were captured by Benedict Arnold in 1776 and taught Naval Command skills at Annapolis. The creatures spawn a single fetus from the “egg duct” every hundred years; the fourth spawn of the cycle is always a crazy, self-obsessed idiot who has no military skillz.

John McCain is an Opportunistic Coward

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:12:23 EDT

So now the sky is falling? So now we are in Crisis? What happened to "fundamentally sound"? It is so obvious that McCain is grandstanding for reasons of political expediance, while all the while trying to frame himself as above the fray. I'm sorry to tell you this Johnny, but everyone knows that you are trying to call a time out because you are dropping in the polls like a turd swirling down the toilet. What a cowardly move; ducking out of the debate and using a national crisis for cover. And now they are talking about "delaying" the VP debate. They can hear Palin heaving a sigh of relief all the way in Russia! (cuz she lives in Alaska) I honestly dont think our country can survive another 4-8 years of this these reptilian bastards who will twist, and shape-shift, and manipulate the American people in their never ending quest for absolute power. Country First my ass

September 25, 2008McCain camp to propose postponing VP debatePosted: 10:44 AM ET
From CNN Correspondent Dana Bash

(CNN) — McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

In this scenario, the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Mississippi, currently slated to be the site of the first presidential faceoff this Friday.

Graham says the McCain camp is well aware of the position of the Obama campaign and the debate commission that the debate should go on as planned — but both he and another senior McCain adviser insist the Republican nominee will not go to the debate Friday if there's no deal on the bailout.

FactChecking…’The View’?

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:36:11 EDT

When the chat on The View turned to Palin’s record on earmarks McCain got it wrong:

Barbara Walters: She also took some earmark spending.
Joy Behar: A lot.
McCain: Well, not as governor she didn’t.

McCain’s wrong here. It’s true she scaled back the state’s federal spending requests within the last two years. But she didn’t eliminate them. She sent a letter on her gubernatorial stationery with $197 million in earmark requests, directly contradicting McCain’s statement. Palin writes:

Palin:In preparing these requests, the State has been mindful of congressional concerned about budget deficits and earmarks. Accordingly, the total number of requests has been reduced significantly from previous years. Approximately two-thirds of the requests involve programs that have been funded previously.

It’s clear Palin knew the gravy train was slowing (in large part because McCain was applying the brakes), but that didn’t stop her from sending the nearly $200 million request (nearly $30 per Alaskan, according to the 2006 Census Bureau population estimates). And we’ve already reported that Palin’s history with earmarks dates back to her time as mayor of Wasilla.

McCain would have been on more solid ground if he were informing his View-ership of his own earmark-busting record. The Arizona senator’s requests have amounted to a big, fat zero. But Palin’s still asking for pork by the barrel, even if the barrels have been downsized.

Posted under FactCheck.org, John McCain, Presidential Election 2008, Sarah Palin

FactChecking McCain

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:21:44 EDT

September 5, 2008He made some flubs in accepting the nomination.SummaryWe checked the accuracy of McCain’s speech accepting the Republican nomination and noted the following:

McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs" and would put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor." In fact, the plan exempts small businesses, and those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have.
McCain attacked Obama for voting for "corporate welfare" for oil companies. In fact, the bill Obama voted for raised taxes on oil companies by $300 million over 11 years while providing $5.8 billion in subsidies for renewable energy, energy efficiency and alternative fuels.
McCain said oil imports send "$700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much." But the U.S. is on track to import a total of only $536 billion worth of oil at current prices, and close to a third of that comes from Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
He promised to increase use of "wind, tide [and] solar" energy, though his actual energy plan contains no new money for renewable energy. He has said elsewhere that renewable sources won’t produce as much as people think.
He called for "reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs," but as in the past failed to cite a single program that he would eliminate or reduce.
He said Obama would "close" markets to trade. In fact, Obama, though he once said he wanted to "renegotiate" the North American Free Trade Agreement, now says he simply wants to try to strengthen environmental and labor provisions in it.

AnalysisSen. John McCain's acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul on Sept. 4 was couched more in generalities than in specifics, offering fewer factual claims to check than we found in other speeches to the gathering. But we found some instances where the nominee strained the truth.

Insurance Claims

McCain mischaracterized Obama’s health care plan:

McCain: His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.

The claim that “small businesses” would have to “cut jobs, reduce wages,” runs counter to Obama’s actual proposal. Obama’s plan would require businesses to contribute to the cost of insurance for employees or pay some unspecified amount into a new public plan. But his proposal specifically says, “Small businesses will be exempt from this requirement.” And it offers additional help to small businesses that want to provide health care in the form of a refundable tax credit of up to half the cost of premiums. We’ll note that neither man has defined what exactly a “small business” is.

Furthermore, Obama’s plan wouldn’t “force” families into a “government-run health care system.” His plan mandates that children have coverage; there’s no mandate for adults. People can keep the health insurance they have now or chose from private plans, or opt for a new public plan that will offer coverage similar to what members of Congress have. Obama would also expand Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. His plan certainly expands government-offered insurance – and McCain’s doesn’t – but it’s not a solely government-run plan, as McCain implied. And if Obama's public plan turns out to be similar to what federal employees have, as he says it would be, we're not sure how "a bureaucrat" would stand "between you and your doctor." The possible exception would be persons covered by Medicaid or SCHIP.

McCain also made this boast:

McCain: My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance.

Fair enough. But McCain's plan wouldn't do nearly as well as Obama's. One comparison, by the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, finds Obama’s would reduce the uninsured by 18 million people in its first year, compared with a 1 million reduction under McCain’s plan. TPC made various assumptions about the plans to fill in details each proposal lacks, so those numbers aren’t definitive. We await more comparisons from other experts.

Oily Words

McCain attacked Obama for supporting "corporate welfare" for oil companies:

McCain: [I]nstead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Senator Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies.

The bill McCain is talking about here is the 2005 energy bill, which actually raised taxes on the oil industry a little bit overall – by about $300 million, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Meanwhile, McCain himself proposes to cut the corporate rate for all companies – oil included – and that would result in an estimated $4 billion cut for the five largest U.S.-based oil companies, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Obama, on the other hand, is promising that he'll strip oil companies of "tax breaks" to the tune of an amount yet to be determined.

It's true that Obama voted for the 2005 bill. He said he favored the $5.8 billion (over 11 years) that it contained in tax incentives for renewable energy, energy efficiency and alternative fuels. McCain voted against it on the grounds that the $2.6 billion it contained for oil and gas incentives was too much, even though the bill also took away $2.9 billion from the industry, for a net tax increase of $300 million. Describing such a complex measure as "corporate welfare" is misleading.

More Oily Words

We found other exaggerations in McCain’s claims about his plan for energy independence:

McCain: We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much.

In fact, the U.S. doesn't pay nearly that much for oil from hostile nations. According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. imported 4.9 billion barrels of oil in 2007. At today’s prices, that works out to about $536 billion, still a hefty chunk of change, but considerably less than $700 billion. More important, that's what we pay to all exporting nations, not just those that “don’t like us very much.” We note that 32 percent of U.S. oil imports came from Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

Just Wind

McCain also made sweeping claims about green energy that aren't actually backed up by his policy proposals:

McCain: We will attack the problem on every front. ...We will increase the use of wind, tide, solar and natural gas. We will encourage the development and use of flex fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles.

McCain has been quite specific about his proposals to clear the way for building 45 new nuclear power plants, opening offshore areas to oil drilling and spending $2 billion a year for so-called "clean coal" technology. He has also proposed a $300 million prize for developing the first practical plug-in electric car, although General Motors already is working on that and is aiming for delivery of the Chevrolet Volt by 2010, prize or no prize. McCain has also proposed a $5,000 tax credit for consumers who purchase zero emission vehicles

But when it comes to power from wind and tide, McCain's words are blowing in the breeze. His energy plan, which he calls the Lexington Project, proposes no new spending for renewable energy programs. Instead, he proposes to "rationalize the current patchwork of temporary tax credits," but hasn't said what he means by that. As we’ve written before, spokespeople for the wind and solar industries are unsure what this actually means. Finally, we’ll note that McCain himself told supporters at a July town hall meeting that he doesn’t think that renewable energy is likely to be "as much of the solution as some people think." Perhaps not, but if McCain is right his own words are contributing to the public misperception.

Pig in a Poke

McCain repeated his vague promise to make spending cuts:

McCain: Reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs will let you keep more of your own money to save, spend and invest as you see fit.

McCain has not said which programs he considers to be "failed programs." He thus makes the spending cuts sound less painful than they will be should he fulfill his previously stated promise to balance the federal budget by 2013 while also making all Bush tax cuts permanent and adding new cuts of his own. McCain repeated his promise to eliminate "earmarks" from federal spending bills, saying "the first big-spending pork-barrel earmark bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it." That drew applause, but the fact is that earmarks amount to only $16.9 billion in the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Meanwhile, the deficit is expected to be more than $200 billion in 2009. And McCain's tax cuts will add billions more to future deficits unless offset by spending cuts, which he so far has not been willing to identify. What would he cut?

A McCain adviser, former CBO chairman Douglas Holtz-Eakin, has said that McCain "will provide the leadership to achieve bipartisan spending restraint" and "will perform a comprehensive review of all programs, projects and activities of the federal government" to find programs to cut or eliminate. But that, of course, will come after people have cast their votes.

Trade Talk

McCain said, “I will open new markets to our goods and services. My opponent will close them."

McCain may be alluding to Obama’s threat earlier this year to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if Mexico and Canada won't open the deal to renegotiation. Obama said at a Democratic primary debate in Cleveland in February:

Obama, Feb. 26: I will make sure that we renegotiate. … I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced.

But that's far from a threat to "close" markets to U.S. exports.

An expert from a pro-trade group agrees. “It's a stretch to take the heated comment from the Cleveland debate to pull out of NAFTA if it wasn't revised as indicative of a protectionist policy,” Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told FactCheck.org. “In any event, the position on NAFTA has since been clarified."

In fact, Obama has said he thinks it's unwise to repeal the trade deal, because to do so "would actually result in more job loss ... than job gains." And in a June interview with Fortune magazine, he stated that he didn’t plan on pulling out of NAFTA. "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he said.

It's true that McCain has been a stronger advocate of free trade agreements than Obama, who supported the trade deal with Oman in 2006 and one with Peru in 2007 but opposed the one with Central America and another with Colombia. But saying he would "close" markets is nonsense.

Planet Plans

Finally, we note that McCain and the Republican delegates applied a different standard to the Republican nominee's lofty rhetoric than they did to Obama's.

McCain drew applause with this line:

McCain: We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and restore the health of our planet.

The previous evening, however, McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, ridiculed Obama for using similar high-sounding words:

Palin, Sept. 3: What does he actually seek to accomplish after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?

That crack drew jeers and laughter. Perhaps Republicans see a distinction between "healing the planet" and "restor[ing] the health of our planet," but it escapes us.

–by Brooks Jackson, with Viveca Novak, Lori Robertson, Joe Miller and Emi Kolawole

McCain Off Base on Sex Ed

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:10:59 EDT

September 10, 2008A McCain campaign ad claims Obama's "one accomplishment" was a bill to teach sex ed to kindergarten kids. Don't believe it.SummaryA McCain-Palin campaign ad claims Obama's "one accomplishment" in the area of education was "legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergarteners." But the claim is simply false, and it dates back to Alan Keyes' failed race against Obama for an open Senate seat in 2004.

Obama, contrary to the ad's insinuation, does not support explicit sex education for kindergarteners. And the bill, which would have allowed only "age appropriate" material and a no-questions-asked opt-out policy for parents, was not his accomplishment to claim in any case, since he was not even a cosponsor – and the bill never left the state Senate.

In addition, the ad quotes unflattering assessments of the Illinois senator's record on education but leaves out sometimes equally harsh criticism directed at McCain in the same forums.
AnalysisThe ad is called "Education" and has received a good bit of free airtime, having been run repeatedly on cable news networks. It pairs pictures of kindergarten children with Obama looking confused.

A Factual Failure

McCain-Palin 2008 Ad: "Education"

Announcer: Education Week says Obama “hasn’t made a significant mark on education.” That he’s “elusive” on accountability. “A staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly.” Obama’s one accomplishment? Legislation to teach “comprehensive sex education” to kindergarteners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.

John McCain: I’m John McCain and I approved this message.The ad claims "Obama's one accomplishment" in the realm of education was "legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergarteners."

It's true that the phrase "comprehensive sex education" appeared in the bill, but little else in McCain's claim is accurate. The ad refers to a bill Obama supported in the Illinois state Senate to update the sex education curriculum and make it "medically accurate." It would have lowered the age at which students would begin what the bill termed "comprehensive sex education" to include kindergarten. But it mandated the instruction be "age-appropriate" for kindergarteners when addressing topics such as sexually transmitted diseases. The bill also would have granted parents the opportunity to remove their children from the class without question:

SB 99: However, no pupil shall be required to take or participate in any family life class or course on HIV ~~AIDS~~ or family life instruction if his parent or guardian submits written objection thereto, and refusal to take or participate in such course or program shall not be reason for suspension or expulsion of such pupil.

The bill also called for all sex education course materials to include information that would help students recognize, among other activities, inappropriate touching, sexual assault and rape:

SB99: Course material and instruction shall discuss and provide
for the development of positive communication skills to maintain healthy relationships and avoid unwanted sexual activity. ... Course material and instruction shall teach pupils ... how to say no to unwanted sexual advances ... and shall include information about verbal, physical, and visual sexual harassment, including without limitation nonconsensual sexual advances, nonconsensual physical sexual contact, and rape by an acquaintance. The course material and instruction shall contain methods of preventing sexual assault by an acquaintance, including exercising good judgment and avoiding behavior that impairs one's judgment.

The bill passed in the Health and Human Services Committee with Democrats, including Obama, voting along party lines in support of it. But the measure promptly stalled and died in the full Senate, and no action has been taken on it since late 2005.

Obama is often quoted as saying that when it comes to sex education in public schools, “it’s the right thing to do ... to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in schools,” placing an emphasis on the word "appropriate." But Obama has also said he does not support, "explicit sex education to children in kindergarten."

In a debate with Republican Alan Keyes, against whom Obama was running for an open seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama made it clear that at least one reason he supported the bill was that it would help teach young kids to recognize inappropriate behavior and pedophiles:

Keyes, Oct. 21, 2004: Well, I had noticed that, in your voting, you had voted, at one point, that sex education should begin in kindergarten, and you justified it by saying that it would be "age-appropriate" sex education. [It] made me wonder just exactly what you think is "age-appropriate."

Obama: We have a existing law that mandates sex education in the schools. We want to make sure that it's medically accurate and age-appropriate. Now, I'll give you an example, because I have a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean. And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age. So, that's the kind of stuff that I was talking about in that piece of legislation.

Besides the Obama-Keyes race, this allegation also surfaced during this year's party primaries when Mitt Romney claimed Obama supported sex education for five-year-olds. (Obama misleadingly fired back that Romney supported the same policy.)

His Only Accomplishment?

The ad claims the bill was Obama's "one accomplishment." This is doubly false. Obama was neither a cosponsor nor a sponsor of the sex education bill, which never got past "go" in the Senate. So it was not an "accomplishment" at all. Furthermore, Obama can properly claim a number of real accomplishments.

He was a cosponsor of what became the Chicago Education Reform Act of 2003, which allowed for an increase in the number of Chicago charter schools and required the Chicago Board of Education to enter into a formal partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union to "advance the Chicago Public Schools to the next level of education reform." He was also a cosponsor of a bipartisan bill to help Illinois high school graduates be eligible for in-state college tuition rates even if they weren't U.S. citizens.

On the federal level, Obama sponsored three amendments to The America COMPETES Act, which became law in 2007. All three amendments were passed in the Senate by unanimous consent and became law. One amendment proposed language that would create a mentoring program for women and minority groups during their studies in Department of Energy programs. He also proposed language to support summer learning programs and boost their math curricula. And he put forward a requirement that women and minorities be represented in the President's Science and Technology Summit. Whether or not one considers any of these measures earth-shaking, they're accomplishments nonetheless

Cherry-Picking Quotes

The ad also features three cherry-picked quotes from the media, highlighting negative comments about Obama's record and ignoring those directed at McCain. The announcer quotes Education Week contributing blogger David Hoff, saying, "Education Week says Obama 'hasn't made a significant mark on education.' " The quote is accurate. But the ad leaves out a quote Hoff gathered from Arizona's Casa Grande Elementary School Superintendent Frank Davidson:

Davidson (via Education Week): I don’t think [McCain] has a strong track record of putting education at the top of his priorities.

McCain had used the information about Obama before, and in response, blogger Hoff encouraged readers of the magazine's election blog to "Read the Obama story and the McCain story and you can decide who has a better track record on K-12 issues." We agree, you should.

The ad then quotes a July 7 editorial from The Washington Post, which said "that he's 'elusive' on accountability." Those words did appear in The Post's July 7 editorial. At the time, McCain had no education plan to critique, but later, in August, The Post revisited both candidates' proposals and said McCain's was "both late in coming and still a work in progress." It also said "of the two, Mr. Obama has given the issue more attention."

The last quote used in McCain's ad is attributed to the Chicago Tribune and says that Obama is "a 'staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly.' " This is actually from a piece by Steve Chapman, former associate editor of The New Republic and contributing writer to Slate and the conservative publications The Weekly Standard and The National Review. The piece isn't a Chicago Tribune editorial at all, though it's made to appear that way in the ad. And Chapman, none too pleased about how his opinion piece was featured in the ad, responded in a Sept. 10 Tribune blog entry with this:

Chapman: ... the ad itself doesn't bother explaining how the candidates differ on school vouchers, the subject of my column. Instead, it insults our intelligence by expecting us to believe that Obama thinks kindergarteners should be taught how to use condoms before they're taught to read. Right. And Joe Biden eats puppies for breakfast.

We couldn't have said it better, Mr. Chapman.

–by Emi Kolawole SourcesKrol, Eric. "Obama clarifies sex ed views at Benedictine," Chicago Daily Herald. 6 Oct. 2004.

Hoff, David. McCain vs. Obama: The Whole Story. 29 Mar. 2008. Education Week. 10 Sep. 2008.

Editorial. Focus on School Reform. 7 Jul. 2008. The Washington Post. 10 Sep. 2008.

Bill Status SB099. Illinois General Assembly.

U.S. Congressional Record. 27 Aug 2007. S5038

Energetically Wrong...Let's Check the Facts

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:06:39 EDT

September 12, 2008Palin says Alaska supplies 20 percent of U.S. energy. Not true. Not even close.SummaryPalin claims Alaska "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." That's not true.

Alaska did produce 14 percent of all the oil from U.S. wells last year, but that's a far cry from all the "energy" produced in the U.S.

Alaska's share of domestic energy production was 3.5 percent, according to the official figures kept by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

And if by "supply" Palin meant all the energy consumed in the U.S., and not just produced here, then Alaska's production accounted for only 2.4 percent.AnalysisRepublican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin sat down with ABC News' Charlie Gibson for an interview, part of which aired Sept. 11. In the exchange, the Alaska governor misstated a basic fact about her state's energy production:

Palin: Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that's with the energy independence that I've been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy, that I worked on as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, overseeing the oil and gas development in our state to produce more for the United States.

It's simply untrue that Alaska produces anything close to 20 percent of the U.S. "energy supply," a term that is generally defined as energy consumed. That category includes power produced in the U.S. by nuclear, coal, hydroelectric dams and other means – as well as all the oil imported into the country.

Palin would have been correct to say that Alaska produces just over 14 percent of all the oil produced in the U.S., leaving out imports and leaving out other forms of power. According to the federal government's Energy Information Administration, Alaskan wells produced 263.6 million barrels of oil in 2007, or 14.3 percent of the total U.S. production of 1.8 billion barrels.

But Alaskan production accounts for only 4.8 percent of all the crude oil and petroleum products supplied to the U.S. in 2007, counting both domestic production and imports from other nations. According to EIA, the total supply was just over 5.5 billion barrels in 2007.

Furthermore, Palin said "energy," not "oil," so she was actually much further off the mark. According to EIA, Alaska actually produced 2,417.1 trillion BTUs [British Thermal Units] of energy in 2005, the last year for which full state numbers are available. That's equal to just 3.5 percent of the country's domestic energy production.

And according to EIA analyst Paul Hess, that would calculate to only "2.4 percent of the 100,368.6 trillion BTUs the U.S. consumes."

Palin didn't make clear whether she was talking about Alaska's share of all the energy produced in the U.S. or all the energy consumed here. Either way, she was wrong.

McCain Gets It Wrong, Too

Sen. John McCain has also has used this inflated, incorrect figure. On Sept. 3, McCain told ABC News' Gibson:

McCain: Well, I think Americans are going to be very, very, very pleased. This is a very dynamic person. [Palin's] been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply.

McCain repeated the false figure more recently, in a September 11 interview with Portland, Maine, news station WCSH6.

Footnote: When we asked the McCain campaign where the 20 percent figure came from, we were referred to the Web site of the Resource Development Council for Alaska, Inc, a group that says it promotes development of Alaska's natural resources. It states:

Alaska Resource Development Council: Alaska's oil and gas industry has produced more than 16 billion barrels of oil and 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas, accounting for an average of 20 percent of the entire nation's domestic production.

This falls far short of supporting Palin's sweeping claim, however. It refers only to "oil and gas" production, not total energy. It refers only to production, not total consumption or supply. And the 20 percent figure is an "average" over many years, though the site does not say exactly how many. That makes it very much out of date, because Alaskan oil production has declined sharply in recent years. According to EIA figures Alaskan oil production has dropped 22 per cent in the most recent five years alone.

And in case you are wondering, Alaska produces even less of the nation's natural gas that it does of its oil. EIA figures show Alaska accounted for just 1.9 percent of total U.S. natural gas production during the six months ended in June 2008. And even that is dropping rapidly. The figure was 2.3 percent just two years earlier.

–by Justin Bank

Dispelling the Myth of Sarah "Hockey Mom" Palin

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:18:15 EDT

From NBC's Domenico Montanaro
There are several stories this morning on Palin -- in addition to the reviews of her interview performance -- ranging from her asking Rick Warren for advice, more on her role in the library books controversy, her town billing for rape kits, as well as a question of ethics.

--

Palin reached out to Pastor Rick Warren for advice. "The question I asked her was, 'How can I pray for you?' " Warren said, The Hill newspaper reported online yesterday. Palin then "asked me to send her some Bible verses on how do you deal with the unfair, unjust attacks and the mean-spirited criticism that comes in," Warren said.

BOOKS: "Shortly after taking office in 1996 as mayor of Wasilla, a city of about 7,000 people, Palin asked the city's head librarian about banning books," AP writes. "Later, the librarian was notified by Palin that she was being fired, although Palin backed off under pressure. Palin alleged attempt at book-banning has been a matter of intense interest since Republican presidential nominee John McCain named her as his running mate last month. Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said Thursday that Palin asked the head librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, on three occasions how she would react to attempts at banning books. He said the questions, in the fall of 1996, were hypothetical and entirely appropriate. He said a patron had asked the library to remove a title the year before and the mayor wanted to understand how such disputes were handled.

"Palin notified Emmons she would be fired in January 1997 because the mayor didn't feel she had the librarian's 'full support.' Emmons was reinstated the next day after public outcry, according to newspaper reports at the time." ...

"The Rev. Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in the nearby town of Palmer, said the church Palin and her family attended until 2002, the Wasilla Assembly of God, was pushing to remove his book from local bookstores. Emmons told him that year that several copies of 'Pastor I Am Gay' had disappeared from the library shelves, Bess said. 'Sarah brought pressure on the library about things she didn't like,' Bess said. 'To believe that my book was not targeted in this is a joke.'"

RAPE KITS: "When Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the city billed sexual-assault victims and their insurance companies for the cost of rape kits and forensic examinations," AP writes. "Palin had been in office for four years when the practice got the attention of state lawmakers in 2000, who passed a bill to stop it. Former Democratic Rep. Eric Croft, who sponsored that bill, said he was disappointed that asking the Wasilla Police Department to stop charging didn't work. Maria Comella, a McCain-Palin campaign spokeswoman, said Palin 'does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.' ... Alaska routinely has the nation's highest rate of sexual assault."

USA Today: "In 2000, Alaska lawmakers learned that rural police agencies had been billing rape victims or their insurance companies $500 to $1,200 for the costs of the forensic medical examinations used to gather evidence. They quickly passed a law prohibiting the practice.

According to the sponsor, Democrat Eric Croft, the law was aimed in part at Wasilla, where now-Gov. Sarah Palin was mayor. When it was signed, Wasilla's police chief expressed displeasure.

" 'In the past, we've charged the cost of exams to the victims' insurance company when possible,' then-chief Charlie Fannon told the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, the local newspaper. 'I just don't want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer.' Now that Palin is the Republican nominee for vice president, Democrats such as former Alaska governor Tony Knowles -- who signed the rape-kit bill into law and was defeated by Palin in 2006 -- are raising the issue to question Palin's commitment to women's issues and crime victims. Palin appointed Fannon after firing his predecessor shortly after she took office in 1996."

ETHICAL QUESTIONS: Bloomberg: "Palin's office approved a state job for a friend and campaign aide with whom she shared a land investment, financial records and interviews over the past two weeks show. She hired a former lobbyist for a pipeline company to help oversee a multibillion-dollar deal with that same company. She named a police chief accused of harassment to head the state police. And she sent campaign e-mails on her city hall account while serving as mayor of Wasilla -- conduct for which she later turned in an oil commissioner on ethics charges.

"These incidents raise 'some serious questions about her judgment and serious questions about her standards of ethics in public service,'' said James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies in Washington. Suggesting a real estate investment partner for a job 'may be acceptable in Alaska; it would not be acceptable in Washington, D.C., a place whose norms she wants to change.'"

The Green Goblin Strikes Again!

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:59:11 EDT

Green Screen Behind McCain Actually Lawn of, Uh, Middle School In, Uh, North Hollywood

America laughed again last night as a terrible “green screen” once again appeared behind John McCain, during his big speech at the RNC. Well, the “green” was actually the lawn of a school in North Hollywood, California. And the school is called “Walter Reed Middle School.” And the random idiot assigned the task of picking John McCain’s video background during the biggest speech of his career was apparently told to put a picture of Walter Reed Army Medical Center on the screen, and ineptly googled this utterly random California school picture, instead. And nobody knows what Walter Reed Hospital looks like, anyways, so everybody just assumed it was another one of his mansions. The school is about to release “a statement” damning McCain for inappropriately using the picture of this innocent school. All of this, as Josh Marshall notes, is exactly what happened in the movie Spinal Tap. [Talking Points Memo]

From Wonkette's Sarah K. Smith

Fundamentally Sound My Ass

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:29:02 EDT

"Look George!" said Johnny with the excitement of a young curious child making a new discovery, "all of the poor people look like ants from way up here!" George chuckled knowingly and proceeded to tell little Johnny about the time the poor little ants were in a wild frenzy after the mean ol nasty hurricane flooded their pathetic hovels. "Wow" exclaimed Johnny, smiling like an over ripe jack-o-lantern, "I cant wait to be king of the ants."

So McSame and his buddy George feel that the economy is fundamentally sound....Bullshit. An oil man and the beneficiary of his wife's beer inheritance know the economy is anything but sound. But if you were cusioned from the economic meat hooks and biting economic reality that 99% of Americans are facing, you might have the old "good enough for government work" attitude too. Besides, without extreme social and economic stratification who will these despondent crusty rich old white guys hire to do all of their yucky yard work, laundry, cooking, ass wiping, ect.

From Wonkette:

McCain Nomination Greeted By Economic Collapse

Here are the current Top Headlines at Bloomberg:

Payrolls in U.S. Fall More Than Forecast; Jobless Rate at Five-Year High
Mortgage Foreclosures in U.S. Rise at Fastest Pace in Almost Three Decades
U.S. Stocks Decline After Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Increases to 6.1%
Merrill Lynch Cut to `Sell’ at Goldman; Credit-Market Writedowns May Rise
Gabelli Says Investors Have Good Reason to Worry About Earnings Next Year
McCain Vows to Change Washington, ‘Restore’ Republican Party’s Principles

Can you say "Out of Touch"...I knew ya could

Happy days are here again...or.....brother can you spare a dime?

Pulling Palin from the Ticket...It could Happen

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:57:00 EDT

It has happened once before. Poor vetting and sensationalized stories of mental illness and drunk driving caused McGovern to jettison poor old Eagleton from the ticket. Perhaps Palin will suffer the same fate....

From Wikipedia:

Thomas Francis Eagleton was a United States Senator from Missouri, serving from 1968–1987. He is best remembered for briefly being a Democratic Vice Presidential nominee sharing the ticket under George McGovern in 1972.

Selection as vice presidential candidate

In 1972, Richard Nixon appeared unbeatable. When Senator George McGovern won the Democratic nomination for President, virtually all of the high-profile Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Birch Bayh turned down offers to run on the ticket.

Having been declined by the "name" Senators, McGovern turned to lesser-known candidates, and Eagleton, who had opposed the Vietnam War, was selected on July 14 with only a minimal background check. Eagleton made no mention of his earlier hospitalizations. Newspapers soon revealed them. McGovern and Eagleton initially joked about the case with Eagleton saying he would undergo a psychiatric examination if other candidates (e.g., Nixon) would do the same. But the charges kept coming. Columnist Jack Anderson wrote a column falsely accusing Eagleton of being arrested for drunk driving — a charge that Anderson had to retract.

Replacement on the ticket

McGovern said he would back Eagleton “1000%”, but on August 1, Eagleton withdrew at McGovern's request and, after a new search by McGovern, was replaced by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver.

A Time magazine poll taken at the time found that 77 percent of the respondents said "Eagleton's medical record would not affect their vote." Nonetheless, the press made frequent references to his 'shock therapy', and McGovern feared that this would detract from his campaign platform.[3]

McGovern's handling of the controversy was an opening for the Republican campaign to raise serious questions about his judgment. In the general election, the Democratic ticket won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

BATTLEGROUND: A DEM EDGE IN NV?

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:43:28 EDT

From MSNBC:

NEVADA: Per state political guru Jon Ralston, Democrats now have a 76,000-voter registration edge in Nevada, 565,855 Democrats to 489,802. Ralston asks, “Think John McCain should worry yet?”

Nevada is within our reach!!! Time to phonebank and canvass!!

Standing up for Alaska: One governor, two faces

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:45:18 EDT

This is too easy. Me thinks McCain's penchant for former beauty queens has clouded what little sense of judgement he may have had left in his convoluted brain. Any random Googler could have done a better job of vetting than McCain's people....Sheesh!!!!

From andrewhalcro.com:

Andrew Halcro is an American politician from Anchorage, Alaska. Formerly a Republican member of the Alaska Legislature, he ran for Governor of Alaska as an Independent candidate in the 2006 election.

One of these days Governor Sarah Palin will realize that the folks back home can actually hear what she says on the road while representing Alaska. One day she will; but it certainly wasn't yesterday.

According to June Kronholz who writes for the Washington Wire, a Wall Street Journal blog covering politics, at Monday's National Governor's Association meeting, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was addressing the group as the incoming head of the organization.

Rendell stated that his priority for his coming term would be to push for a larger investment in public infrastructure from congress. He decried the nations $1.6 trillion infrastructure deficit. However Rendell said that there would be difficulties convincing voters of the need for such investments.

Kronholz writes, "A problem for big plans like that, he added, is that such basic-needs spending is out of favor with voters. And the reason for that? “The Bridge to Nowhere,” he said, citing a pet project championed by Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young that was derailed following an outburst of public anger over the cost. Infrastructure “has become just a pork-barrel process in voters’ eyes,” he said."

Kronholz then wrote, "Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin—like Stevens, a Republican—rushed over to Rendell afterwards to remind him that she had vetoed construction of the bridge."

Let's pause and listen to that again: "Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin rushed over to Rendell afterwards to remind him that she had vetoed construction of the bridge."

According to the Ketchikan Daily News edition on August 8, 2006, this is what Sarah Palin rushed over to tell the voters of Ketchikan during the primary election campaign:

'People across the nation struggle with the idea of building a bridge because they’ve been under these misperceptions about the bridge and the purpose,' said Palin, who described the link as the Ketchikan area’s potential for expansion and growth.

Palin said Alaska’s congressional delegation worked hard to obtain funding for the bridge as part of a package deal and that she 'would not stand in the way of the progress toward that bridge.'”

And according to the Ketchikan Daily News on September 29, 2006 this is what Sarah Palin rushed over to tell the voters of Ketchikan during the general election campaign:

'Part of my agenda is making sure that Southeast is heard. That your projects are important. That we go to bat for Southeast when we’re up against federal influences that aren’t in the best interest of Southeast.'

She cited the widespread negative attention focused on the Gravina Island crossing project. 'We need to come to the defense of Southeast Alaska when proposals are on the table like the bridge and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative,' Palin said.

But yet Palin, rushed over to placate Rendell who just got finished doing exactly what she said she'd defend Alaskans against.

It shouldn't surprise anyone.

Governor Sarah Palin, a CEO who couldn't bother to rush over to meet with head of the Mat Maid Dairy when things went sour, instead choosing to wave signs with angry farmers in front of television cameras.

Governor Sarah Palin, a CEO who couldn't bother to rush over to tell her Commissioner of Public Safety that she was replacing him, instead sending an acting staffer to do her dirty work.

Governor Sarah Palin, a CEO who couldn't bother to rush over to tell Ketchikan community leaders as well as the congressional delegation she planned to veto the funding for the Ketchikan bridge, instead sending out a 5:30am press release so it would hit the east coast news cycle.

But yet she rushed over to tell the Governor of Pennsylvania that she wasn't to blame for the negative publicity surrounding the same bridge she promised to fight for during her campaign.

One governor, two faces. What a bargain.

Palin...WTF? Thanks McCain!!

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:11:22 EDT

Lyda Green, Republican member of the Alaska Senate and Alaskan Senate President had an interesting reation to the news of Palin as VP:

"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

From Politico.com :

The early morning news of McCain's pick sent jaws dropping throughout Alaska, with friends waking up friends with "Oh my God, have you heard?" phone calls.

State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez, was astonished at the news. He didn't want to get into the issue of her qualifications.

"She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."

Former House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican political leader who has clashed with Palin in the past, was shocked when she heard the news Friday morning with her husband, Walt.

"I said to Walt, 'This can't be happening, because his advance team didn't come to Alaska to check her out," Phillips said.

Phillips has been active in the Ted Stevens re-election steering committee and remains in close touch with Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other party leaders, and she said nobody had heard anything about McCain's people doing research on his prospective running mate.

"We're not a very big state. People I talk to would have heard something."

Few wanted to talk about anything else on talk radio Friday. Conservative host Rick Rydell said there are some benefits to the state, but it's a gamble for McCain to pick an unknown with what he considered "questionable vetting."

"It seems almost like a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game," Rydell said in an interview after his show Friday.

Rydell said McCain has destroyed his argument about Barack Obama's lack of experience.

Rudy Giuliani Says Funny Things On Conference Call

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:18:05 EDT

From http://wonkette.com/

As you know, the worst mayor ever of anything, Rudy Giuliani, will deliver the keynote address at his party’s convention. Rudy Giuliani is a fucking stupid rat-demon whose pathetic 5th place campaign couldn’t even make it past January after 12 months of exploiting, for political purposes, the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians whose safety he, as mayor of the attacked city, was supposed to protect. He really is the most appropriate symbol for the Republican convention that follows eight years of George W. Bush, although probably not for the same reasons that the speaker selection committee chose him. Anyway he had a conference call today and just completely bombed on it, because he’s fucking stupid.

First he ran his mouth for a while about how John McCain could pick a pro-choice vice president — not supposed to talk about that to the reporters, sport — saying, among other things, “If that person happens to be, among other things, pro-choice, the party will support that.” O rly?

Dungeons & Dragons nerd Michael Goldfarb had to hastily change the subject.

Earlier, this hilarious exchange went down:

Before that, Ron Kampeas, a reporter from the Jewish news outlet J.T.A., essentially accused the McCain campaign of hypocrisy for criticizing Kurtzer for meeting with the Syrians because Giuliani, he said, has represented the company Citgo, which is owned by the Venezuelan government. He also noted that Giuliani’s firm once represented Saudi Arabian interests.
“Actually I don’t have any representations with the Saudis, that’s incorrect,” said Giuliani. “And I never represented Citgo in negotiations with the Chavez government. So, both of those are factually inaccurate.”
Kampeas said, “Bloomberg reported that your law firm lobbied for Huge Chavez at Citgo — is that not correct?”
“It is not correct that I had negotiations with Chavez’s government,” said Giuliani. “It is correct that my law firm for many, many years — it doesn’t any longer — represented Citgo, an American corporation. But it had nothing to do with Chavez.”
“And you never represented Saudi Arabia’s oil ministry in a Texas court case?” Kampeas asked.
“I never represented Saudi Arabia,” Giuliani said. “I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia.”
Moments later Kampeas’s line went dead.

“I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia,” the fuckshit declares.

May we also note that our beloved Doctor Congressman Ron Paul won 35 pledged delegates in the Republican primary contests this year but was still denied any sort of speaking role at the convention, which is what led him to plan his rival Paultard Convention. Rudy Giuliani won ZERO delegates, because he’s fucking stupid and awful, but has somehow been granted the Keynote Address. They should both be banned to Outer Space.

Giuliani’s Maiden Keynote Conference Call Goes Off the Rails [New York Observer]

U.S. Troops Give Barack Obama Their Elitist ‘Money’

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:00:38 EDT

From Wonkette:

Oh ho ho: “According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain’s haul.” Wow. Barack Obama hates American troops so much that he takes all of their money! [OpenSecrets via AMERICAblog]

My Policy Story: Improving Our Schools IDEA Full Funding

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:55:44 EDT

The failure of the Federal Government over the last 30 years to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is breaking the back of our local schools and districts accross the country. It is also creating a situation in which children are denied the free and appropriate public education which Brown v the Board of education mandates, and creates defacto segregation as children with special needs are denied educational mainstream access with their peers. As a social worker and parent of a child who recieves special education services, I have a unique perspective into how this issue is hurting families and curtailing the future of millions of children with special needs.

The following information is taken from the National Education Association's website:

In 1975, our country took a major step forward in promoting the inclusion and equality of one of our most disenfranchised groups of citizens. Passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), assured that all children with disabilities receive a free, appropriate public education. Over six million children with disabilities are no longer limited by their families' ability to afford private education; they are no longer forced to attend costly state institutions, or worse, stay home and miss out entirely on the benefits of an education. IDEA ensures that children with disabilities may attend public schools alongside their peers. There is no question about it: students, schools and communities are enriched when all children have a right to a free, appropriate public education.Despite all that has been accomplished on behalf of children with disabilities, much more remains to be done. In the near 30 year history of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal contribution has always fallen far short of the congressional commitment to fully fund IDEA. Local and state budgets have been forced to absorb the shortfall. In the last several years Congress has made significant progress, but IDEA appropriations still need a 139 percent increase before IDEA is fully funded. After 30 years, the magnitude of that shortfall demands a new approach. It is time to make special education funding mandatory and deliver on a long overdue promise.

How does the federal shortfall hurt school districts?While much attention has been paid to rising federal expenditures for special education over the past few years, new federal funding has not kept pace with rising costs at the local level. In fact, special education costs for local school districts are rising substantially faster than new federal funding. Even with recent increases in federal special education funding over the past few years, the local financial burden has increased from 39 percent of total spending to 45 percent during the same time period.The federal government is shortchanging local school districts more than $10.5 billion in FY 2002 alone. If IDEA had been fully funded for the last 26 years, state and local governments would have saved $311 billion, which would have been available to increase teacher salaries, to reduce class size, or to purchase new computers and up-to-date textbooks. That $311 billion could have been used to build over 43,000 new elementary schools or hire over 300,000 new teachers and other educators, which would have resulted in smaller class sizes and led to increased student achievement. Who supports mandatory full funding of IDEA?In addition to the education groups that are part of this coalition, mandatory full funding for IDEA enjoys broad bipartisan support. Both the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures strongly support guaranteed full funding. Currently, 35 states have passed state resolutions urging Congress to fulfill its 40 percent commitment. Last year, the Senate enacted on a unanimous voice vote the Harkin-Hagel amendment to provide mandatory full funding of IDEA. In the House, more than 120 Members from both parties have sponsored bills to provide for the guaranteed full funding. What is full funding of IDEA?Part B of IDEA originally authorized Congress to contribute up to 40 percent of the average per pupil expenditure (APPE) for each special education student.4 In 2002, the average per pupil expenditure is expected to be $7,320. With 6,153,000 students served under IDEA, schools are qualified to receive $18.01 billion in federal funds. Unfortunately, schools are only receiving $7.5 billion. In other words, schools are currently receiving roughly 17 percent rather than the federal commitment of 40 percent of APPE.6 Although that is a significant sum, schools will spend more than $102 billion on those students in the same year. In addition, there are additional parts within IDEA that are funded individually and serve additional purposes. For example, Part C of IDEA is designed to meet the developmental needs of infants and toddlers and their families in order to prevent later disabilities. These other parts are also under funded.Basics of the Proposal:

Make IDEA funding mandatory
Increase the federal contribution from 17 percent to 40 percent
Accomplish full funding gradually over six years
Require states to maintain their level of effort
Encourage schools to intervene early in a child's life and provide developmentally appropriate programs and services. Developmentally appropriate intervention during the early years can dramatically reduce later referrals to special education and eventually help curb the costs of special education.

IDEA Funding Coalition MembershipThe IDEA Funding Coalition is a working group of nine non-profit education associations sharing an interest in special education finance. The coalition is dedicated to creating mandatory resources for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. For more information, please contact any of the following:

American Association of School Administrators - Mary Conk, (703) 875-0733
American Federation of Teachers - Matt Morrison, (202) 393-8631
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association - Neil Snyder, (202) 624-7750
Council for Exceptional Children - David Egnor, (703) 264-9452
Council of the Great City Schools - Jeff Simering, (202) 393-2427
National Association of Elementary School Principals - Sally McConnell, (703) 518-6263
National Association of Secondary School Principals - Steve DeWitt, (703) 860-7338
National Association of State Directors of Special Education - Nancy Reader, (703) 519-3800
National Education Association - Randy Moody, (202) 822-7594
National PTA - Carolyn Henrich, (202) 289-6790
National School Boards Association - Dan Fuller, (703) 838-6763

Local public schools are now educating millions of disabled children, and a growing number of them are graduating from high school. Only three decades ago, these same children would have been isolated in separate institutions or simply kept at home, with little or no chance of ever becoming independent, productive, taxpaying citizens.

National Education Association

Charlie Bucket Goes to Denver!!

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:08:24 EDT

Charlie Bucket has won a community credential to Invesco Stadium to see Obama's acceptace speech!!!

Check out the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdBGYfzYWLo

Si Se Puede!!!

Monte

Marcus Garvey

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:54:02 EDT

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own creative genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit, and Eternity our measurement. There is no height to which we cannot climb by using the active intelligence of our own minds. Mind creates, and as much as we desire in Nature we can have through the creation of our own minds.

Government left to the free and wanton will and caprice of the individual in an age so corrupt as this, without any vital reprimand or punishment for malfeasance, other than ordinary imprisonment, will continue to produce dissatisfaction, cause counter agitations of a dangerous nature and upheavals destructive to the good of society and baneful to the-higher hopes and desires of the human race.

For those who have abused their trust, images of them should be made and placed in a national hall of criminology and ill fame, and their crimes should be recited and a curse pronounced upon them and their generations.

Marcus Garvey, 1920

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/timeline/index.html

Road Trip Anyone?

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:29:50 EDT

The campaign announced that Barack will leave the convention hall and join more than 75,000 people for a huge, free, open-air event where he will deliver his acceptance speech to the American people on Thursday, August 28th."

"Barack Obama will accept the Democratic presidential nomination next month at a Denver football stadium that can hold more than 75,000 people after the political party decided to open the event to a broader audience, officials said on Monday.

"Senator Obama's candidacy has generated an enormous amount of excitement and interest," Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. "By bringing the last night of the convention out to the people, we will be able to showcase Barack Obama's positive, people-centered vision for our country in a big way."

The Democratic Party holds its nominating convention August 25-28 in Denver, with daytime meetings and councils held at the Colorado Convention Center and televised evening events at the Pepsi Center sports arena, which can hold up to 20,000 people.

The party decided to hold the final evening's televised events, including Obama's nomination acceptance speech, at INVESCO Field at Mile High, the 76,125-seat stadium that is hone to the Denver Broncos football team.

The additional space enables the party to open the event a broader audience. Attendance at nominating conventions in generally limited to delegates, elected officials and volunteers, a convention spokeswoman said.

"This change in the convention program will allow thousands of first-time participants a chance to take part," said convention co-chair Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas. "I can't think of a better convention finale for our nominee, who has made reaching out to voters a hallmark of his campaign."

General Election Strategy Power Point

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:10:12 EDT

We are going to kick some ass!!!

From MSNBC:

“We have a lot of ways to get to 270” electoral votes, Plouffe said. Aided by a Power-Point demonstration with slides titled, “Expanding the Map: Turning Red States Blue” and “Enthusiasm Gap,” Plouffe whipped through state after state and predicted they may all be in play come November. “We want to play a lot of offense,” Plouffe said.

Here is a link to the powerpoint:

http://obama.3cdn.net/277bb8792237d562f2_9gm6bnupn.pdf

Si Se Puede!!!

TIME TO GEAR UP FOR ROUND TWO!!!

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:27:12 EDT

The following are a few of the reasons that we cannot allow McCain to be elected and provide a defacto 3rd term for Bush. These statistics can give us a bit of insight, but they only reveal the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the real human suffering that is happening in our country and the world.

While there is much to celebrate with Obama winning the nomination, we cant afford to waste any opportunity….it’s time to gear up for round two and send McCaniac back to Arizona where he can cherish his golden years on the old El Rancho.Let’s put a real leader in the White House….Lets elect Barack Obama!

SI SE PUEDE!!!

36.5 million people were below the official poverty thresholds in 2006, compared to 31.1 million in 2000, and that there was an increase of 5.4 million poor from 2000 to 2006
7 percent of children live in families with incomes of less than half the poverty level. That's a paltry sum—less than $8,000 for a family of three and $9,600 for a family of four.
Forty-seven million Americans, including more than 9 million children, are living without health care coverage.
Over the last decade, between 347,000 and 544,000 10th- through 12th-grade students left school each year without successfully completing a high school program
More American soldiers committed suicide in 2007 than ever. Breaking every conceivable historical record, sources within the US defense establishment see the toll climbing even higher in 2008. With 115 suicides in 2007, up 102 from the previous year, 2008's end of year statistics stand to be exceedingly grisly.

Obama takes lead in superdelegates, AP reports

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:38:53 EDT

Si Se Puede!!!!!!

"Additions erase Clinton's imposing lead among party, elected officials"

Story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24556427/

The Fierce Urgency of Now has Never been so Ferocious

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:40:00 EDT

The Fierce Urgency of Now has Never been so Ferocious

I was recently reading up on Jim Crow era history, and I was almost floored by the parallel challenges we still face as a nation. The first three of the following speech excerpts were given over a hundred years ago, and they are as true now as they were then. This is what is still at stake, 100 years later, and never in our nation's history have we had such a golden opportunity to finally set things right.

"We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the Bench. The people are demoralized...the newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists…The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty."

"You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both. The colored tenant is in the same boat as the white tenant, the colored laborer with the white laborer."

"There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it."

Tom Watson, 1892
That is why…We have to recognize that while we each have a different past, we all share the same hopes for the future - that we'll be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable health care when we get sick, that we'll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we'll be able to retire with security. They're common hopes, modest dreams. And they're at the heart of the struggle for freedom, dignity, and humanity …."
Barack Obama, 2008

Who is Mickey Kantor and why does he hate Indiana?

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:16:31 EDT

Someone forwarded this to me...it's pretty shocking, and could probably turn the tide in Indiana if it were to go viral.....forward this to everyone you know!!!!Everyone - please check out this video of early Bill Clinton campaign video showing Carville, Stephy and Mickey Kantor referring to residents of Indiana as White N***ers.http://agonist.org/schecter/?p=9533The following is an article about Mickey "white n***er, these people are sh#t" Kantor that gives a bit of insight into the type of sharks the Clintons are known to swim with....

A Confidant for Every Crisis

By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 29, 1998; Page B1

...Others speculate Kantor is there for his blind loyalty; he's one person who won't go south on Clinton even if it turns out the president is lying.

...Kantor is one of few in the president's inner circle with longstanding ties to each of the Clintons. He actually met Hillary Clinton first, back in 1978 when they served on the Legal Services Corp. board during the Carter administration. That same year Bill Clinton was forging his national political identity, becoming the youngest elected governor in four decades. Kantor soon became part of the Arkansas governor's extensive national network.

...Kantor has a reputation as a skilled negotiator who is known for his fierce desire to win. Sometimes this desire to best his foes manifests itself with nervous pacing. Other times, the will to win takes a more dramatic turn. On the tennis court, for instance, he has been known to hurl his racket in disgust. "I am the worst loser you ever met in your life," he told The Washington Post in an interview during the 1992 campaign. "I get mad."

...Mad and also abrasive, some say. But Kantor often seems unfazed by such critiques. "I have to keep pushing people," he told the National Journal in a 1994 interview. "My job is to make sure we get it done. It's not a popularity contest. You can't be Mr. Nice Guy."

..."In unambiguous language, with an open face and an earnestness of voice and eye, Mickey Kantor had in our March meeting told us a bald-faced lie," Robinson writes.

Obama Action Figure!!

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:40:32 EDT

Get a really cool Obama Action figure...and part of the proceeds will be donated to the camapign!!

link:

http://www.jailbreaktoys.com/Obama/Obama.html

SI SE PUEDE!!!!

I need a Miracle

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:33:34 EDT

Heavens to Mergatroid! I've been reinstated

It looks like all of the delegate candidates have been reinstated. This sure has been a strange process. Sunday will likely prove to be just as interesting. I'm not sure but maybe the Obama campaign felt like this would alienate alot of genuine supporters/ future supporters if they cut them out? If anyone has some insight into this turn of events, I would love to hear from you.

From the mouth of the CDP website:

"The Obama Campaign submitted a list of approved district delegate candidates to your office on April 7, 2008 pursuant to Section III.A.5 of the California Democratic Party Delegate Selection Plan. By this letter, we would like to withdraw that list such that all district delegate candidates be deemed approved by the Obama Campaign and eligible to run for district delegate in their congressional district."
--Letter from the Obama Campaign to the California Democratic Party, April 10, 2008

James Salter,LCSW, District 4 Delegate Candidate.....Si Se Puede!

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." HST

California Delegate Candidates Reinstated!! Zoinks Redux

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:10:40 EDT

David Plouffe just sent out this email...

There has been an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots support for Senator Obama among Democrats and Independents in all 53 California Congressional districts.

In recognition of this tremendous enthusiasm, our campaign has asked the California Democratic Party to allow all persons who have filed to be a district delegate candidate for Senator Obama at the Democratic National Convention to participate in the caucuses this Sunday, April 13, 2008.

We are confident that delegates elected from this pool will reflect the Senator's commitment to a diverse and unified delegation at the National Convention.

An overwhelming number of supporters have signed up to run for delegate, so there will likely be lines and tight space at the caucus locations. We ask for everyone's patience and cooperation.

Most of all, please enjoy this opportunity to meet other Obama supporters and elect delegate candidates to the Convention in Denver.

If you have any questions, please contact Daryl Sprague at dsprague@barackobama.com.

Thanks for your interest and active participation in Barack's campaign to change politics and change America.

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

Final Cut for Delegate Candidates!!

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:43:03 EDT

Zoinks! I've been cut from the candidate list! If you are a candidate you might want to go to the following link and see if you made the cut:

http://www.cadem.org/site/c.jrLZK2PyHmF/b.3919821/?auid=3549868

I still plan on going to the Caucus, and I think everyone else should too....and as a concession for my flaming e-mail and less than stellar performance, I plan on supporting Curtis Walker and Christa Darlington. After incurring their rath I have no doubt that they will disembowel any Hillary Bots that might be lurking in the wings at Denver.

Si Se Puede!

James Salter, LCSW

An Olive Branch

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:57:26 EDT

Cheney, Invoking the Specter of a Nuclear Attack, Questions Kerry's Strength

Published: October 20, 2004

CINCINNATI, Oct. 19 -Vice President Dick Cheney cast doubt Tuesday on whether Senator John Kerry was strong enough to fight terrorism, and asserted that the nation might one day face terrorists "in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us,'' including a nuclear bomb."

If anyone remembers this headline, and how upset they were after reading it, you might begin to understand why I was so upset about the suggestion that I might not be completely behind electing Senator Obama as our next president. Please don't get me wrong!….I am not attempting to equate anyone with Darth Cheney here. I am just saying that in our zeal to elect Obama, we have to be careful not to succumb to the same kind of fear that has divided our country for so long now. It has been a long almost eight years that our country has been hijacked by the Bush lunatics, and I have to admit that this tragic occupation has also impacted me in a profound way. I have a son who will soon be of age to register for selective service, and the thought of him marching off to Bush's war terrifies me to my bones. There is so much at stake that it is easy to become overzealous in our passion to take the country in a new direction. So let's please not cannibalize each other, because we are all working toward the same goal here.

So whether you have been in the trenches in this campaign or whether you have been active in promoting issues of social justice in your community, however you have chosen to answer Senator Obama's call to service, I want you to know that I think all of you matter and I thank you all for your hard work.

James Salter, LCSW

The Straw Man

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:40:17 EDT

Christiana and othersThe issue is that when a Mr. Walker "suggests" that some candidates in our district may be Clinton operatives, he should be very clear as to what he is insinuating. This especially true when he follows up the "suggestion" with a recommendation that people should vote for him to avoid this problem. That leaves the rest of the candidates in the shadow of suspicion with no real recourse but to speak out. Maybe this insinuation was inadvertent, but it still has the same effect as if it were purposeful. If anyone has knowledge that me or any other candidate is trying to pull a fast one, let the information come forward. Is there a vetting process? What is it? Who are the "vetters"? Who are these operatives? I , among others, would like to know so that we can avoid a nasty situation in Denver. As to what I have done,...I think it does matter what a person does in their life, as this is reflective of their values and how they have contributed to the good of society. I am proud of my work as a Pediatric Medical Social Worker. I have battled with insurance companies to insure that children receive the cancer treatment they so desperately need. I have advocated for children in foster care to have a relative by their side in the infusion room. I have sat in on countless I.EP meetings to insure that students receive the free and appropriate education they deserve. I worked for over a year negotiating visitation for a young boy who's mother was incarcerated after they had already been separated for 3 years with virtually no contact. I helped to develop the role of a social worker in a Rocklin Middle School that had no awareness of the mental health needs of the children that attended there. I have played hours of Mario Brothers with foster children who often waited in vain for their parents to show up for supervised visits. I have made this my life's work because I understand what is like as a child to be swept up into a system which obscures your voice and makes you a number. On what I feel is a lesser note, my son and I wore out two new pairs of vans knocking on countless doors, talking to young people at Sierra College, and the Roseville Galleria. I participated in the Sacramento Martin Luther King March wearing my Obama gear and talking to as many people as possible about Barack Obama. I have done these things for the better of all...including Mr. Obama.I think these things do matter. They reflect the concept of Social Justice that Obama hopes to bring to our country. I guess I didn't participate in a manner that you deem to be appropriate or that would grant me the title of a "known Obama supporter." However, this does not allow anyone to cast suspicions of illegitimacy or discount my commitment to electing Barack Obama. I too could not let such an accusation stand without a reply.

Fear and Loathing at the California District 4 Caucus for Obama

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:16:49 EDT

A Funny Thing is Happening on The Way to Denver….or,Fear and Loathing at the District 4 Obama Caucus I have always been of the mind that the Democrat Party has been about inclusion. We have been about opening doors, and at times kicking them open, to make sure that ALL voices are heard and every one of us has a seat at the table. A specter has recently surfaced that makes me uneasy at the very least, and downright furious at the worst. Mr. Curtis Walker has decided to include language in his communications that casts a McCarthyistic pall on all district 4 candidates as possible Hillary moles, except for “known Obama Candidates.” Here are some of Mr. Walker’s imperatives: “DON'T BE BAMBOOZLED--MAKE CERTAIN YOU CAUCUS/VOTE FOR KNOWN OBAMA CANDIDATES!” “We guarantee we will not "flip" to another candidate in Denver” “It is critical that known, long term Obama supporters are sent to Denver, Colorado, for the Democratic National Convention to make certain there are no "delegate games" allowed to play out on the floor of the convention!” “know that you are actually voting for candidates that are known 100% Obama Supporters” “make certain only Obama Delegates that have proven to be 100% behind Senator Obama are elected to represent Congressional District Four at the Democratic National Convention.” Bamboozled indeed! Who is that soccer mom running for district 4 delegate? Be careful… she hasn’t kissed the ring of the “known” and may “flip” or play “delegate games” in Denver…. (queue dramatic music here) Yes We Can!….unless…I never thought we would be swift boated by a fellow Obama supporter, but no matter which angle I look at this thing from, it continues to smack of the same kind of exclusivity and insider B.S that was launched against Mr. Obama by none other than Hillary herself!! This election is about HOPE…it’s about SOCIAL JUSTICE…It’s about ending the old politics of division, and inspiring a whole new generation of voters to roll up their sleeves and get involved. So for all of us “unknowns” who have apparently failed to kneel at the esoteric throne that Mr. Walker holds up as the litmus test for legitimacy…Don’t let this paranoia seep into your conscious, and on April 13 cast your vote any damn way you choose, because the last time I checked we still live in something called a Democracy. James Salter, LCSWSI SE PUEDE!

Once in a Generation?

James "Monte" Salter CD4 Valley Team leader — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:52:07 EST

I often hear people talking about certain opportunities coming around only once in a generation, and I think this true to some degree. Our generation has seen many of these opportunities present themselves, only to be left by the side of the road because of apathy, contentious political bickering, and ineffective leaders. We have also seen the effects of allowing our opportunities to die on the vine, and how this has damaged and polarized our nation. These defeats have left many of us feeling apathetic, and even fatalistic about not only America’s future, but the future of our world.

One of my earliest political memories is of watching Nixon resign in shame. As a young child this had a profound effect on my perception of our national leaders. I learned to not trust, not to hope, and to be wary of men in places of power. I should have been learning from these leaders how America reaches out to the world, and wages PEACE. Our current administration has done nothing to change this perception, and I have even found myself pondering the possibility that we are witnessing the end of our great experiment in democracy…..opportunity lost.

The opportunity that we are now presented with does not come around once in a generation. We need to remember this as we cast our votes. We cannot make the mistake of expecting another American Leader like Barack Obama to come around next time. We cannot sit on fences and stand in the middle of the road. This opportunity may not present itself again. If you believe in justice, and if you believe in freedom, you need to grab ahold of this opportunity with both hands. Lets live up to our ideals and dreams. Lets see what happens when we wage peace. Lets see what happens when we act out of love instead of fear. Let’s see what it’s like when we really embrace the American dream. These don’t have to be idealistic dreams that never materialize. It can happen, and we can make it happen. The Fierce Urgency of Now is bigger than a generational opportunity. Barack Obama is our chance to steer the world in a positive direction for many generations to come.

Let’s elect Obama for President of the United States of America, and make the world a better place for GENERATIONS!