Here in Indiana we pride ourselves on being fair. Now we hear that the GOP has tried to stop the early voting by going to the Indiana Supreme Court. They lost their petition to close the polls but this is another example of how the republicans continue to try to steal elections. 2000 wasn't good enough for them, one of the worst fraud filled elections in modern US history, they know they can't win in a fair election. Not since Henry Clay used his power in the House of Representitives to buy a power position has this country felt so abused by a party. It was FRAUD then, it is FRAUD now. Everyone deserves to vote no matter what party they choose. This is the land of the free, yet Bush and his party feel that means free to use every means available to win.
The long lines in Ohio, Florida and the hanging chad and the Supreme Court have all been used to keep a large number of votes from either being cast or counted. We all know that politics is a dirty business and it has been that way for generations. We the public need to stand up and say enough is enough and insure that everyone gets to vote and all votes need to be counted. Indiana put in place a law that makes everyone who votes have a gov. ID. to insure there is no further voter fraud. This state has not EVER had a major case of voter fraud and I'm not sure if we ever had any case. This law was put in place by the republicans to put up obsticles for the poor and elderly who have to go wait in long lines at the BMV to receive said ID. The only good side to this law is if you can't afford ID they must give you one anyway. My question is why do we put up walls for any voter? The above mentioned people tend to vote Democrat, wonder why now?
The election will be over soon and we will here of fraud, we will hear of long lines, we will hear of votes not being counted and we will have court cases. This is sad in a country that sends observers to other countries to stop voter fraud. Fox watching the hen house if you ask most people today. We as Americans must stop this kind of election issues. We need other nations to watch our polls so nobody cheats in our elections. Never going to happen, it is up to all of us to put a stop to this kind of politics. Those who have died or served during wars didn't do so for this kind of crap. If the goverment can't put an end to this fraud, we may have to step up. I'm not asking for a new revolution, but I'm not ruling it out either. This isn't about poor vs. rich, this isn't white vs. black, this is about parties out of control and right now it happens to be republicans in the spotlight. Democrats have done their fair share in the past but it all needs to be stopped.
I look forward to this Tuesday and can only hope that this year is not a repeat of 2000. I have chosen to work the polls to do what I can at my local polling place to insure a better and fairer election. I am only one person so I don't think that somehow I alone can stop politics as usual but it is one place. This nation must pull together and if we get enough people in the polling places then we can make a real difference. We take for granted that our rights will always be here. Nations around the world have people who wish they could vote, we have that right, yet we are to lazy a nation to get up off our butts and do something as easy as voting. Let's take back this country that so many have died for. VVVVVVVVVVVVOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEE!
I don't know the record in Indiana for early voting, but we have to be pretty close to it. The lines have begun to get a little longer and it is of course taking longer to get to vote. People aren't complaining about it, they all seem to be having a good time. I have never seen so many people who don't know each other having so much in common. People at the polls smiling, that is not NORMAL. It's so nice to see the voters cracking jokes and truly feeling that this election could really change our countries future and everyone feels a part of something really special.
Yes I hope Senator Obama wins, but in the end I want to see EVERYONE get out and vote. This election means more to this nation than just who becomes President. This country is on the edge of something that has not been seen since Lincoln. The country can't continue to hold together so long as the "right and left" are so far apart. We are Americans not red, not blue but Americans. If we are going to survive as a nation we must come together and lead this country back in the right direction. Get out and vote, there is nothing more important this year, so get out and vote.
Senator Obama made a stop in Indianapolis Indiana yesterday. I wasn't able to go but talked to friends and the Indianapolis news channels. The crowd was huge and the energy was amazing. Senator Obama was late but nobody seemed to care. Senator Obama talked about many things, from the economy to the Indiana early voting rules. He asked those who could vote early should do so. Indiana has at least 2 weeks of voting and in some place they can even vote on Saturday.
Senator Obama arrived to a standing ovation and even though he was about an hour late the crowd didn't appear to be upset. He has been to Indiana many times since he entered the race 2 years ago. We keep hoping he will come to Bloomington again. My friends that were able to go said the crowd was electric and listened quietly to Senator Obama talk about the economy, taxes and Indiana's voter laws.
Indiana allows early voting even if you aren't going to be absent the day of the election. In Bloomington we have seen a lot of early voting. I voted last week because I will be democrat sheriff at a local polling place. The lines have been short so people shoudn't have any reasons not to vote early. The lines move very quickly as the ladies that are running the early voting office are doing a great job. In most cases you can vote in less than 20 minutes. This is a great way for elderly, disabled or business people who might have trouble getting away long enough to vote. Many people in Indana don't understand that they can vote early so we are getting the word out.
As Senator Obama gave his speech in Indianapolis people started to move toward the city/ county building just off Alabama and Market street. After the speech the crowd that overtook the city/ county building was led by a local step club who danced all the way to the door. Indianapolis registered the most early votes in one day in Indianapolis history. Thousands have voted daily both in Indianapolis, Bloomington and much of Indiana. The laws are clear here in Indiana but the state doesn't advertise the facts about the law so many don't go.
The laws are in Indiana are clear on early voting but the state doesn't advertise them, many don't go for that reason. This is great for the elderly and disabled as you can get in and out in about 20 minutes. This also gives people time if they don't have the correct papers needed to vote. Here in Bloomington the ladies are great, they tell a person exactly what is needed and explain how to get them. This is not so easy to do on election day, many never vote because the lines at the BMV are to long with people getting their I.D. .
This law was put in place by a republican administration to insure there is no voter fraud. Indiana has not had a problem with that so the law was put in place to make it harder for elderly and disabled people to vote. Many ederly don't have state issued I.D. because many don't drive. The republicans ie. Mitch Daniels claim that the state will give then the card free but know that the lines are long at the BMV so most just give up. The way we can stop the effectiveness of this ploy is to vote early and find out with at least a week what they need from the state. Now the elderly and disabled can get this I.D. during slower times at the BMV.
Let's follow Senator Obama's words and get out and vote now. This keeps the republican's from using the I.D. law against the largest group of democrat voters. Get the voting done know and sit back and watch the next President of the United States, Obama/ Biden. This is the time we take back Washington and put the U.S. in the leading role we have had for 200 years before Bush destroyed that role and has put us in line for a collapsing economy. Vote Now.........
VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, VOTE NOW, DON'T WAIT, DON'T WAIT, DON'T WAIT, DON'T WAIT, DON'T WAIT, DON'T WAIT. INDIANA EARLY VOTING, INDIANA EARLY VOTING, INDIANA EARLY VOTING, INDIANA EARLY VOTING. INDIANA EARLY VOTING, CALL YOUR LOCAL CLERKS OFFICE FOR TIMES, CALL YOUR LOCAL CLERKS OFFICE FOR TIMES. DON'T FORGET STATE OR FEDERAL PHOTO I.D. , DON'T FORGT STATE OR FEDERAL PHOTO I.D. . TAKE BACK WASHINGTON NOW, TAKE BACK WASHINGTON NOW, TAKE BACK WASHINGTON NOW,. ((((((((((((GET OUT THE VOTE AND HELP GIVE RIDES TO VOTERS))))))))))))). CHECK YOUR NEIGHBORS AND SEE IF THEY NEED A RIDE TO THE POLLS.................................... MANY ELDERLY AND DISABLED DON'T DRIVE AND NEED HELP TO GET TO THE POLLS, WE NEED EVERY VOTE OUT THERE. THEY MAY NOT VOTE FOR OBAMA BUT THE IMPORTANT THING IS THEIR VOTES COUNT. 08,08,08,08,08,08,08,08. CALL YOUR LOCAL CLERK TO FIND OUT WHERE YOU NEED TO GO IF YOU ARE NOT SURE.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote back in April or May about where this economy is going. I stated that unless things changed we could be facing a new depression. I don't believe we are there YET, but if we continue this failed policy we WILL see this economy fail. Last week was a disaster on Wall Street, this week we've watched a bounce and then a continued drop. The 700 Billion dollar BAILOUT will do little to change this. The housing crisis will continue to pull the economy down and at some point total collapse.
The banks are sitting on billions of dollars of real estate that they can't unload because the banks are not loaning money. If a person can't get a mortgage then how can the banks move these houses? The answer is of course that they can't, they will continue to sit on the property and the banks will lose value and investments. Once the banks fail the economy comes to a stop. The individual will sit on what liquid asset's remain and corporations will close their doors. This is what occured in the last depression and we are watching many of the same things occuring now.
People are losing faith in their government and Wall Street. The fat cats are diving out of the market as they continue to receive inflated salaries. The middle class and the poor are paying the bills and hurting the most as they lose much of their retirement and homes on record levels. Now is not the time to give handouts to the rich, now is the time to help EVERYONE keep their homes and return a little faith in our governments ability to stabilze this economy.
Only time will tell if this government can continue to be a world leader and can be trusted to do what's right for EVERYONE. Stop giving tax breaks to oil companies making record profits. Stop giving money to companies moving out of this country. Stop all the waste in budgets that congress passes with little worry about where the money comes from. Pork projects are killing these budgets. We pay enough taxes to cover this countries bills, we don't have to chop medicare, social security or Head Start. We need to demand that our taxes are used for important needs, not to bridges to nowhere. Keeping a better eye on Wall Street instead of turning our heads away and hoping they will do the right thing.
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The final presidential debate is this Wednesday, October 15th, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. It's the last chance for undecided voters to see Barack and John McCain side-by-side and determine who will bring the change this country needs. You can make the most of this opportunity by bringing your friends, family, and fellow supporters together to watch. Sign up to host a Debate Watch Party. We'll make sure you have everything you need to make the event a success. If you've hosted an event before, you know how powerful they can be to help grow our movement. If you haven't, it's a terrific way to show your support, and we'll be with you every step of the way to help. We're having a special conference call for Debate Watch Party hosts next week. We'll give you ideas for how to get your guests involved in the rest of the campaign. In these final weeks, each of us needs to do whatever we can to keep growing our movement and encourage undecided voters to cast their vote for change. Sign up to host a Debate Watch Party now: http://my.barackobama.com/debate-watch-party Thanks, Jon Jon Carson National Field Director Obama for America
President Bush must think all america is stupid if he actually believes we would't start fighting the so called Bailout. How could anyone think that no oversight, no chance to go back and account for where the money went and no court resource if needed? Who would come up with those rules in the first place? They know we have to move fast, yet they throw in rules that people need to ask themselves why? Why would we give ONE man control of ONE TRILLIOIN dollars and have no regulation? Oh, I know, the same government that has refused to answer any questions about illegal actions, President Bush. Mr. I don't belong to the executive branch Cheney. His Attorney General and anyone else in charge.
We really have to ask why, why would we give that kind of money with no oversight? No oversight is what has us, the taxpayer, paying ONE TRILLION dollars to bail out private companies. Knowing that time is something we have little of, they add rules that give one man control with no legal recource. Why do they need that clause? Is there something else we need to know that they don't want us to know? President Bush and some in his party ie. McCain have fought to deregulate everything they can over the past 7 years. Senator McCain still thinks that deregulation was a good thing, that it helped speed up the economy. Wait, he is right, it did speed up the economy, all the way into the abyss. We must insure that this bail-out has all the oversight we can have over any government program.
The answer to most of the questions above fall right in the Presidents lap. President Bush has re-created the great depression just so the people who didn't live through the last one had a chance to feel what one feels like. The man knows nothing about the economy, Senator McCain knows nothing about the economy. Hell most of us don't know very much about the economy, but we do know this bail-out, with no regulation is a a bad idea. This government, with the worst president in U.S. history, a Vice-President that doesn't belong to the executive branch, and a refusal to answer to illegal use of power, has thrown us under the train. We were poor and middle-class before, now most of us are just poor. I understand that without a bail-out this economy could very well collapse. What I don't understand is how anyone would want BUSHIII elected. He put us here as did Keating 5 member McCain. Many don't remember this last near disaster, I do and I think the press needs to step up and remind those who don't. We need change, we want change and we must have change if this country is going to survive. GO Senator Obama, our last real hope.
Reagan’s America is dead.
If not dead, it lies fallen on a US economy near ruin. The recent collapse of several financial giants and the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands have reached levels unmatched since the 1930’s Great Depression Era. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who witnessed firsthand the Great Depression, declared “This is the worst economy I’ve ever seen.”
Like Oscar Wilde’s tragic protagonist Dorian Gray whose beauty gives way to his true ugliness once his portrait is destroyed, the inheritors of the Reagan mantle, McCain-Palin are revealed for what they are—pallbearers of a legacy best left to die and be buried.
We should be cheering at the funeral.
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
Joe Biden, the same man who insensitively described Obama as "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" for an African American is now Obama's Vice Presidential candidate.
From a racial relations perspective, this pairing seems initially odd. Some may question Obama’s judgment but they would be missing the point. An Obama-Biden administration may very well serve as a model for racial reconciliation in the twenty-first century.
