Simple Answers To Simple Questions
by tristero
As James Traub asks in “The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did),” his fast-paced and absorbing new book: “How, today, can we promote anything, much less democracy?”
We can’t.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions. (Homage to Atrios. )
Hey Kids, Let’s (Pretend To) Buy A Bank
by dday
There was a ridiculous amount of news for a Friday night, the foremost being that President Paulson is finally giving in and doing what should have been done in the first place, purchasing an equity stake in failing banks. The problem is that he is still doing it wrong.
WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Friday that the Bush administration will move ahead with a plan to buy stock in financial institutions.
Paulson said the program to purchase stock in financial institutions will be open to a broad array of institutions.
The administration received the authority to make direct purchases of stock in banks in the $700 billion measure Congress passed last week to rescue the nation’s financial system […]
Paulson said the government’s program would be designed to complement the efforts of banks to raise fresh capital from private sources. He said that the government’s stock purchases would be of nonvoting shares so that the government will not have power to run the companies.
Actually, we need the power to run the companies, or at least tell the bankers what to do, more specifically that they must lend to one another. They aren’t the kind of shares that Warren Buffett got from Goldman Sachs. If this doesn’t change bank behavior then it essentially will do nothing. A bank that refuses to lend is not a functional bank, and the government ought to take it over. As Krugman says, this is a half-Gordon – referring to Gordon Brown’s recapitalization plan (not the part about suing Iceland).
Worse, the G7 finance ministers aren’t coordinating their efforts.
Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven nations signaled reluctance to adopt a coordinated effort to shore up banks, risking a deeper crisis of confidence after this week’s crash in global stock markets.
As equities worldwide suffered their worst week since the 1970s, officials gathering in Washington said they were seeking new ways to stem the meltdown. Still, they argued that tailoring efforts to the needs of individual nations was better than a cross-border plan.
The G-7 is considering including in its statement saying that no bank of systemic importance will be allowed to fail, and may outline principles all nations should follow, two European officials told reporters in Washington. Still, the group is unlikely today to endorse a U.K.-style commitment to guarantee loans between banks, an official from a G-7 member said.
AND, it appears that Paulson is going to use Fannie and Freddie to kickstart the buy-up of troubled assets, essentially widening the money pool:
Federal regulators directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start purchasing $40 billion a month of underperforming mortgage bonds as the Bush administration expands its options to buy troubled financial assets and resuscitate the U.S. economy, according to three people briefed about the plan.
Fannie and Freddie began notifying bond traders last week that each company needs to buy $20 billion a month in mostly subprime, Alt-A and non-performing prime mortgage securities, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are confidential. The purchases would be separate from the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Because the $700 billion is going to go to recapitalization, yet he has to reward his banker friends by overpaying for their trash.
AND, GM is talking merger with Chrysler, just weeks after securing a $25 billion dollar loan from the Feds.
These are just the economic Friday news dumps. (we’re also taking North Korea off the terror watch list and agreeing to a timeline for withdrawal in Iraq, you know, little things like that)
And they worry me. Paulson is still trying to work a heist instead of fix the fundamentals. And the market has thus far responded very poorly to heists.
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Informative
by digby
This isn’t going away:
Obama Sign in West Plains
By KSPR NewsA sign of the political times in the Ozarks has many questioning the message … And the source.
This billboard is on US 63 in the Howell County Community of West Plains. No one has claimed responsibility for putting up the sign, but Howell County democrats are upset at the image of Barack Obama in a turban.
Obama has fought internet rumors that he’s Muslim. He grew up in a Christian family.
The West Plains Daily Quill gave us this picture. The paper quotes billboard owner Ronnie ford as saying he doesn’t know who put up the provocative message.
The comments to the article are varied, but this one is a perfect example of how the conservatives are going to react throughout an Obama administration when people complain about things like this:
Very rarely does one see such an informative billboard. Ripping it down would just be another case of the Obama goon squad censoring free speech in America.
H/T to E.O.
The Fraud Of Fraud
by digby
It’s becoming clear that the fraudulent GOP “vote fraud” project is up and running at full speed and will likely be a huge story for well beyond the election. Rick Perlstein had an interaction with John Fund recently, who said right out that Democrats didn’t believe in election law and would try to count illegal votes. He’s selling books so perhaps his hyperbole is just salesmanship, but his prediction that a close election will be thrown into doubt because of Republican efforts to challenge every provisional ballot sounds quite plausible to me.
The process of turning ACORN into a terrorist sleeper cell has begun and I see little hope that they aren’t going to be successful. The press is clearly fascinated by the right wing caricature of a group of shiftless “community organizers” trading crack for Obama votes in the inner city and have done exactly zero research into the issue, so the reporting has been hysterical.
I have written many times about this report (pdf) from 2004 about the history of Republican vote suppression efforts and I urge you to take the time to read the whole thing if you haven’t. This has been a tool of conservatives of all parties since the beginning of the Republic, but it’s only been since the 1980s that the Republicans professionalized it with the formation of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The report shows that the Jesse Jackson campaign’s successful new voter registration efforts was a particular impetus for GOP efforts to promote the false allegation that there is systematic voter fraud in the land.
This is the first election where we may see the full effect of this project. The Republican National Lawyers association were a vital part of the Florida recount (they even give out an award to certain lawyers featuring some of the famous Florida chads) but this may be where the true genius of the project lies. We are going to have what appears to be a substantial Democratic victory by an African American with a strong minority constituency. The totals may not be close. But by ratcheting up this spectre of “voter fraud” in advance, they are helping to lay the groundwork for delegitimizing a president Obama in the eyes of a large number of Americans.
That the media is running after this story like a bunch of toddlers gleefully chasing puppies is typical, but still disheartening. It was only a couple of weeks ago that a special prosecutor was named in the US Attorney firings after the Inspector General found that that some of them, notably David Iglesias, were fired because they failed to prosecute bogus voter fraud cases. In light of that you would think that the press would be a bit skeptical of voter fraud allegations by Republicans.
Instead you have this:
CNN’s Drew Griffin took his network’s Special Investigations Unit to Lake County, IN yesterday in an attempt to document election problems in the area. Did he discuss the active and legitimate voter suppression campaign taking place there, in which local Republicans are blocking early voting in three Democratic leaning cities? Not at all. Instead, he focused on faulty registration cards submitted by the current bete noir of the conservative movement, the community organizing group ACORN. What’s worse, his report (and most other media accounts) grossly misrepresented the intent and professionalism of ACORN’s registration efforts. (video at the link) In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days. What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:
ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. […] The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.
According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ‘suspicious.’ ” Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana. So what explains all the faulty registration forms? There are two probable causes. One is that some registration forms can contain simple errors. That means the registrant didn’t intend to subvert the election process, but rather just made an honest mistake. The other scenario involves the canvassers themselves. If employees want to boost their performance in the eyes of their boss or simply don’t want to do the work of finding legitimate new voters, they could turn in forged or faulty registration forms.* This is illegal and can wreak havoc on registrar’s offices, but there’s no evidence these imaginary people turn around and vote in November. Given Indiana’s strict voter ID law, it would actually be next to impossible for anyone to cast a ballot under the name of a submarine sandwich chain or a dead person. But these facts haven’t stopped conservative critics and some in the media from incorrectly implying that ACORN’s faulty registrations prove the organization is trying to forge votes and steal the election in November. An editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily said, “[John] McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest.” CNN even set up Griffin’s segment with a graphic that read “Voter Fraud?”
I think it’s pretty clear at this point that he is.
McCain’s ad featuring ACORN (which dday discussed yesterday) has been removed from Youtube. But here’s the script:
JOHN MCCAIN: I’m John McCain and I approve this message.
ANNCR: Who is Barack Obama?
A man with “a political baptism performed at warp speed.”
Vast ambition.
After college, he moved to Chicago.
Became a community organizer.
There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN.
He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.
What did ACORN in Chicago engage in?
Bullying banks.
Intimidation tactics.
Disruption of business.
ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans.
The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.
No wonder Obama’s campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, “Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.”
But Obama’s ties to ACORN run long and deep.
He taught classes for ACORN.
They even endorsed him for President.
But now ACORN is in trouble.
REPORTER: There are at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms.
ANNCR: Massive voter fraud.
And the Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front for get out the vote efforts.
Pressuring banks to issue risky loans.
Nationwide voter fraud.
Barack Obama.
Bad judgment. Blind ambition.
Too risky for America.
It looks right now as if the election might not be close enough for the Republicans to make a plausible case for outright theft of the election through voter fraud. But as I said, they are certainly laying the groundwork for a propaganda campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama. The beauty of the voter fraud fraud is that they win even when they lose.
The conservatives’ long term goal is to make citizens so cynical about the electoral system that they just don’t vote. the fewer people who participate in democracy the easier it is for the aristocracy to maintain control.
Honorable Putz
by digby
I’ve had it. McCain corrects some batty Republican on the obvious fact that Obama isn’t an Arab and the gasbags are all hailing the return of the “Real John McCain.” The excuses are flowing all over the place — his campaign failed him by forcing him to go negative when he really didn’t want to, he lost his way temporarily and rediscovered what he was all about, Palin was a loose cannon. He’s hated hearing all this nasty stuff about at his rallies.
This is utter nonsense. McCain has been a prick throughout this campaign and his crowds have been a bunch of jackasses. Remember this?
The man is not a man of honor. He’s an angry jerk who unleashed Sarah W. saying the word terrorist over and over again when criticizing Obama. Here are the two patriots on Hannity just this week:
Did McCain sound reluctant to you?
Here’s a little recap of his honorable behavior from a must read profile in this month’s Rolling Stone:
Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. “If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print,” says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain’s press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an “immature and unprofessional reaction to slights” that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”
McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an “incompetent little shit.” Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.
During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.
In the Senate — where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has “very few friends” — his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Grassley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. “Are you calling me stupid?” Grassley demanded. “No, I’m calling you a fucking jerk!” yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was “going to head-butt Grassley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain.” The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son’s case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.
McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a “pompous self-serving son of a bitch” who “possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain.” In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that “only an asshole would put together a budget like this.”
Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.” McCain exploded: “Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room.” The incident foreshadowed McCain’s 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly “suspended” his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.
At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.”
The man is an ass. He’s always been as ass. He has absolutely no problem in that footage from just a couple of days ago insinuating the Obama was consorting with terrorists, knowing full well that the context of that was
The only reason he’s ever spoken out against such behavior in the past is to promote the completely bogus idea that he is some sort of honorable, patriotic man. And that’s what he did yesterday. The attacks aren’t working and they are destroying McCain’s reputation. That’s the reason he stepped in.
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Friday Night News Dump, Alaska Style
by dday
Sarah Palin abused the power of her office. Why didn’t they read the report she released exonerating herself? Wouldn’t that be the fair and balanced thing to do?
A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state’s public safety commissioner. The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn’t the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.
The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.
Monegan says he was dismissed as retribution for resisting pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor’s sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.
Well, she’s said six or seven different things, that’s just today’s excuse, but that’s besides the point. By the way that “politically motivated” investigation included 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
The report has been released (by unanimous vote of the Council) and can be found here. The nut graf:
For the reasons explained in Section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) provides
“The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.”
The wingnuts will hang their hat on the fact that the report says that Palin’s firing of Walt Monegan was within her statutory authority, but the above paragraph doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room. Her handpicked Attorney General failed to turn over documents in the case, too.
I think the best way for the McCain campaign to spin this is to assert that, by being found guilty of abusing power and obstructing justice, Palin has now shown herself to be perfectly qualified for the office of Vice President as it has been conceived by Dick Cheney.
Or, they can go the route of Palin’s lawyer and claim that the report is incomplete because they never talked to Palin herself, which leaves me to wonder if there’s a word in Eskimo for “chutzpah.”
Perhaps the best, or saddest, part of this is that they tried to stage a replay of the Brooks Brothers riot, this time by dressing up in red noses and rallying against what I guess they’d call a “reindeer court”:
As for the nitty-gritty details, I figure Marcy Wheeler’s better at that than I am.
Business As Usual
by digby
Here’s some chutzpah for you. Eric Umansky and Sharona Coutts report that AIG — your AIG — is still lobbying:
Earlier today, we wondered whether AIG is still lobbying the federal government. After all, taxpayers have lent the failing insurance giant roughly $120 billion and now own 80 percent of the company. We spent days ringing AIG, the Fed and Department of Treasury, none of them could give us an answer. Well, we finally have one. An AIG spokesman, Joseph Norton, told us via e-mail a few minutes ago: “We are not a GSE [government-sponsored entity] and are therefore not restricted. We remain a share-holder owned entity and continue advocacy activities.” In other words, AIG is going to keep lobbying. By contrast Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac immediately shut down their lobbying after the government took them over.
Can you believe it? The government is paying lobbyists to lobby itself.
We shouldn’t be surprised. They treated themselves to spa treatments on the government dime after the bailout, so they haven’t exactly reconciled themselves to their new reality. They think they are still a high flying insurance company making huge bucks for the Big Money Boyz. They haven’t reckoned with the fact that they are now civil servants.
I know there is a certain sense of surreality about all this and that people haven’t really had a chance to catch their breaths and all. But the financial sector had better get a grip right now and recognize that the country has almost no patience with them at the moment and they will be rolling out the metaphorical guillotine if they don’t get some humility right now. I know it’s hard for former masters of the universe to accept that they have lost their magical powers, but well… they have.
Dark Forces
by digby
I’ve been getting some flak for suggesting that the conservatives are building up a racist argument to explain the financial crisis. And, to some degree, that’s fair. They aren’t just blaming racial and ethnic minorities for the problem. They are also blaming their best friends, Wall Street and liberals. You can always count on Ann Coulter to get to the heart of the matter at a time like this:
When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.
In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration’s affirmative action lending policies as one of the “hidden success stories” of the Clinton administration, saying that “black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded.”
Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn’t get out of their loans by selling their houses.
A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it’s gone off.
In Bush’s first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government’s “implicit subsidy” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.
Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no “concern about housing.” How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can’t repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “under heavy assault by the Republicans,” but these entities still had “important political allies” in the Democrats.
Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.
This would sound like irrelevant raving to me except for the fact that this economic crisis and the fact that we have a person with a “foreign sounding name” running for president seems to have made the right wing come completely unhinged. And I’d worry much less if the Republican establishment, including the Republican candidates for president and vice president, weren’t stoking the free floating anxiety out in the nation instead of trying to calm it.
If you’ve seen these videos and others that are floating around the intertubes, you know what I’m talking about:
Kathy G writes:
I’m trying not to be a drama queen about this stuff, but honest to God, I am very scared for Barack Obama. Just watch those videos again. Look at the faces of those people. Listen to their voices. I don’t know what’s scarier: the ranting hysterics, or the ones who, with cool, calm, unembarrassed certainty, aver that, oh yes, of course they know that Barack Obama is a terrorist who hates America.
Clearly, there are a whole lot of hateful, enraged, and very crazy people out there. No, I don’t think the majority of McCain/Palin supporters are like that, but yes, enough of them are like that, that I think we all should be seriously disturbed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, or heard of, anything like it. And just a few, or even one, of those people are capable of inflicting incalculable damage.
[…]
Dark forces have been let loose across the land. The rancid rhetoric coming out of the McCain/Palin campaign is but one example. But there ae many more: there’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-like attempt of many on the right to blame the financial crisis on greedy, lazy minorities. There’s the conspiracy mongering and rank insanity over at the National Review’s The Corner, where the leading lights of American conservatism seriously debate whether Barack Obama is a Maoist or Stalinist. Ultimately, though, it is the McCain/Palin campaign which is setting the tone here. And they, more than anyone else, are responsible for enabling this horrorshow. Their words feed the madness, and stoke the rage. Overarching ambition and searing hatred have eaten away at them, leaving holes in the places where their souls used to be. I watch and read this stuff, and I despair. It’s not that I think it will actually hurt Obama much at the voting booth. In fact, I’m more convinced than ever that he will win. And not only that: it might not even be close. And he may win with enough of a commanding majority in Congress to actually accomplish something big. But, like Digby, I do worry that a toxic narrative is taking hold that will cause substantial numbers of Americans to see an Obama presidency as something that is illegitimate and must be destroyed. And honest to God, I worry about Barack’s personal safety as well. He and Michelle are two exceedingly brave people. God only knows the thoughts that must go through their heads every day.
I think what I find most disconcerting about this is that these angry people in the audience keep screaming that they want McCain to take the gloves off and really go after Obama. Apparently, they believe he’s been some kind of a softie. Today, they cable netwroks are showing footage of a man who says that there’s got to be some way to “line up” all of these guys Obama’s been palling around with. The tone is vicious and violent.
And lest you think this is just some rubes with pitchforks out in Jesusland, the alleged intelligentsia of the right wing is no less hysterical:
Second, and relatedly, Obama’s radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism. This, I’d suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist. What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system. A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about “change” but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability. With an enormous assist from the media, which does not press him for specifics, Obama has walked this line brilliantly. Absent convincing retractions of his prior radical positions, though, we should construe shrewd moves like the ostensibly reasonable Second Amendment position as efforts make him electable.
This is why Ayers is so important: it is a peek behind the curtain of Obama’s rhetoric. When he talks about “education reform,” that sounds admirable and, given the state of the schools, entirely reasonable. But when you look at what the Obama/Ayers program really tried to do to the schools (see, e.g., Stanley’s work on this), it is radical. With a guy who speaks in euphemisms — “change,” “social justice,” “due process,” etc. — it is vital to have concrete examples of how these concepts are put into action.
Ok, so you have the base and you have the wingnut welfare queens growing ever more unhinged. But it’s actually still a bit of a shock to me that the McCain campaign itself is feeding into this fear and anger with nary a thought to the context in which this election is being fought. He is still a US Senator with a reputation and family legacy to protect. And yet he is dangerously close to endorsing the assassination of Barack Obama.
They have a perfect right to fight hard for the election and I wouldn’t expect them to be nice about it. But we are in the midst of a national crisis and people are feeling disoriented and scared. Stoking that free floating anxiety at a time like this with dark suggestions of Obama being part of a terrorist infiltration of the government is beyond the pale.
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ACLUORN
by dday
As the McCain campaign sinks into the fever swamps and goes about as far as you can go before someone cries “racism,” they’ve teamed up their irresponsible behavior and incitement to riot with the project to delegitimize the election itself. They just released a Web video highlighting Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN.
This is all they’ve got left, so they’re going with it. A dark, twisted conspiracy theory based on ignorance and deep-seeded xenophobia and hatred. And the BBQ-stained media is helping them along by highlighting the couple thousand voter registration forms (at MOST, and that’s probably exaggerated) that ACORN alerted election authorities about being fraudulent, instead of the 1.3 million voters they registered accurately, most of them in low- and middle-income communities. This is an attack on people’s right to vote and participate in politics.
In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days.
What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:
ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. […]
The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.
According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ‘suspicious.’ “
Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana.
They turn THEMSELVES in and these idiots on the right think they’re scamming the election. They’re nothing but a scapegoat.
In addition, as Adam Serwer notes there is a dinstinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. To my knowledge Mickey Mouse or Moamar Qadafy or George Jetson has never attempted to vote in a national election, even if their “registrations” got by the eyes of censors, which they wouldn’t, if election officials paid attention to ACORN flagging the bad forms. In fact, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud whatsoever, and this has been verified dozens of times. Josh Marshall explains in a piercing post:
The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don’t remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to.
In the main I would agree that it’s not a good idea to pay people to register voters, especially on a per-registration basis, because it incentivizes employees to falsify forms to keep their numbers up. In the end, the only people harmed by bad voter registration forms are ACORN themselves, because it means they overpaid their workers. I would say the same thing about signature gatherers for ballot initiatives. I would support that legislation if it came up for a vote. But the conservatives never introduce such legislation, even though they yell and carp about this every couple years. They don’t want to fix the problem. They want an organization they can point at and demonize, and ACORN fits the bill. They want to use the power they have through the right-wing media and the Republican National Committee and even the Justice Department to push this narrative of Democratic perfidy and black people stealing elections.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That’s the key. What you’re hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.
Meanwhile, there’s a very real story about thousands of voter registrations being blocked in swing states, mass purges of the voter rolls, and all kinds of fallout from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed by Republicans and signed by George W. Bush. But that doesn’t get mentioned, because there’s no group like ACORN to tar and feather.
If you’re poor, if you’re struggling, if you are a minority, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And furthermore, they don’t care if this backfires. They mean to call into question the election and the office of the Presidency itself under a Democratic Administration. They win either way.
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Greatness
by digby
As I’m watching the Dow tank once again, with footage of George W. Bush blathering incomprehensibly in the background, it occurs to me that I may have been wrong in seeing the Bush administration as the book-end to the Nixon years. All the corruption and arrogance and imperial design made me think this was a phenomenon of the baby boom era.
Now I’m beginning to think it’s the bizarroworld version of Roosevelt. It started with a pearl harbor style attack and ended with an economic crisis. And at each turn, instead of meeting the challenge with creativity and intelligence, Bush exacerbated the problems and made them worse.
Somebody asked me the other day what would have been different if Gore had been allowed to take office. I said that he probably would have been impeached after 9/11 and President Lieberman would have pretty much done exactly what Bush did. The only difference would be that he wouldn’t have politicized the Justice Department, not because he is against it, but because Democrats would never get away with such things even for a second.
Many of us knew that Bush was a disaster. The first time I saw him speak it was incomprehensible to me that the Republicans would try to sell someone this obviously inadequate to the country. It felt like the ultimate insult. And it was. Conservatives had so little respect for government that they sought to prove its irrelevance by installing a functional moron as president. The result is obvious.
I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to be president at this point. But one thing we’ve learned: cataclysmic events may make a president, but there’s no guarantee they are going to make him a great success. It’s just as likely he (or she) will be an epic failure. This isn’t something you want to take chances with. We should not elect incompetent boobs just because our inflated egos tell us that we are qualified to be president ourselves and so the country should elect someone who is “just like us.”
Maybe we should start educating people to see politicians the way they see athletes. They certainly may have lots of opinions about what a team should do. But even the most egotistical drunk screaming obscenities from the stands doesn’t truly believe that he’s a better hitter than Manny Ramirez or that the team should hire a bunch of guys off the streets to play in the outfield. They have more respect for the game than that. It would be nice if citizenship required as much respect for the country.
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