Blue Hearts

Hey All,

So much more to say so here we are again.
Kristin

p.s. I'm putting this one here so no one will miss it. (caveat: I do not know who Howie Silver is.):

"John McCain Campaign"~ deliberately sending "Misleading Absentee Ballot Applications" to registered "Democrats and "American Citizens" that have donated to Senator Obama's Campaign.~~~~~~~~~

From: Howie Silver ~~~~~~
Subject: Caging ~~~~~
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:07:32 +0000 ~~~~~~~~~~

The story is all over Progressive Talk Radio today about the McCain campaign sending absentee ballot applications to registered democrats or people that have donated to Obama's campaign. These ballots are deliberately misleading and have postage paid return addresses that are for an election clerk that is outside of your city or town. What this will end up doing is either having your vote not counted, or if you return one of these, they will cite you for election fraud, saying that you already voted absentee.

These ballots are only being sent out in 'purple states' and this is a big deal. This is called voter caging, and is a huge problem. The McCain campaign is stealing this election as we speak! Please get this information out to as many people as you can, and tell anyone you know who has received one of these ballots that they need to contact their city election clerk or the supervisor of elections immediately. Also call the local media and let them know what is going on. The main stream media is never going to cover this so we have to depend on our ground campaign to get the word out to our voters.
Howie ~~~

HUMOR


http://www.jibjab.com/originals/this_land

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/time_for_some_campaignin

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Hysterical! K

Subject: Les Misbarack

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/les-misbarack.html
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GENERAL


The lying game

Like George W. Bush, McCain and Palin have to lie. Because if they told the truth about their policies, they'd lose the election.
By Alan Wolfe

Sep. 18, 2008 | Eight years after the travesty of the 2000 election, in which the media were prone to emphasize Al Gore's exaggerations while letting George W. Bush off the hook, Republican politicians finally are being called out on their dishonesty. "The biggest liar in modern political history," writes Michael Tomasky, the editor of the Guardian America, about John McCain. There are indeed so many lies associated with the Republican campaign that one can pick and choose at random. My favorites are the efforts by the McCain campaign to portray Obama as being in favor of teaching sex education to 5-year-olds and the Spanish language ad accusing him of opposing immigration reform. Your favorites might include McCain's claim that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class or his statement to the women of "The View" that Sarah Palin never requested earmarks.

McCain's propensity to lie has become what political junkies call a meme, an idea or behavior that runs, seemingly unstoppably, from one media outlet to another. Some bloggers offer daily counts of how many falsehoods McCain tells while others wonder why the Democrats do not respond in turn. Even the mainstream press has gotten into the act. One of the pleasures of the 2008 campaign -- I admit they have been few and far between -- is watching all those who once admired John McCain for his truthfulness realize the true depths of his moral depravity. When McCain is linked to Palin, moreover, as he so frequently wants to be, lying experiences something of a multiplier effect. These candidates lie so much that they have taken to lying about their own lies.

Before we get carried away with enthusiasm about all this, though, we should keep two things in mind. One is that we are so quick to label McCain a liar that we tend to forget how much, and with what horrendous consequences, George W. Bush possessed the same character flaw. The other is that Republicans lie so frequently, not because the party just happened to settle upon one serial liar after another to run for high office, but because the form of conservatism to which they all adhere demands that if they are to win they have no choice but to lie.

In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, then something of a political unknown, claimed to be a compassionate conservative and promised the country a "humble" foreign policy. Lies both. Compassionate conservatism was a brilliant campaign slogan, an attempt by Bush to persuade independent voters that he was not a raving madman like Newt Gingrich, who had urged, in true Dickensian fashion, the building of orphanages to solve the welfare problem. Long before the public had ever heard of Rick Warren, Karl Rove understood that the evangelical base of the Republican Party wanted language more uplifting than traditional Republican red meat, and the idea that conservatives were in fact more compassionate than bureaucratic liberals provided it. In actuality, as we now know, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, the most compassionate program ever adopted in this country, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to do so.

Bush spoke in 2000 of a humble foreign policy for much the same reason. We now also know that the Bush-Cheney administration was intent on adopting the most aggressive American foreign stance possible, and that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, offered them the public justification for actions they had been secretly planning since taking office. We tend to forget that before Sept. 11, aggressive foreign policy moves were not all that popular. Americans wanted a peace dividend in the aftermath of communism's collapse and seemed hell-bent on turning inward to their private pursuits. In that context, offering them a humble approach while planning a militant one constituted as dramatic a lie as one can imagine.

I would never challenge the argument that John McCain's lies in 2008 are over the top. But if McCain is more serial a liar than George W. Bush, it is a matter of degree rather than kind. Bush's lies, after all, led to thousands of needless deaths, and none of John McCain's lies, at least to this point, have done that. Were he to find himself elected, McCain would no doubt lie about many things, such as whether the United States has engaged in torture or whether Iran is a genuine military threat to the United States. But the bar has been set way too high; given the mendacity of the Bush administration, I am at something of a loss to imagine that a McCain administration could lie more.

Why do Republicans lie so much? Why is McCain following the Bush script? Why, at the very moment when he wanted a "maverick" by his side, did McCain pick a congenital liar to be his running mate? Republicans engage in what I can only call "structural lies." To understand what this means consider this: Just about every significant lie uttered by Republican politicians is designed to make them seem less conservative than they really are.

The current lie du jour of the McCain campaign is that their man will aggressively take on the greed that is causing the collapse on Wall Street. Given McCain's lack of interest in the economy, wealthy campaign contributors, and ideological hostility toward government regulation, this stance is laughable. But McCain's lie unconsciously reveals an important truth, which is that when the economy goes into a tailspin, the public prefers a solution long identified with liberalism. McCain could tell the truth, which is that he is all for the free market and can barely wait until the crisis passes so the rich can go about the business of becoming ever richer. But if he does that, he will lose. McCain wants to win. Therefore he lies.

It is not just the economy that features this structural dynamic. If you were just tuning into the election now -- no doubt there are many Americans who have not quite tuned in yet -- you would think that the Republican Party loves workers, hopes to redistribute income to the lower middle class, embraces immigrants, favors environmental protection, and hates war. Some of the Republican lies, to be sure have nothing to do with policy, such as false estimates of the size of the crowds attending Republican rallies or Sarah Palin's announcement that she had sold the Alaska governor's plane on eBay, but of those that do, the overwhelming majority are designed to make the Republican ticket more humane and moderate than it actually is. Only on foreign policy, where McCain shows no interest in hiding his hawkish instincts, can the ticket claim to be taking an honest position even if the face of public skepticism.

Conservatism is an honorable political philosophy whose most eloquent spokesmen, such as John Adams and Edmund Burke, proclaimed the truth as they saw it. This is a tradition that continues among all those contemporary conservatives who have been appalled at the direction the McCain camp has taken and have been willing to say so publicly. In contrast, the conservative populism that has swallowed up the contemporary Republican Party lies because conservative populism is itself a lie. It claims to be guided by faith when it is run by corruption. It speaks of diversity but remains overwhelmingly white. It uses women to push an agenda that would expose women to harm. It speaks of reform tomorrow to slash the reforms of today. It seeks popular support to enact policies that, if revealed for what they were, would be wildly unpopular.

Like so many of John McCain's critics, I find myself astonished at the sheer brazenness of the lies he tells. But this is not because McCain is more dishonorable than Bush. It is because the conditions under which a truthful Republican could be elected in 2008 are much more difficult than they were in 2000. Through sheer incompetence and cronyism, George W. Bush showed Americans just how dangerous conservatism can be. Because he did, those conservatives who would succeed him face even more difficult obstacles placed in their path to power. In the past, they might have gotten away with lying occasionally. This will no longer do. Expect, therefore, as the country turns to the debates ahead, that John McCain, when addressing issues of foreign policy around which he has been remarkably honest, will begin to lie in that area as well.

-- By Alan Wolfe

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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I LOVE Frank Rich. Read his book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: From 9/11 to Katrina" if you get a chance. He really is challenging the press to do its job. K

September 21, 2008
Truthiness Stages a Comeback

By FRANK RICH
NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.

Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.

For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.

But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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McCain Loses His Head
By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 WashingtonPost.com

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small.
'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."
-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and the New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

georgewill@washpost.com

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Loan titans paid McCain aide
Officials: Campaign manager hired to help Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
By David D. Kirkpatrick and Charles Duhigg
The New York Times

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions.

'Didn’t really do anything'
“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.

Mr. Davis’s role with the group has bubbled up as an issue in the campaign, but the extent of his compensation and the details of his role have not been reported previously.

Mr. McCain was never a leading critic or defender of the mortgage giants, although several former executives of the companies said Mr. Davis did draw Mr. McCain to a 2004 awards banquet that the companies’ Homeownership Alliance held in a Senate office building. The organization printed a photograph of Mr. McCain at the event in its 2004 annual report, bolstering its clout and credibility. The event honored several other elected officials, including at least two Democrats, Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama.

In an interview Sunday night with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain noted that Mr. Davis was no longer working on behalf of the mortgage giants. He said Mr. Davis “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

Asked about the reports of Mr. Davis’s role, a spokesman for Mr. McCain said that during the time when Mr. Davis ran the Homeownership Alliance, the senator had backed legislation to increase oversight of the mortgage companies’ accounting and executive compensation. The legislation, however, did not seek to change their anomalous structure as private companies with federal support.

The spokesman, Tucker Bounds, also noted that the Homeownership Alliance included nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Urban League. “It’s not controversial to promote homeownership and minority homeownership,” Mr. Bounds said. More than a half-dozen current and former executives, however, said the Homeownership Alliance was set up mainly to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by promoting their role in the housing market, and the two companies paid almost the entire cost of the group’s operations.

Financed by Freddie, Fannie
“They were financed largely, possibly exclusively, by Fannie and Freddie,” said William R. Maloni, a Democrat who is a former head of industry relations for Fannie Mae. “We thought it would be helpful to have someone who was a broadly recognized Republican to be the face of the organization, and that person became Rick Davis.” Mr. Maloni added, “Rick, for that purpose, turned out to be quite good.” (Several executives said Mr. Davis’s compensation was not unusual for the companies’ well-connected consultants.)

The federal bailout of the two mortgage giants has become an emblem of what critics say is the outdated or inadequate regulatory system that allowed the financial system to slide into crisis this summer.

At the time that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recruited Mr. Davis to run the Homeownership Alliance in 2000, they were under new pressure from private industry rivals and deregulation-minded Republicans who argued that the two companies’ federal sponsorship gave them an unfair advantage and put taxpayers at risk. Critics of the companies had formed their own Washington-based advocacy group, FM Watch. They were pushing for regulations that would deter the companies from expanding into new areas, including riskier and more profitable mortgages.

Mr. Davis had recently returned to his lobbying firm from running Mr. McCain’s unexpectedly strong 2000 Republican primary campaign, which elevated Mr. McCain’s profile as a legislator and Mr. Davis’s as a lobbyist.

“You can say what you want about free-market distortions, but people like the system because it gets them into houses cheap,” Mr. Davis said to Institutional Investor magazine in 2000, adding that he would run the advocacy group out of his Alexandria, Va., lobbying firm.

The organization also hired Public Strategies, a communications firm that included former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon. Mr. Davis wrote letters and gave speeches for the group. In April 2001, he sent out a press release headlined, “It’s Tax Day — Do You Know Where Your Deductions Are? For Most Americans, They’re in Your Home.”

But by the end of 2005, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were recovering from accounting problems and re-examining costs, former executives said. The companies decided the Homeownership Alliance had outlived its usefulness, and it disappeared.

John Harwood contributed reporting.

This article, "Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million," first appeared in the New York Times.

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
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Fascinating article. Must read. K


September 21, 2008
THE COLLEGE ISSUE
Case Study

By ALEXANDRA STARR

When Jaime Escuder, a University of Chicago law student, was searching for a professor to supervise an independent project on prisoners’ rights, he turned to Barack Obama, but not for his politics. As a student in Obama’s constitutional law class in 2001, Escuder was impressed by his teacher’s ability to see both sides of an argument. “I figured Obama would respect the stance I took in the paper, whether or not he agreed with it,” Escuder, now a public defender in Illinois, told me. In the project, Escuder forcefully advocated for prisoners’ having the freedom to procreate. Obama gave him guidance on honing his argument — but never told him if he agreed. When he did venture an opinion, it was to prod Escuder to consider real-world implications. On running into Escuder at the Hyde Park Co-op one weekend morning, Obama said: “I don’t think that you’re giving adequate consideration to how difficult it will be for prison officials to care for pregnant women. I’ve been dealing with this recently, and believe me, it isn’t easy.” Escuder assumed Obama was talking about being a father.

Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for a decade before he left in 2003 to run for the United States Senate. He emerged as one of the Senate’s most liberal members, and his voting record is often invoked in the current campaign, especially by his opponents. But the men and women who studied with him at Chicago echo Escuder’s observation that Obama was much more pragmatic than ideological. Even as his political career advanced, Obama’s teaching stuck to the law-school norm of dispassionately evaluating competing arguments with the tools of forensic logic. But Obama apparently was not attached to legal argumentation for its own sake. “It was drilled into us from Day 1 that you examined your biases and inclinations,” Richard Hess, now an attorney at Susman Godfrey in Houston, told me. “And then, when you made decisions, they were based on sound empirical reasons.” Escuder saw his professor as “a street smart academic”: “He wanted his students to consider the impact laws and judicial opinions had on real people.” According to Marcus Fruchter, who took constitutional law with Obama and now practices at the law firm of Schopf & Weiss in Chicago, “You never would have known he was going to be a liberal senator based on what he said in his courses.”

Obama’s rootedness in the real world shaped every aspect of his teaching. He laced his lectures with basketball analogies. When a student observed the death of Jam Master Jay of the hip-hop group Run-DMC by wearing the group’s trademark tracksuit to the racism seminar, Obama acknowledged the gesture with a nod and a smile. (“I can assure you, that would not have been a common response among the faculty at the University of Chicago,” Joshua Pemstein told me. He was in class that day and now practices at Foley Hoag in Boston.) Obama’s style resonated with students, who packed his classes despite the fact that his obligations as a state senator meant that when the Legislature was in session his courses were held early on Monday morning and on Friday afternoon. If his students begrudged the early risings and missed three-day-weekends, they didn’t take it out on Obama in their course evaluations: they routinely rated him as one of the best teachers at the law school.

I recently spoke to many of Obama’s former students and asked them to speculate about how the teacher they saw manage a classroom might try to manage a country. Some students thought Obama’s teaching offers a more accurate glimpse of his potential presidency than the oft-cited statistic that he holds the most liberal voting record in the Senate. “I don’t think that there is a ‘teacher Obama’ and ‘politician Obama,’ ” said David Bird, who works at Reed Smith in Pittsburgh. “He came across as very practical and down to earth. I think that reflects who he is as a person and his experience organizing and in the legislature.” Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who lobbies for progressive causes in Illinois, agreed that his former professor isn’t likely to emerge as an ideological liberal if he indeed makes it to the White House. “Based on what I saw in the classroom, my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words,” he said. “Ruthless pragmatism.”

Obama’s status as senior lecturer in law was a rarefied one. At that time, two federal judges — Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, both of the Seventh Circuit — held that position, and both men had been full-time, distinguished members of the Chicago faculty before joining the bench and reducing their course loads at the law school. So when the 34-year-old Obama told the law school’s dean, Douglas Baird, that he wanted the same post, Baird was somewhat taken aback. “He’s not a man possessed by self-doubt,” Baird told me with a smile.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think highly of Obama. Baird had recruited him from Harvard Law School, where Obama was the first African-American president of the law review. Baird arranged for the promising graduating student to become a law and government fellow at Chicago, providing Obama with a stipend and office so he could complete his first book, “Dreams From My Father.” In 1996, after winning election to the state senate, Obama decided he needed to supplement the salary he would draw as a legislator. And so over dinner at the Park Avenue Café in Chicago one evening, he and Baird hammered out an agreement whereby Obama would become a senior lecturer and teach three classes a year.

The dean reiterated a long-standing offer for Obama to take a tenure-track position, mentioning that it would require him to publish legal scholarship. “Douglas,” he replied, according to Baird, “that’s just not me.” Baird points out that Obama could have fudged the issue; it wasn’t as if they were inking a publication schedule. In any event, Baird pushed hard to get Obama the senior lecturer position. The newly minted state senator would have added diversity to the law school: at the time, there was only one person of color on the full-time Chicago academic teaching staff. And Obama had proved to be a skilled teacher. “You could tell from the course evaluations and enrollments that students had really taken to him,” Baird told me.

When Obama was promoted to the senior lecturer position, he had only taught his seminar on racism and the law. While his teaching schedule expanded to include constitutional law and voting rights, it was his original seminar that left the greatest impression on his students. In the class, Obama emphasized how people’s experiences and backgrounds could influence their perceptions of prejudice and the possible need for government action to curb its effects. “He wanted us to be aware of our biases so we could better avoid the pitfalls they can bring,” a former student, Bethany Lampland, who now practices in New York, told me.

He did that in part by sharing personal stories that revealed preconceptions he himself harbored. In the fall of 2003, for example, he related an uncomfortable encounter he had one evening on Lake Shore Drive. An Asian driver in a souped-up Honda cut him off; when the two men reached a stoplight, Obama shot him a dirty look. The driver’s response was to roll down his window and yell “nigger” at Obama before speeding off.

The professor described himself as initially shocked. But as he reflected on the episode, he told the class, he realized that the other driver wasn’t the only one harboring stereotypes. “I was thinking, Here’s some Asian kid on his way to a club,” Obama said, according to Richard Hess, who was enrolled in the course. Obama had stereotyped the driver as the kind of person who would never call him “nigger.”

Hess, who worked in Democratic politics before attending law school, told me he was impressed by his professor’s ability to coolly analyze such an unpleasant confrontation. “I thought it displayed a thoughtfulness,” he said. “He would talk about race in a way that I doubt anyone had heard from their professor before, or I had heard from a politician before.”

Tom Hynes, who took racism and the law in 1996, agrees that Obama’s openness and the seminar discussions he encouraged were highly unusual. “That class was a catalyst to examine biases you might have developed throughout your own life,” said Hynes, who now works in finance. “Obama had a way of getting you to think and talk about issues people generally don’t like to think and talk about.”

The class led Hynes to take a hard look at his experiences growing up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in racially balkanized Chicago. Under Obama’s supervision, he wrote an independent paper on the history of tensions between Irish immigrants and African-Americans. He was struck, he said, by Obama’s pragmatic take on race relations. “In his mind, the real problem wasn’t racist attitudes some people may hold, but the fact that some minorities were starting at such a huge disadvantage,” Hynes recounted. “Issues like poor public education and the lack of access to credit seemed more glaring to him.” When Hynes studied with Obama, his professor was starting a political career, a profession Hynes had seen up close: his father was president of the Illinois State Senate in the late 1970s, and his brother, Dan Hynes, currently serves as Illinois state comptroller. Four years ago, Dan Hynes campaigned for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate — and was beaten by Obama.

Dennis Hutchinson, who also teaches courses on race and the law at Chicago, pointed out that Obama’s racial background gave him a certain advantage. “Let’s be frank,” Hutchinson, who is white, said. “If you’re black, and you are teaching a group of mostly white students about sensitive topics touching on race, then you’re controlling the class.” But like any good law professor, Obama seems not to have used his position to produce a preconceived political result. When he lectured on a pivotal affirmative-action Supreme Court case, for instance, he emphasized that white contractors who lost out to minority businesses because of racial set-asides had a legitimate grievance. Similarly, Obama allowed that there was an argument to be made for paying out reparations for slavery. The class reading — including authors like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington — certainly bolstered the idea that some kind of atonement was warranted. But after making the theoretical case, Obama pushed his students to think about the implications of actually cutting checks to the descendants of slaves. It was possible, he pointed out, that the move would merely create resentment.

Obama kept his own thoughts on the topics he was teaching mostly to himself. Michael Turbes, a lawyer who now practices in Atlanta, learned within the first few weeks of his voting rights seminar just how inscrutable Obama could be. Turbes, who is African-American, knew Obama from outside the classroom: the two met while lifting weights in the gym and occasionally played one-on-one basketball. Despite the friendliness, Turbes is not sure exactly what transpired in early 1997, when Obama announced he wanted to change the time the voting rights class was meeting. Turbes was enrolled in another course at the suggested hour, and the window when students could make changes to their schedule had passed. He mentioned this to Obama, who said he would put the matter to a vote.

“I told him, ‘There are some things you don’t vote on,’ ” Turbes recalled.

Obama then invited the rest of the class to debate Turbes’s point and eventually asked for a show of hands. Turbes speculated that Obama regarded the impasse as a teaching moment and allowed the back-and-forth to go on because it was generating a spirited discussion. Since a majority of his classmates voted to keep the same time slot, he can’t be sure if his hunch is correct. “I’ve read that he’s good at poker, and that doesn’t surprise me,” Turbes said. “He is good at not wearing his opinions on his sleeve.”

Dan Johnson-Weinberger studied voting rights with Obama two years after Turbes did. He remembers Obama as an able observer of the allocation of power in the American democratic system. As Obama shepherded students through the evolution of how Americans elect their representatives, Johnson-Weinberger told me, he emphasized how important the rules of the game were in determining who won elections.

That background in voting law, the former student said, played a factor in Obama’s primary triumph over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “He understood how important the caucus states would be, and he grasped that voters in African-American Congressional districts would have a disproportionate impact in selecting the nominee,” he said. “I think one of the reasons he said yes to this race is that he grasped the structural path to victory.”

Johnson-Weinberger, who has championed alternative electoral systems like proportional voting in Illinois, found Obama’s practical approach to be a welcome respite from traditional law-school fare. His former professor, he speculates, would bring a similar mind-set to the White House. “I don’t think he’s wedded to any particular ideology,” Johnson-Weinberger told me. “If he has an impatience about anything, it’s the idea that some proposals aren’t worthy of consideration.”

Johnson-Weinberger has long been an Obama fan. He volunteered for Obama’s losing 2000 primary challenge to Representative Bobby Rush and his triumphant Senate run four years later. But even he is a little stunned by how rapid Obama’s rise has been. “If I had told him then that he was going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, he would have laughed,” Johnson-Weinberger said.

Or maybe not. Obama offered many hypotheticals in his courses to help explain cases. In a constitutional law lecture more than a decade ago, he tossed out one asking his students to imagine him as president of the United States, according to one who was present. Some giggles ensued.

What, he asked, is so funny about that?

Alexandra Starr has written about politics and culture for The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic and The American Scholar.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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My candidate, myself

Even when faced with new facts and insights, most voters don't change their minds about their favorite candidates. A neurologist explains how they might.
By Robert Burton

Sep. 22, 2008 | "Let's make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times" -- George W. Bush, 2008

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to "their candidate"; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong.

Unfortunately, cognitive science offers some fairly sobering observations about our ability to judge ourselves and others.

Perhaps the single academic study most germane to the present election is the 1999 psychology paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The two Cornell psychologists began with the following assumptions.

Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
To put their theories to the test, the psychologists asked a group of Cornell undergraduates to undergo a series of self-assessments, including tests of logical reasoning taken from a Law School Admissions Test preparation guide. Prior to being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate how they thought they would fare in comparison with the others taking the tests.

On average, participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile, revealing that most of us tend to overestimate our skills somewhat. But those in the bottom 25 percent consistently overestimated their ability to the greatest extent. For example, in the logical reasoning section, individuals who scored in the 12th percentile believed that their general reasoning abilities fell at the 68th percentile, and that their overall scores would be in the 62nd percentile. The authors point out that the problem was not primarily underestimating how others had done; those in the bottom quartile overestimated the number of their correct answers by nearly 50 percent. Similarly, after seeing the answers of the best performers -- those in the top quartile -- those in the bottom quartile continued to believe that they had performed well.

The article's conclusion should be posted as a caveat under every political speech of those seeking office. And it should serve as the epitaph for the Bush administration: "People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's."

The converse also bears repeating. Despite the fact that students in the top quartile fairly accurately estimated how well they did, they also tended to overestimate the performance of others. In short, smart people tend to believe that everyone else "gets it." Incompetent people display both an increasing tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities and a belief that they are smarter than the majority of those demonstrably sharper.

Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one's decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right. As I have pointed out in my recent book, "On Being Certain," feelings of conviction, certainty and other similar states of "knowing what we know" may feel like logical conclusions, but are in fact involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason. At their most extreme, these are the spontaneous "aha" or "Eureka" sensations that tell you that you have made a major discovery. Lesser forms include gut feelings, hunches and vague intuitions of knowing something, as well as the standard "yes, that's right" feeling that you get when you solve a problem.

The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought. Indeed, these feelings can occur in the absence of any specific thought, such as with electrical and chemical brain stimulation. They can also occur spontaneously during so-called mystical or spiritual epiphanies in which the affected person senses an immediate "understanding of the meaning or purpose of the universe." William James described this phenomenon as "felt knowledge."

Feelings of absolute certainty and utter conviction are not rational deliberate conclusions; they are involuntary mental sensations generated by the brain. Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments. Just as it's nearly impossible to reason with someone who's enraged and combative, refuting or diminishing one's sense of certainty is extraordinarily difficult. Certainty is neither created by nor dispelled by reason.

Similarly, without access to objective evidence, we are terrible at determining whether a candidate is telling us the truth. Most large-scale psychological studies suggest that the average person is incapable of accurately predicting whether someone is lying. In most studies, our abilities to make such predictions, based on facial expressions and body language, are no greater than by chance alone -- hardly a recommendation for choosing a presidential candidate based upon a gut feeling that he or she is honest.

Worse, our ability to assess political candidates is particularly questionable when we have any strong feeling about them. An oft-quoted fMRI study by Emory psychologist Drew Westen illustrates how little conscious reason is involved in political decision-making.

Westen asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice. Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system -- the center for emotional processing -- lit up dramatically. According to Westen, both Republicans and Democrats "reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted" (cognitive dissonance).

In other words, we are as bad at judging ourselves as we are at judging others. Most cognitive scientists now believe that the majority of our thoughts originate in the areas of the brain inaccessible to conscious introspection. These beginnings of thoughts arrive in consciousness already colored with inherent bias. No two people see the world alike. Each of our perceptions is filtered through our genetic predispositions, inherent biologic differences and idiosyncratic life experiences. Your red is not my red. These differences extend to the very building blocks of thoughts; each of us will look at any given question from his own predispositions. Thinking may be as idiosyncratic as fingerprints.

As a result, we are all plagued by bias, self-deceit and poor character judgment. So, is there a better approach, a better methodology for assessing important personal qualities when the chips are down? After all, when that 3 a.m. emergency call comes, we won't care about a president's charm, church, oratorical abilities, cuteness of children, whether he or she wears designer glasses, is the world's greatest war hero, has an Arabic-sounding middle name or "feels like one of us."

Would we choose a neurosurgeon for those reasons? I would choose a neurosurgeon for his or her dexterity and decision-making. So I want a president aware of how his mind works, as well as what he suspects are his inborn biases and intellectual limitations. Ironically, the acknowledgment of intellectual limitations may be the best evidence for superior decision-making skills. Contrary to George Bush's belief, we do not want certainty in the White House. We want flexibility and an acknowledgment that certainty is often a sign of ignorance.

Unfortunately, sound bites, TV interviews and presidential debates often fail to reveal the candidates' real thought processes -- how each would approach a new or complex problem for which he or she doesn't already have a pat answer.

Ideally, I would like to put the candidates through a series of tests similar to those given to the Cornell undergraduates. The candidates would be given questions, including a variety of "thought experiments" for which they could not be prepared in advance. Then we could see their thought processes in action. We would have a better idea of how they reasoned and whether they rely on gut feelings and instincts. We could see their ability to step back from their own answers to judge their quality and accuracy.

As many of the most pressing issues of the day have a large science component, I would particularly want to focus on each candidate's intellectual grasp of scientific method, from choosing and evaluating evidence to seeing how they would respond to a well-constructed contrary line of reasoning. I would want them to answer difficult, complex questions about aspects of science such as global warming, stem-cell research or alternative energy sources for which they may not have adequate knowledge. I want to see how the candidates respond when stumped. Are they evasive, flustered or straightforward in admitting what they don't know or understand? Equally important, I would like to see how each responds when presented with evidence that his answers are wrong. Is he or she capable of admitting to having made an error? Would he or she be flexible enough to change an opinion?

And, when answers seem to conflict with traditional reasoning and scientific method, I would want the candidate to explain why he or she continues to hold such beliefs. For example, give me a reason-based, scientific explanation of speaking in tongues, or how one can objectively determine that one has "heard the voice of God," or that the Earth is 7,000 years old. This is not meant as a challenge to one's faith -- each of us is entitled to our beliefs. But as a public servant, each candidate has the obligation to explain how non-scientific beliefs are justified. If a candidate insists on a faith-based decision, such as "knowing" that the Earth is only as old as written in the Bible, I want to hear how that is justified in the face of contrary evidence.

Each of the candidates has repeatedly emphasized that this is a pivotal moment in American history. They are all experienced in interviewing potential co-workers, running partners and job applicants. I doubt that they would stop at allowing an applicant to simply recite his qualifications. So the candidates should be willing, even eager to submit to the most difficult personal interrogations themselves. After all, this is an opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual prowess and skills with decision-making. Conversely, no candidate should be allowed to retreat into canned speeches or evasive comments.

Many of the failures of post-9/11 American policy were caused by or aggravated by the inability of our president to recognize his intellectual limitations (including his choice of advisors), keep an open mind, evaluate evidence such as the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction, and listen to all sides of a complex issue. Perhaps this could have been avoided if Bush had been forced to publicly answer serious multifaceted questions prior to the election. Let's not make the same mistake again.

The next six weeks are our only chance to elect the most qualified candidate. This is not a time for interviewer politeness and gentle repartee that sidesteps controversial or delicate issues. It is not enough to hear each candidate regurgitate memorized and rehearsed policy statements; we must know what they will do and how they will act in situations for which they have not been adequately prepared. Leadership is measured by the best decisions during the worst times.

-- By Robert Burton


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September 20, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Lipstick Bungle

By CHARLES M. BLOW
Mr. McCain, on Monday you repeated your delusional notion that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. Now, the federal government is working on a deal to save that economy from collapsing. You have admitted that the economy is not your forte, so you could have used a running mate with some financial chops. (Remember Mitt Romney?)

But no. Who did you pick? SnowJob SquareGlasses whose financial credentials include running Wasilla into debt, listing (but not selling) a plane on EBay and flip-flopping on a bridge to wherever. In fact, when it comes to real issues in general, she may prove to be a liability.

In what respect, you may ask?

It turns out that the Republican enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is just as superficial as she is. They were so eager for someone to cheer for (because they really don’t like you) that they dove face first into the Palin mirage. But, on the issues, even they worry about her.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week 77 percent of Republicans said that they had a favorable opinion of Palin. But when asked what specifically they liked about her, their top five reasons were that she was honest, tough, caring, outspoken and fresh-faced. Sounds like a talk-show host, not a vice president. (By the way, her intelligence was in a three-way tie for eighth place, right behind “I just like her.”)

When those Republicans were asked what they liked least about her, they started to sound more like everyone else. Aside from those who said that there was nothing they didn’t like, next on the list were: her lack of experience, her record as governor and her lack of foreign-policy experience.

Also, most Republicans think you only picked her to help with the election, not because she is qualified, and a third said that they would be “concerned” if for some reason she actually had to serve as president.

And Palin is proving to be just as vacant as people suspected. In her interview with Charles Gibson last week, she didn’t know what the Bush doctrine was. At your first joint town hall meeting with her in Michigan on Wednesday, in front of an invitation-only crowd of Republicans no less, she dodged substantive questions about the issues as if they were sniper fire, while issuing a faux challenge to the audience to play a game of “stump the candidate”. Seriously?

Many of your supporters will no doubt cry sexism. Fine with me. But that defense rings hollow. I find many of them to be sexist. Fresh-faced? Delegates on the floor of the Republican National Convention wearing buttons like “Hoosiers for the hot chick”?

Seriously.

E-mail chblow@nytimes.com.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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This was recently sent to me. I don't know its origins but it's still a great reminder of why we're out there and why this election matters. K

Just in case we take our right to vote for granted..............

This is the story of our Grandmothers, and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years ago. It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'
HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.

History is being made.


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LOCAL

For those of you who want to volunteer, please sign up. I have! K

Our team has been hard at work over the past couple months. More than 175 volunteers have helped us collect over 1,700 voter registration forms in the north Waldo / Brookside / Plaza area. The registrations were collected one at a time by volunteers who were willing to take that small step from being a supporter to being an agent of change in this campaign. But time is running out. We only have 2 weeks left before the October 8 Missouri voter registration deadline.

We will be canvassing our area this weekend. If you’ve helped us before, we need your help now more than ever. If you haven’t been able to help us, now is the time to step forward and multiply your one vote by helping others register to vote so that they’ll be able to vote for Barack on November 4. Some of our friends in Kansas feel that their votes don’t count, but I know that their time counts when it’s spent in Missouri helping our supporters register to vote.

Please sign up to help us canvass our neighborhoods on:

Saturday at 10AM and/or 2PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs7kjq

Sunday at 4PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs73ls

We’re not asking for money. We’re asking for something far more valuable: your time. Your time can be translated into votes right here in OUR neighborhoods. Voter registrations combined with person-to-person communications are what is going to win this election and we only have 14 days left to register those people who will cast the winning votes!

We need several hundred volunteers to knock on doors, identify our supporters and help them get their voter registrations up to date so that they can cast their votes to make Barack Obama the next President of the United States of America.

3 hours is a small price to pay to help save our country. Will you give us those 3 hours this weekend? We’ll be running canvassing shifts at 10AM and 2PM on Saturday and one shift at 4PM on Sunday following the Chiefs’ victory over Denver. We’ll meet at the bus Park & Ride parking lot on the northeast corner of Gregory Blvd. and Wornall Rd.

If you can help us, please register for the shift(s) by clicking on the appropriate link(s) below and then following the instructions at the bottom of the web page to sign up for the event. Please provide an e-mail address and telephone number in the “Comments” box on the registration form so that we can send you a Canvassing Instruction Sheet and contact you should there be last-minute changes to our plans.

Saturday at 10AM and/or 2PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs7kjq

Sunday at 4PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs73ls

Please forward this e-mail to your friends in the area so that they too can help Barack win Missouri!

George Mayer
Volunteer



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Please join friends and neighbors for an evening supporting the re-election of

Robin Carnahan
Missouri Secretary of State

Tuesday, October 7
5:30 - 7:30 pm

at Baja 600 on the Plaza
Kansas City, MO

Suggested Contribution

$1500 - Sponsor $1000 - Host

$500 - Supporter $250 - Friend

Contributions should be sent to Robin Carnahan for Misssouri, P.O. Box 23190, St. Louis, MO 63156 or online at www.RobinCarnahan.com

For more information or to RSVP call Nicole Woodie at 314.367.2004 or nicole@robincarnahan.com


Paid for by Robin Carnahan for Missouri Committee, Tom Carnahan, Treasurer
P.O. Box 23190, St. Louis, MO 63156

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Excellent free opportunity. Please sign up if you're available. K

ACLU is holding a day-long activist training next weekend.

This training is very basic kind of activism:
-how to speak effectively with an elected leader;
-how to articulate one's position on an issue without embarrassing the cause;
-how to write effective letters to the Editor & so on. Very basic stuff.

You may not necessarily need this training but you probably know people who could benefit from it. Will you please pass this email and information on to them?

Young people are welcome. Registration is all that is required and that can be done easily online.
https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=nat_kansascity_missouri_training&JServSessionIdr001=6djitv5ro1.app23a

ACLU national staff will be in town to lead the training.

The cost is free; lunch is provided.

Sunday, 9/28/08
9 am - 4 pm
UMKC, Royal Hall, Room 111

Here's an article on the training from our website: http://www.aclukswmo.org/full_content.php?article_id=773&full=yes&pbr=1


Thanks for your help. I hope you are well.

Donnie Morehouse
Associate Director
ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri
3601 Main Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64111
816-756-3113 x 234
dmorehouse@aclukswmo.org

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Here's some Green News from our friend at It's Only Natural on Gregory at Wornall:


1. This one's a bit old - but its a good reminder that when you throw something away - there is no "away." All trash goes somewhere - a landfill. And our landfills are filling up way faster than anyone could have predicted.

Here's some info from KC Public Works: We used to have 4 landfills available but closed down three years early. The landfill in Lee’s Summit is expected to close in 2014, in Sugar Creek in 2026, and the Johnson County in 2027. It takes 15 years to site and build a landfill. 70% of the current residential collection could be recycled. Only 18% is being recycled as compared to the national average of 35%. Costs and fees are increasing. When the local landfills close, the closest sites are privately owned sites in Warrensburg and Lawrence. We will have to ship the trash further and incur larger fees on fuel, drivers, and truck maintenance

In a Kansas City Star article in November - it said that what 80% (!) of what goes into the Johnson County landfill (40% of which comes from Missouri) is recylcable items!!!

So - keep stepping up your efforts to reduce (buy less and buy things with less packaging), reuse (fix broken things, buy from garage sales, get free stuff from FreeCycle, swap with neighbors etc) and recycle. The earth will thank you!!

2. From The Kansas City Star, December 28, 2007, p. A8: "Frustrated by what they see as insufficient action by the federal and state governments, municipalities around the country are offering financial incentives to get people to go green:
*Free hybrid-car parking
*Cash rebates for installing solar panels
*Low-interest loans for energy-saving home renovations..."

Unfortunately neither Missouri nor Kansas City were listed in this group - but municipalities are reaping such benefits from these programs, I expect we'll start benefiting from local versions as well.

3. Everyone has heard about - and is probably already using (even if you didn't notice) - ethanol from corn and soy based sources. But the latest alternative that looks even more promising is algae. "An acre of one of the planet's fastest-growing plants can produce as much fuel in 10 days as the same amount of corn or soy could in a year. What's more, algae consumes CO2 (which helps it grow even faster), so the green stuff makes a dent in global warming before it enters a vehicle." A recent body+soul Magazine. Amazing!!!

4. Another great reason to buy green and to read labels carefully!!

"Shampoo, carpet, baby bottles, dental sealants... contain chemicals that disrupt the natural way that hormones work. The chemicals, known as endocrine disruptors, are all over your house, your clothing and your car. They promise to make skin softer, clothes smell fresher and food keep longer.

"The problem: Neither the companies that make these products nor federal regulators are telling you that some of these substances may be dangerous. Many have been found to cause life-threatening illnesses in laboratory animals." The Kansas City Star, December 2, 2007, p. A7.

The article mentions that hundreds of studies have shown that these compounds cause a host of problems in lab animals: cancers, early puberty, miscarriages, diabetes, ADD, asthma and autism - "all of which have spiked in people in recent decades since many of these chemicals saturated the marketplace." And while hundreds of products have been banned in countries around the world, the US is not acting to take them off the market.

5. From a recent Green Home column (House & Home section of the Kansas City Star): a great idea on what do you do with your old iPod - enter Ryan Arter, owner of Olathe based iResQ. iResQ repairs Apple products like iPods, iPhones and Mac computers - but if they can't be fixed they can be recycled. The company separates out the batteries, which are recycled and removes any parts that can be used to fix other iPods. The rest of the iPod is sent to be reused or repurposed. Check them out at www.iresq.com

# posted by Blue Hearts @ 8:26 AM