Sunday, February 01, 2009
Blue Hearts 2-1-09
Hey All,
Better late than never. I have some great shots of the Inauguration that I want to share with you. I've posted them on my Facebook page but I know many of you don't subscribe. (I just started last month!!)
My sister, April's, now famous Obama cookies - They're shortbread
Upon arrival, my sister picked me up and we returned to her place where she finished her work in progress. She gifted all the dinner attendees at our Monday and Tuesday night dinners. Yum.
Me with my Donkey friend in the lobby of the Ritz before our dinner at West End Bistro.
Having a drink before dinner from lower left: sister April, cousin Celine, cousin (Celine's brother) Alexander, Aunty Anna, me, Anna's daughter, Karen.
On the metro on the way to the inaugural ceremony. My sister April, friend Nicole and friend Tom. It's not even crowded yet. It was so tight and people kept trying to get on the trains. We were definitely familiar with the sardine experience.
The throngs leaving the Capital South Metro station.
While weaving through the line for the Orange section. It was like walking a labyrinth only in a figure 8. You couldn't find the end of the line if your life depended on it. You can see the security gate behind us.
Once we got into our Orange Section 12 (about 4 hours since we left the house that a.m.) who else was in our section but Bruce and Patty!!! This was my souvenir for Bill!!
A shot from my seat.
Our new president giving his wonderful speech. Oh happy day!
The crowd behind us without flags...
The crowd with flags. Keep in mind, this was with a telephoto lens at the end of it's capability.
Being among millions of people who were all so excited to be in this one place, anticipating such great things from this impressive man, was a truly amazing experience I'll never forget. Listening to the speech and hearing the speakers as they went back and back and back, we were about two sentences ahead of what the back of the crowd was hearing. Listening to the music of the quartet, albeit prerecorded, brought tears to my eyes.
As we were leaving, who was about five people in front of us but Oprah Winfrey. There was a fuzzy microphone over her as she was being interviewed while walking. She had been recording her show from DC, apparently. But I don't think they were with the show.
We slowly milled out of the seating area and headed toward the Library of Congress to attend my Aunt's party in the James Madison room. We felt so fortunate to have a place to go nearby where there would be bathrooms and food!!! If we didn't have that, it would have been possibly hours before we would have had access to either. Certainly the metro stations would all be packed.
Yum!
With James Madison, a lovely jazz ensemble. So civilized!
And we topped off the perfect day with a lovely family dinner at 1789 in Georgetown. What a perfect choice. It's an elegant, intimate dining experience. As it was built in 1789 all the rooms are very cozy. I was so happy to have ended the night like this.
The District celebrates our new president!:
The Newseum
The Willard Hotel
Now, just in case my pictures don't do it for you, here are some more to enjoy:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/the_inauguration_of_president.html
For your enjoyment:
Moneygall is a small village in County Offaly, Ireland. It has
a population of approximately 300 people, has a Roman Catholic church, five
shops, a post office, a national school, a police station and two pubs.
President-elect of the United States Barack Obama's
great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, emigrated from Moneygall
to New York City at the age of 19 in 1850 and eventually resettled in
Tipton County, Indiana. Kearney's father had been the village shoemaker,
then a wealthy skilled trade.
And now for the SONG...Crank up your speakers.
http://www.oneeyedparrot.org/obama.html
And here's an article for your reading pleasure. Can you believe this is coming from Ed Rollins?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/20/rollins.inauguration/index.html
Another reason to have hope.
http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/01/26/obama_cabinet/?source=newsletter
And finally and totally unrelated, if you are interested in receiving a free bone scan and body fat assessment, check this study out. I did it and it was easy. I've included Karren's description. She sent it to me.
Thanks for listening!!!!!!
Kristin
I recently was referred to an osteoporosis study that is being done by UMKC. It took me about an hour for the entire appointment. It involved a blood draw, wt., ht., waist and hip measurements and a total body scan for bone density and body fat (ugh). You have to go to Truman for the appt., and I was very impressed with the facility. The great thing about it is that you get a bone density and % of body fat report that would normally cost about $300. The results are printed out for you to take. The study will go on for approximately another year and is free to anyone of either sex age 18 or over. Plus, you get a free $25 gift card to AMC or Price Chopper. What a deal! The person to contact if interested is below.
Karren
Jillian Richwine
Director, Kansas City Osteoporosis Study (KCOS)
Human Genetics/Genomics Center
Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery and Basic Medical Sciences
University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Medicine
2411 Holmes, M3-C03
Kansas City, Missouri, 64108-2792
LABORATORY: 816-404-5414
FAX: 816-404-5415
MOBILE: 816-645-2048
E-MAIL: richwinej@umkc.edu
Better late than never. I have some great shots of the Inauguration that I want to share with you. I've posted them on my Facebook page but I know many of you don't subscribe. (I just started last month!!)
My sister, April's, now famous Obama cookies - They're shortbread
Upon arrival, my sister picked me up and we returned to her place where she finished her work in progress. She gifted all the dinner attendees at our Monday and Tuesday night dinners. Yum.
Me with my Donkey friend in the lobby of the Ritz before our dinner at West End Bistro.
Having a drink before dinner from lower left: sister April, cousin Celine, cousin (Celine's brother) Alexander, Aunty Anna, me, Anna's daughter, Karen.
On the metro on the way to the inaugural ceremony. My sister April, friend Nicole and friend Tom. It's not even crowded yet. It was so tight and people kept trying to get on the trains. We were definitely familiar with the sardine experience.
The throngs leaving the Capital South Metro station.
While weaving through the line for the Orange section. It was like walking a labyrinth only in a figure 8. You couldn't find the end of the line if your life depended on it. You can see the security gate behind us.
Once we got into our Orange Section 12 (about 4 hours since we left the house that a.m.) who else was in our section but Bruce and Patty!!! This was my souvenir for Bill!!
A shot from my seat.
Our new president giving his wonderful speech. Oh happy day!
The crowd behind us without flags...
The crowd with flags. Keep in mind, this was with a telephoto lens at the end of it's capability.
Being among millions of people who were all so excited to be in this one place, anticipating such great things from this impressive man, was a truly amazing experience I'll never forget. Listening to the speech and hearing the speakers as they went back and back and back, we were about two sentences ahead of what the back of the crowd was hearing. Listening to the music of the quartet, albeit prerecorded, brought tears to my eyes.
As we were leaving, who was about five people in front of us but Oprah Winfrey. There was a fuzzy microphone over her as she was being interviewed while walking. She had been recording her show from DC, apparently. But I don't think they were with the show.
We slowly milled out of the seating area and headed toward the Library of Congress to attend my Aunt's party in the James Madison room. We felt so fortunate to have a place to go nearby where there would be bathrooms and food!!! If we didn't have that, it would have been possibly hours before we would have had access to either. Certainly the metro stations would all be packed.
Yum!
With James Madison, a lovely jazz ensemble. So civilized!
And we topped off the perfect day with a lovely family dinner at 1789 in Georgetown. What a perfect choice. It's an elegant, intimate dining experience. As it was built in 1789 all the rooms are very cozy. I was so happy to have ended the night like this.
The District celebrates our new president!:
The Newseum
The Willard Hotel
Now, just in case my pictures don't do it for you, here are some more to enjoy:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/the_inauguration_of_president.html
For your enjoyment:
Moneygall is a small village in County Offaly, Ireland. It has
a population of approximately 300 people, has a Roman Catholic church, five
shops, a post office, a national school, a police station and two pubs.
President-elect of the United States Barack Obama's
great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, emigrated from Moneygall
to New York City at the age of 19 in 1850 and eventually resettled in
Tipton County, Indiana. Kearney's father had been the village shoemaker,
then a wealthy skilled trade.
And now for the SONG...Crank up your speakers.
http://www.oneeyedparrot.org/obama.html
And here's an article for your reading pleasure. Can you believe this is coming from Ed Rollins?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/20/rollins.inauguration/index.html
Another reason to have hope.
http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/01/26/obama_cabinet/?source=newsletter
And finally and totally unrelated, if you are interested in receiving a free bone scan and body fat assessment, check this study out. I did it and it was easy. I've included Karren's description. She sent it to me.
Thanks for listening!!!!!!
Kristin
I recently was referred to an osteoporosis study that is being done by UMKC. It took me about an hour for the entire appointment. It involved a blood draw, wt., ht., waist and hip measurements and a total body scan for bone density and body fat (ugh). You have to go to Truman for the appt., and I was very impressed with the facility. The great thing about it is that you get a bone density and % of body fat report that would normally cost about $300. The results are printed out for you to take. The study will go on for approximately another year and is free to anyone of either sex age 18 or over. Plus, you get a free $25 gift card to AMC or Price Chopper. What a deal! The person to contact if interested is below.
Karren
Jillian Richwine
Director, Kansas City Osteoporosis Study (KCOS)
Human Genetics/Genomics Center
Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery and Basic Medical Sciences
University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Medicine
2411 Holmes, M3-C03
Kansas City, Missouri, 64108-2792
LABORATORY: 816-404-5414
FAX: 816-404-5415
MOBILE: 816-645-2048
E-MAIL: richwinej@umkc.edu
Monday, January 19, 2009
Hi All,
And welcome to DC!! Well, actually Arlington, VA. I just arrived yesterday and I'm staying with my sister, April. Friend, Julanna, was on my plane and was met by daughter, Hayley, and husband, Adam. Seems like half of KC is here; Alison and Richard, Sonya, Jim and Gabe, Helen and Frank, John and Sharon. Do you think I'll run into them while out and about?
I'm a bit apprehensive about what to expect tomorrow. Will the taxi ever come? How many trains will it take before we get one with seats? How cold will it be? How long will we have to go without access to the facilities? How far will we have to walk to get to our destination? How long will the lines be? Can we bring our purses?
Fortunately April lives here and has several contingency plans. We'll see. And that's the attitude we'll need to have. Today we got some thermal underwear and wicking sock liners! Hope it helps. And after the inaugural ceremony we're going to Anna Eshoo's party where we have to look decent, so no ski attire, etc. Fortunately these are my big concerns. Lucky me.
Sorry to say my camera cable has the wrong-sized tip so I can't download photos while I'm here. I'll have to send them through Facebook if I can get my act together. If not, I can get it done upon my return.
Tonight we're headed into downtown to dine at The Ritz and people watch. Can't wait.
That's it for now.
xo,
Kristin
And welcome to DC!! Well, actually Arlington, VA. I just arrived yesterday and I'm staying with my sister, April. Friend, Julanna, was on my plane and was met by daughter, Hayley, and husband, Adam. Seems like half of KC is here; Alison and Richard, Sonya, Jim and Gabe, Helen and Frank, John and Sharon. Do you think I'll run into them while out and about?
I'm a bit apprehensive about what to expect tomorrow. Will the taxi ever come? How many trains will it take before we get one with seats? How cold will it be? How long will we have to go without access to the facilities? How far will we have to walk to get to our destination? How long will the lines be? Can we bring our purses?
Fortunately April lives here and has several contingency plans. We'll see. And that's the attitude we'll need to have. Today we got some thermal underwear and wicking sock liners! Hope it helps. And after the inaugural ceremony we're going to Anna Eshoo's party where we have to look decent, so no ski attire, etc. Fortunately these are my big concerns. Lucky me.
Sorry to say my camera cable has the wrong-sized tip so I can't download photos while I'm here. I'll have to send them through Facebook if I can get my act together. If not, I can get it done upon my return.
Tonight we're headed into downtown to dine at The Ritz and people watch. Can't wait.
That's it for now.
xo,
Kristin
Friday, October 24, 2008
Blue Hearts 10-24-08
Hey All,
Happy Birthday, Georgianne. No longer triplets for the next 10 months. : (
xo, Ke
Tomorrow I'm going to be overseeing a Canvass and hope you can help. (I just found out this afternoon that I'm doing it! Hence the late notice.)
We'll be meeting at 4235 Baltimore and you can come at 8:45 - 12:45, 11:45 -3:45, or 2:45-6:45. Please see the first item under LOCAL below. The details are from George Mayer (the guy who came to my house to train us on registering voters).
Please try to make it tomorrow. If you can't, come on Sunday. There will be one shift; come at 3 for the 3:30-6:30 shift. These are sort-of training sessions/dry runs for GOTV on Election Day.
And happy reading!
Kristin
HUMOR/LINKS
http://www.myamericanprayer.com/video.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DIc8jdra0o
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This group, Rednecks for Obama, was started by the grandfather of a good friend of a Blue Hearts member! Here's the website. K
http://www.rednecks4obama.com/
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What can I say? The Daily Show could be in every one of my blogs. This is particularly good! How many times am I reassured that I'm not living in an alternate reality when I watch John Stewart?! K
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=188638&title=understanding-real-america-in
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From the New Yorker. Sedaris is always funny. K
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/10/27/081027sh_shouts_sedaris?currentPage=all
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Love this! K
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cc65ed650d
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Very funny. K
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/taking-back-t-4.html
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So You Think You Can Be Vice-President?
via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan by Andrew Sullivan on 10/24/08
The Palin story has now nuked the shark:
Who was the highest paid individual in Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October as it headed down the homestretch?
Not Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser; not Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications staff member. It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night.
Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show “So You Think You Can Dance?”, was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records.
Okay: $11,400 a week to do her make-up? And they were complaining about the Newsweek cover? This is no hockey mom. She's America's Next Top Super Model!
GENERAL
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This is a letter from an uncle to his nephew on why the uncle is voting for Barack Obama this year. It's very well thought out and worth sharing, I thought. K
In response to your question, and out of a desire to clarify my own thinking, I have undertaken to succinctly (not necessarily briefly) explain the reasons I have come to conclude that Barack Obama is the better choice to be our next president.
Tone and Approach to Campaign: Throughout the Clinton and Bush (43) administrations, and the associated campaigns, I have come to believe the single most destructive force in Washington, D.C. is the partisan tone of all discussions. I was pleased to hear both Obama and McCain promise to rise above this, and to run campaigns that were based on serious discussions of our pressing public policy issues, and to reject the politics of personal attack, as exemplified by Karl Rove and James Carville. Obama has kept his pledge. McCain has not. If you choose to employ the politics of personal attack to win the office, you will inevitably continue the game while in office to win a second term. During these times of such serious challenges and issues, we simply must get past this. I give Obama huge points for keeping his word on this, and it enhances my assessment of his credibility and integrity. McCain's approach hurts his credibility with me, and reveals a weakness in character. His approach shows his desire to win trumps his willingness to keep his word and do what he knows is in the best interest of the country. You want to fully understand how far out of hand this campaign rhetoric is getting? Read this Frank Rich column from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?em
Intelligence and Education: Obama was raised by a single mother and grandparents. His father was absent. Did not come from money. Did not come from power or privilege. He studied at Occidental College for two years, and then transferred to Columbia University. And, of course, we all know he went to Harvard Law School where he became the first African-American to be named Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review. He is smart. He is well educated. He had the discipline and drive to raise himself from the bottom to the top through working hard to get a good education.
McCain's track record is very different. It parallels that of George Bush. They are both underperforming third-generation men from powerful families. They are both men of modest intellect, poorly educated. Yes, they were educated at Harvard and Yale (Bush) and the Naval academy (McCain), but barely. Bush was a C student--which is all but a failing grade at the private institutions he attended. And McCain was nearly last in his class. Modest intellect, poor students, poorly educated. They have track records of disdain for education. They are where they are because of their fathers and grandfathers. Obama is intelligent, well educated. He is where he is despite his absent father. In a complex world full of pressing and complex issues, we need well-educated, intelligent leaders. Obama stands head and shoulders above McCain by this measure.
World View and Foreign Policy: What we see in Bush is a world view that sees the world as black and white, or good v evil--where we are defined as good and anyone who opposes us is evil. And what we have learned from Bush is that this world view is no longer workable. Under this view, we rely too heavily on our military power to impose our will. This is a mistake because we cannot afford even the level of military expenditures we are now incurring, and frankly what we are spending is not enough to make the rest of the world submit to our will. This is generational, in my view. McCain's generation sees the world through the eyes of the Cold War. US v Russia. Good v evil. Black and white. The world is more complex today. Less black and white, and more gray. Just like Obama.
Bush, McCain the the Neo-conservatives believe we need a larger military to achieve our objectives. I believe we need a smaller and more intelligent foreign policy. We do need to continue to compete in this world, and we need to do it effectively. We need to rely less on military might, and the mindset that accompanies it, and more on superior ideas, values and vision. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, said: "To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill; the acme of skill is to win the war without fighting." Bush cannot comprehend this. And I don't think McCain does either. McCain--get this--still believes to this day that we could have won the war in Vietnam, if only . . . [fill in the blank]. This is scary--a Commander in Chief who still does not comprehend the lessons of Vietnam. He comes from a military family and that was his history--all he knows is trying to win battles. I believe Obama offers more hope and a greater opportunity in this regard. To succeed on the world stage, we need to be perceived differently. The world will perceive McCain as another Bush. Obama changes everything on the world stage. Here, I see Obama's inexperience as a strength; he is not impaired with the baggage McCain carries from his experiences in a world that bears very little resemblance to the world in which we live today.
Financial Crisis--The Danger Now: The danger now, in the midst of this financial meltdown, is that we will look to the people who created this mess to fix it. Who created this mess? Both parties bear responsibility. The lending criteria directives to promote home ownership for minority and low income home owners that brought down Fannie Mae was created by the Clinton Administration. The former CEO of Fannie Mae is one of Obama's advisers, and that in my view is a mistake.
But I think we have a far bigger problem in that regard on the McCain side. When the history is written on this financial meltdown--which we now see this week is a global financial meltdown--we will see that perhaps nothing set the stage for this more than a piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. It was signed into law by Clinton, very late in his final term. Thus, you might conclude it was the Democrat's fault. The driver behind this legislation, however, and the "Enron loop-hole" in the legislation, was Senator Phil Graham. Graham is one of McCain's close friends and advisers, and McCain was a leading member of the Senate who passed this a similar legislation and refused to rescind it despite many efforts of some to do so over the years.
The Act exempted from regulation most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. What was the effect? This allowed Enron to be Enron, manipulating power markets in California that a few years ago brought the first rolling power outages to California since World War II. It lead to the fall of Enron, who built their house of cards on the back of this unregulated market system. And it has been the #1 driver of moving the price of oil out of the realm of actual producers and users of oil and into the realm of traders and speculators. This is how you get the spike we got recently to $150/barrel.
The Act also set the stage for the fall of AIG, an international insurer crucial to the health and well-being of the US and international economy. How? The act specifically banned regulation of credit default swaps. These unregulated instruments, insurance policies against default on financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns and risky investments like mortgage backed securities, are what necessitated the government bailout of insurer A.I.G. The unregulated market in credit default swaps has grown to some $60 trillion, and it remains a ticking time bomb that may yet cause more calamitous events. This fact illustrates the nature of these credit default swap transactions: the legislation decreed that they were exempt from the anti-gaming laws of the states. I have nothing against gambling in Vegas, but I do not think it should be permitted by the likes of A.I.G. I had credit default swaps explained to me three weeks ago by two guys who have spent their careers on Wall Street. Stated simply, this legislation allowed hedge funds to buy insurance on the credit worthiness of a Lehman brothers, for 2% down and 98% on margin, and then short the stock to put the institution on the brink of collapse. A more simple explanation: I buy $1 million of insurance on your $250,000 house, which I do not own. I pay 2% down and borrow the rest of the premium. And the next day I set your house on fire. This issue may yet bring this country to its knees. This massive financial deregulation has been a hallmark of the Republicans since 2000, and McCain has been a staunch supporter. We need accountability--we need to hold responsible those who are responsible--and McCain and his close friend and advisor Phil Graham were ring-leaders. This was primarily a Republican creation, and this factor alone weighs heavily in favor of throwing the Republican's out of power.
Negatives in Life Narratives: We have seen that both candidates have some negatives in their life narratives. McCain's negatives are summarized in the Rolling Stone profile on McCain, which tells the story of McCain's record from the Naval Academy, his military record, his POW record, and his political career. Many negatives. Obama's negatives are summarized in the Krauthammer column, which discuss Obama's past associations with people of ill repute, such as the pastor, the college professor that was a 1960s Weatherman, and the financier Tony Rezko. All fair game. One observation I would make--McCain's negatives are about him personally. His conduct, his behavior. Obama's focuses on his association with other people, who we find of questionable character and conduct. Fundamental difference. Still cause for concern on both sides, but we have to decide how to weigh the concerns.
The Sarah Palin Factor: As most know, I have a serious concern about the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christian thinking in our democracy. The reason for my concern is that this thinking is so often divorced from objective reality. Faith can be a powerful force for good. It can also be a powerful force for evil. I always admired Jimmy Carter's faith. My impression is that it was a source of strength for him. And I think his religious faith set a paradigm through which he saw himself as a humble servant of the people. The fundamentalist preachers who have decided to "go political", and the army of Christian fundamentalists who seek to infiltrate our government are of a different breed. They bear far more resemblance to Islamic fundamentalist extremists than they do to Jimmy Carter. They seek to integrate their distorted views into the fabric of our laws and our government. Sarah Palin is one of these.
McCain is not one of these. He is not a religious man. He is posing as one today to pander to this wing of the Republican party, which is rapidly becoming the only thing there is to the Republican party. When he ran against Bush in 2000, he was smeared by these people in South Carolina, and he was quite outspoken in declaring that these people had no constructive role to play in government. Which is why his selection of Sarah Palin ranks, in my view, as the single most cynical political act I have ever witnessed. McCain would have us believe he is a man of integrity; that he will not sacrifice principle for personal gain. That he is about country first. No objective person who is minimally informed can conclude that Sarah Palin would be in the top 100 most qualified VP choices in the Republican party. It was a desperate move to resurrect his campaign, and it established beyond debate that there is little McCain would not sacrifice by way of principle to get himself elected.
Where I come down on Palin is that if you take away the Assembly of God background and beliefs, and turn her into a mainstream Christian whose faith is personal and not a central part of her agenda, her selection still ranks as one of the most troubling and embarrassing developments of our time. This is a serious moment in our history. Palin is not a serious candidate. McCain's choice turns the race into a reality show. We like watching utterly average people strive for the prize on TV. Sarah Palin is well informed on virtually no issues of the day. I would love to see a journalist ask her about credit default swaps and the legislation that created them. You might as well ask me a question about molecular biology in Chinese. I could not comprehend the question. Yet, she brings what George Bush has brought on virtually every issue with which he has dealt as president--certitude. She knows virtually nothing, but she is certain she is the answer. As with Bush, this is related to her fundamentalist religious views. Throughout the history of time, no group of people have had more certitude on the issues of the day than fundamentalist religious extremists. It is true for Christian extremists, and for Muslim extremists. They are people without doubt; they have certitude.
In the end, I am relieved that I have concluded Obama is the better choice. If I believed McCain was the better choice, I would have to try to figure out how a vote to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency would be consistent with my duty as a citizen. I don't think I could ever find a way to rationalize such a vote. I am not saying that fair-minded people cannot find a way to do it; I am saying that I cannot.
So, I said I would be concise. I did not say it would be brief. We live in a complex world with complex issues, and they are not susceptible to sound bite analysis. This hits the major points.
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Very interesting. K
The punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election
Guess what? The Conventional Wisdom has blown it again in handicapping Obama vs. McCain in the homestretch.
By Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro
Oct. 23, 2008 |
This has been a campaign season when the conventional wisdom has fared about as well as Bob Barr's prospects for moving into the Oval Office.
During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House?
Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally fallacious theories about the fall campaign that have been the stuff of Sunday morning round tables and newspaper Op-Ed pages? Granted, we at Salon have sometimes stumbled on the road to omniscience. But that shared sense of humility does not dampen our glee in pointing out the punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders, homestretch edition.
1) The Cult of Sarah Palin
McCain's choice of a running mate on the eve of the Republican National Convention set off a wave of emotions that quickly veered from "Sarah Who?" to "Sarah Wow!" Even amid the initial gooey-eyed gush, there were dangerous signs that the McCain team had done a sloppy job in researching her background. But the boffo convention speech, the giddy poll numbers and Palin's rock-star crowds gave rise to half-baked theories about the veep pick's ability to transform the presidential race and even snare a chunk of the feminist vote. After the disastrous Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews, however, the Palin pick seemed less a moose-hunter's delight and more like stale (Dan) Quayle. A Pew Research Center national poll released this week found that 49 percent of voters now hold negative opinions about Palin, compared to 32 percent voting thumbs down in mid-September. The Pew survey discovered that a stunning 60 percent of all women under the age of 50 currently have negative feelings about Palin.
2) Steve Schmidt Is a Genius
When McCain took the lead after the GOP convention in many national polls, the immediate reaction was to lionize top strategist Steve Schmidt for imposing order and discipline on the unruly campaign. But, in truth, Schmidt's ascension probably only intensified a problem that has dogged McCain from the outset -- a focus on day-to-day tactics over long-term strategy and a coherent rationale for the campaign. McCain often dominated the daily news cycle, but failed to dominate the hearts and minds of voters. Many in the Obama campaign believe that the turning point in the race came when McCain dramatically suspended his campaign on the eve of the first debate in order to fly to Washington to join in the ineffectual dithering over the economic crisis. Schmidt's war-room mentality (he ran the rapid-response team for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004) may have been ill-suited for a political year when McCain needed a Big Idea to compete with Obama.
3) The Price at the Pump Will Fuel the Mood of the Voters
The headline on the Aug. 20 Quinnipiac University national poll is enough to prompt instant nostalgia: "Gas Prices Gaining As Americans' Biggest Worry." Brooding about a $100 fill-up seems so overwrought two months later with a financial system in tatters. Who would have ever guessed back then that oil prices would drop below $70 a barrel before Election Day. The moral, of course, is that voters choose a candidate based on what is bugging them in November, not August. The danger in political soothsaying is to blithely assume that external events will not reshape the political landscape before Election Day. Things always happen, though rarely as dramatically as September's Wall Street whirlpool.
4) Obama Should Have Taken the Money ... and Run
Obama could have received a check from the federal government for $84 million as soon as he officially accepted the nomination. That is what McCain did in accepting public financing -- a decision that ruled out directly raising private money for his own campaign. Obama, by contrast, gambled that he could do better on his own by becoming the first presidential candidate in modern history to spurn public financing for the fall campaign. But right after the conventions, the Obama campaign appeared to radiate a whiff of desperation on the fundraising front. Meanwhile, Republicans were gloating. Not for long, though. Obama, of course, raised a staggering $150 million in September (or about $208,000 every hour), and McCain is being badly outspent in almost every major media market. An important symbolic moment in the campaign came when word seeped out that Obama was buying ads in video games -- an epic illustration of too much money chasing too few undecided voters.
5) Obama Was Guilty of Hubris in Trying to Expand the Map
In late June in Washington, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe narrated a PowerPoint presentation for the press in which he boldly sketched out all the ruby red Republican states that the Obama campaign intended to contest. Plouffe faced a host of skeptical questions about Obama making heavy investments in Virginia and Indiana, states that the Democrats had not carried in 40 years. Over the summer, both Democrats and Republicans alike were puzzled that Obama continued to contest North Carolina, even though McCain had a hefty lead in the polls. Sure, there were a few wrong calls (Plouffe saw Alaska as "competitive" in the pre-Palin era). But Obama is now forcing McCain to devote the bulk of his dwindling resources to defending once-safe GOP states like Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina, while Virginia has moved into the leaning Obama category.
6) Down-ballot Democrats Will Flee From Obama
This was a constant trope during the primaries, and continued into the summer: Democrats, particularly in red states, would cut and run from the party's ticket faster than you could say "Barack Obama and his liberal allies." Oklahoma Rep. Dan Boren made headlines in June when he vowed not to endorse Obama; other House members from conservative districts were expected to do the same. One economic collapse later, and instead, it's Republicans -- in such Democratic strongholds as, ahem, Nebraska -- who are fleeing McCain. Incumbent GOP Rep. Lee Terry, whose Omaha district is being targeted by both presidential candidates as a possible source of one electoral vote, ran newspaper ads this month featuring a hypothetical "Obama-Terry voter." It turns out that to most Democrats, the pluses of an unprecedented turnout organization, wild enthusiasm among supporters and a gazillion dollars in campaign ads outweigh the minuses of a weird name and a liberal voting record.
7) The Hillary Holdouts Will Never Come Back
During July and August, just about the easiest way to get on television was to announce that you were an angry Hillary voter who would never, ever support Obama. Of course, political science studies dating back three decades show that party loyalty invariably trumps hurt feelings by the time November rolls around. Guess what? For all the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) nonsense that filled the airwaves over the summer, the Pew Research Center poll this week shows that Obama is beating McCain by a 91-to-5-percent margin among self-identified Democrats. So while independent-minded blue-collar voters who may have opted for Clinton in the primary are still being wooed by the Obama campaign in states like Pennsylvania, virtually all the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have (surprise!) returned to the fold.
But that's Conventional Wisdom for you. Often wrong, but never in doubt.
-- By Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
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Makes one hopeful, I think. K
Another election nightmare in Florida?
The Obama campaign has inspired a wave of early voters -- but the waits have been long and some fear havoc on Election Day.
By Mike Madden
Editor's note: This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
Oct. 24, 2008 |
Sure, Ted Ravelo likes Barack Obama. But two hours is a long time to stand in line to vote, especially considering that it's still October. "This has to be remedied," Ravelo, 72, said Wednesday morning, shaking his head, as he gave up on voting early -- at least that day -- at the North Miami Public Library, where a couple of dozen voting machines and their operators were struggling in vain to keep pace with a flood of citizens. "Something has to be done." A line stretched two blocks from the building, as other voters doggedly stood -- or sat on the folding chairs many of them had brought along -- for up to two hours while waiting to cast their ballots.
It may have been a bit too much for Ravelo. He said he'd probably have to give it another shot on Election Day, and that his daughters -- who have to work on Nov. 4, and who sent him to scout out the wait time -- might not get to vote at all. But compared to Monday here, when early voting opened, two hours on Wednesday was a breeze; on the first day, officials and community activists said, the wait was three times that long.
A visit to Florida in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign threatens to evoke a certain sense of déjà vu for another late October eight years ago. Once again, polls show the state is deadlocked -- and once again, there's a very real possibility that a lot of people who support the Democratic candidate could have trouble voting.
This time, of course, it won't be butterfly ballots or Brooks Brothers riots that get in the way, and there's no chance Pat Buchanan will pick up any votes from confused elderly Jews in Palm Beach or any other county (if only because he's not running). But even so, a combination of heavy turnout and widespread confusion over new I.D. laws at the polling places could overwhelm the system again. "I don't believe that anybody's going to be ready for the onslaught of voters," said Roger Weeden, an Orlando lawyer who's working with Election Protection, a national coalition of civil rights and public interest groups that will monitor problems with voting around the country through Nov. 4. The new law -- known as "no match, no vote" -- says you need identification at the polls, and your driver's license I.D. number or Social Security number must match what's in state or federal databases; if the data's wrong, you have to either cast a provisional ballot or fix the mistake. Rumors are flying, especially in minority communities, that the law is even more restrictive. On Tuesday night, Miami's "Hot 105" soul station spent a good 30 minutes during the evening rush hour discussing potential voting problems.
Another difference this time around, though, is that Obama's campaign seems to be ready for problems. Part of the reason early voting has been so busy (nearly half a million people voted in Florida in the first three days) is because the campaign isn't shy about telling supporters to get out and vote ahead of time. "You can vote early right here and right now," Obama told about 30,000 people at a downtown Miami rally Tuesday night. Aides were concerned enough that some of the wilder rumors would suppress turnout that they sent a campaign lawyer out to warm up the crowd before Barack and Michelle Obama appeared. "How many of you have heard the rumor that you won't be allowed to go to the polls and vote if you're wearing a Barack Obama button or T-shirt?" the lawyer asked, getting a big roar from the crowd. "Well, guess what -- that's just not true."
Obama's team has been gearing up to turn people out, focusing especially on getting them to vote early and avoid the crunch on Nov. 4. More than 100 field offices are set up around the state; deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and his consulting partner Paul Tewes, the duo who engineered the field strategy for Iowa and other early primary and caucus states that helped Obama win the nomination, moved to Florida a few weeks ago to help run their massive operation here. So far, it looks effective: More than 54 percent of the early ballots in have been cast by registered Democrats, according to state statistics, which might help offset a Republican edge in requests for mail-in absentee ballots.
Judging from what some people were saying -- at the Tuesday night rally and among those voting the next morning -- Obama's campaign didn't have to scare anyone into participating early. "I didn't want to take a chance of something happening and me not getting my vote in," said Rony Francis, 43, who directs operations for a transportation company. He waited 90 minutes to vote at the North Miami library, where most of the voters who joined him were Haitians and other immigrants.
"It's always in your mind, especially after eight years ago," said Al Morrell, 51, a truck driver, also from North Miami. "So you gotta be a little wary."
The night before, Tasha Thomas, 26, who works at the University of Miami's veterinary school, had told me she'd been besieged by weird, panicky questions from supporters since she started volunteering at the Obama field office in her Miami neighborhood. People thought they couldn't vote if their voter registration card was starting to fade, or thought they had to go back to the state where they were born to vote, even if they lived in Florida now. "It was eye-opening, how much wrong information so many people have," she said.
Election Protection plans to have lawyers roaming from polling place to polling place around the state on Election Day, ready to help voters who can't find their precincts or have questions about the process. (Though the group is officially nonpartisan, there's not much doubt that anyone working hard to increase turnout is probably sympathetic to Obama.) "Voter suppression is something that anybody who has any sense of commitment to democracy or civil rights would want to fight against," said Weeden, a criminal defense lawyer who also helped monitor election sites in 2004. Back then, he and other volunteers encountered people who had been called and told their polling places had changed, or found suspicious characters lurking outside precincts with clipboards, asking people if they had met rigorous requirements to vote that went above and beyond what the law says.
While McCain is contesting the state as furiously as he is any other battleground -- he made several stops on a bus tour along Interstate 4 on Thursday, crossing from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico -- his top surrogate, Gov. Charlie Crist, hasn't been entirely on message when it comes to issues surrounding the ballot box. (Some local Republicans say prospects for the McCain campaign here are looking dim anyway.) In most states, Republicans are busy whipping up a frenzy about alleged voter fraud, mostly trying to tie it to the community organizing group ACORN (which is a member of Election Protection) and, by implication, accusing Obama of trying to steal the White House.
Crist, though, isn't buying the party line on that one. "I don't think we anticipate much of a problem with voter fraud," he told reporters on a conference call organized by McCain's campaign Tuesday afternoon (which it probably regretted later). So far, the state government in Tallahassee hasn't moved to block a ruling that says voters whose I.D.s don't match their registration information can correct the problem in person on Election Day, rather than having to go to another office and fix it before their ballot is accepted. Perhaps as a result of Crist's calm, even McCain's die-hard supporters at a Thursday morning rally in Ormond Beach didn't seem too worried about voter fraud. Of course, that's a matter of degree; several insisted that Democrats always get away with some fraud, but they didn't expect things to be worse than usual this year.
If Florida were expected to go as easily for McCain as it did for George W. Bush four years ago (if not eight years ago), the issue might not matter that much. But the more people who show up to vote, the better the night is likely to be for Obama. Democrats are paying close attention. "We have a chance this year, as a nation, to go past that horrendous 48 percent of eligible voters who participate in presidential elections, with the unprecedented number of young voters, independent voters, minority voters, that are participating in this," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told Salon prior to appearing at an early-vote rally for Latinos in Kissimmee, Fla., on Wednesday. He noted that he's heard reports of rumors about voting problems among Hispanic communities in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico as well. But, he said of expected record turnouts, "It's very healthy for our democracy, and we should take advantage of it, not engage in negative tactics and voter suppression."
Obama's most passionate supporters, meanwhile, say they're ready to show up no matter what they hear. "We're smart," said Sherrie Kendrick, a retired phone operator from Miami, who will turn 54 on Election Day. "We may not look it, but we're smart."
-- By Mike Madden
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
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LOCAL
Here are the details for tomorrow until election day. Please come and help. K
You could be the difference between President-elect Obama and President-elect McCain in 2 very short weeks. You could also be the difference in allowing Barack’s coattails to help swing Missouri towards a bluer shade. We need your help now regardless of whether you’ve helped us before.
The campaign has unveiled its Get Out The Vote program and it promises to deliver enough votes to turn Missouri blue, but we can’t run the program without everyone’s help. If you can you help us then please reply to this message indicating whether you will help us canvass (the biggest need) or phone bank and which shifts you can work as described below.
What we need the most are door-to-door canvassers. This is the area where we really need your help. This is where we have the biggest potential to pick up votes. Studies have shown that we can pick up 1 vote for every 12 people we contact. So it becomes a numbers game much like voter registration where if you can talk with 36 people then you can be responsible for picking up 3 votes. That may not sound like much but when we have 1000 volunteers doing that each day in the state then we can turn the election.
For the next week, canvassers will be walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors for the purpose of identifying voters’ candidate preferences and identifying issues important to undecided or leaning voters. Beginning the weekend before the elections the canvassers will be knocking on the doors of supporters to leave literature and make sure that the voters know where their polling place is located, the hours of operation and identification requirements. On Election Day we’ll be knocking on the doors of supporters to make sure that they’ve voted.
Can you help us with canvassing?
Whereas canvassing is where we have by far the greatest need and where the campaign staff believes we can have the biggest impact on the election results, we also need to make a lot of phone calls. Right now we need to make calls such as this call to other volunteers to get them involved in the final push. We really would like volunteers who can make calls from their cell phones at a central location but have some opportunities for home-based calling as well. Could you help us with phone calling?
From this point on, volunteer activities will be coordinated out of our team’s Staging Location which is the red house at 4235 Baltimore. At that point Baltimore runs North/South between Main St and JC Nichols/Broadway. Come across 43rd St and then turn north onto Baltimore.
This Saturday (October 25), and then again next Saturday (November 1), we are going to have working practices of the GOTV program so that everyone will be trained and experienced and the operational procedures will have been tested and refined so that on Election day, the program will run flawlessly. We REALLY want all volunteers to have been trained and to have worked at least one shift before Election Day.
Can you help us this Saturday or next Saturday? If so, the schedules for this Saturday and next Saturday are
* Shift 1: 8:45AM – 12:45PM
* Shift 2: 11:45AM – 3:45PM
* Shift 3: 2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Volunteers who have canvassed or phone banked with OUR TEAM THIS YEAR can arrive 30 minutes after these shift times unless they would like to attend our training session again.
* Volunteers wishing to work 2 shifts should work the 1st and 3rd shifts, thus giving themselves a 2 hour break between shifts.
* Volunteers who can only work 1 shift but are flexible enough to work any of the shifts are encouraged to work the 3rd shift.
We’d like to get as many volunteers out both this Saturday and next Saturday because that will be the best way to test our plans so that they can be refined to optimize our effectiveness on Election Day.
In addition to the work to be done on this and next Saturday, we also have an ENORMOUS amount of doors to be knocked and phones to be rung in order to execute the campaign’s strategy to win Missouri. In keeping with that plan we will also be conducting the following shifts:
* Canvassing
* Sunday, 11/26 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 11/27 – Friday 11/31 1 shift/day: 4:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Sunday, 12/02 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 12/03 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM, 11:45AM – 3:45PM,
2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Election Day Tuesday 12/04 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM,
11:45AM – 3:45PM, 2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Phone Banking
* Sunday, 11/26 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 11/27 – Friday 11/31 1 shift/day: 6:00PM – 8:30 PM
* Sunday, 12/02 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 12/03 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM, 11:45AM – 3:45PM,
2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Election Day Tuesday 12/04 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM,
11:45AM – 3:45PM, 2:45PM – 6:45PM
Please allocate time and sign up for as many shifts and your schedule will permit. We cannot afford to let this historic opportunity to turn our country around to pass us by.
If you have any questions, or need to change your shift schedule, please email George Mayer or Mary Taves at gmayer @everestkc.net, or call them at 816 523-3535.
Thank you so much for your help!
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I mentioned this before but, just in case you haven't done this yet.... k
You are now able to vote at the Plaza Library M-F 10am-7PM. You just fill out an absentee form then proceed to vote. The source that gave me this info said that they are wanting as many people as possible to do this as they are anticipating election day to be insane. Please pass along to other Obama supporters……(Also, you can vote at the Election Board just north of Bob Jones shoes.)
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Sign up now to help us get out the vote for pro-choice candidates!
Please contact Victoria at victoria.pickering@ppkm.org or call 913-312-5100 ext. 257 to sign up or for more information!
Monday, October 27: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
Tuesday, October 28: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
Canvass in Clay County, 4:30 – 7:00pm (5005 NE Antioch Rd, KCMO)
Wednesday, October 29: Phone bank in Overland Park, 1:00-4:00pm
Saturday, November 1: Phone bank in Overland Park, 12:00-4:00pm
Canvass Against Question 1 in Johnson County, 12:00-4:00pm
Sunday, November 2: Phone bank in Overland Park, 12:00-4:00pm
Canvass in Clay County, 2:00 – 7:00pm (5005 NE Antioch Rd, KCMO)
Monday, November 3: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
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Great way to help the campaign even if you don't have much time to give!!! K
From: Beverly Ahern [mailto:bja4@earthlink.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 10:56 PM
Subject: Volunteers to make a Healthy breakfast foods for Obama campaign staff
Hi everyone,
I have been volunteering for the Obama campaign the last couple of weeks. This has brought me in contact with the loyal, hardworking young staff members who work day and night to help get out the vote and work with all of the local volunteers. As you all know, Missouri is till undecided for Obama so with just two weeks left before the election, there is a lot going on at the campaign headquarters.
The key staff members who are from all over the country, are very tired, looking worn down and generally not as healthy as they once were. They eat fried fast food and lots of sweets like cupcakes and Lamar donuts - evenings it is pizza- then they take vitamins. I asked the field coordinators if they would be interested in receiving healthy food. The answer was a relieved YES.
This original concept is to bring a healthy breakfast in the morning between 8:30 - 9:00 am - when the staff arrives and before all of the volunteers arrive. You should count on 20-25 people. The kitchen at the headquarters has a toaster, microwave, blender, sink, large fridge and lots of paper plates, plastic forks and spoons, napkins and some cups. I didn't see bowls. Hot or cold meals will work. Fruit, bagels, smoothies, breakfast sandwiches, granola, etc. Costco is really close by. It is up to you. Put your name on any plate, bowl or warmer you leave. I can help pick up anything left in the kitchen and get it back to you.
I would like to get the schedule filled in for this week to start a routine where the staff can count on good food in the morning. If it doesn't work out to bring breakfast you can always provide a meal later in the day. Just be aware there are lots of people there and you can't always guarantee it will go to the staff rather than the general volunteers. Also if it is a meal to be delivered later in the day, I would like to notify the contact person: Sheila Johnson so she can tell everyone that good stuff is coming at a certain time.
Here is the general info:
Obama Headquarters
3100 Gillham Plaza, Kansas City, MO 64109
Contact Person: Sheila Johnson - 816-585-7611
the dates are October 22 - November 4th.
October 22 - Wednesday - Beverly - hot egg roll-ups
October 23 - Thursday
October 24 - Friday
October 25 - Saturday
October 26 - Sunday
October 27 - Monday - Bonnie Winston and Beverly - whole wheat tortilla/egg wraps
October 28 - Tuesday
October 29 - Wednesday
October 30 - Thursday - Carol Bates and Suellen Dice -
October 31 - Friday
November 1 - Saturday
November 2 - Sunday
November 3 - Monday
November 4 - ELECTION DAY
Please let me know if you can help. Would appreciate suggestions, ideas, other people to ask.
Does anyone have Kathy Marchant and Susi Luaki's email. I would like to invite them to help too.
And thanks in advance. I know who I want for out next president and know this thoughtful generosity of spirit will help.
Best regards,
Beverly Ahern
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Can you believe MO is a swing state with a very strong chance of going for Obama? This can help make it happen. Please do what you can. Thanks, K
From: Sharon Hoffman
Date: October 22, 2008 12:59:36 PM MDT
To: Hoffman Sharon
Subject: WIN MISSOURI AND AND ALL THT JAZZ!
Ok, hopefully this is my last ask for the Obama campaign. Although the polls are looking good and the campaign raised a lot of money last month, we can't leave anything to chance. This election is too important to all of us and... America. The crucial game is on the ground and the campaign has set up a separate 'Committee For Change' to fund the battle ground states. We are definitely one of those. There are 1000 volunteers coming into town and thousands from here working the election. We need everyone of them, AND YOU, and more. And we need to be sure that we have the funds to keep the offices across the state going till the victory is in! So i'm asking you, one more time to donate, what you can to make sure we win THE STATE.. donate whatever you can $1000, $500, $100 or $50 to the COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE. We need to raise $40,000 by Friday. October 24th.. use this link to be sure it stays here in Missouri,
https://www.democrats.org/page/contribute/cfcmidwest?custom1=Sharon+Hoffman
AND LET'S HAVE SOME FUN...
JARDINES WILL BE HOSTING A “GET OUT THE VOTE” JAZZ EXTRAVEGANZA WITH JAZZ GREAT DAVID BASSE AND THE CITY LIGHT ORCHESTRA. MONDAY OCTOBER 27TH FOR OBAMA SUPPORTERS AND TUESDAY OCTOBER 28TH FOR MCCAIN SUPPORTERS.
LET’S ALL GATHER ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 27TH FOR THE 6:30pm PERFORMANCE , TO REGROUP, HAVE SOME FUN, AND REALLY SHOW MISSOURIANS THAT “YES WE CAN” AND “YES WE WILL” !!!!!!!!!
THE COST IS ONLY $100 AND WILL INCLUDE THE SHOW, DINNER AND 50% OF THE PROCEEDS WILL BE DONATED TO THE 'CAMPAIGN FOR CHANGE' which will be used in Missouri for the ground operation to wind up the election on november 4
MAKE YOUR RESERVATIONS NOW! SPACE IS LIMITED!
CALL HOLLY AT JARDINES 816 561 6480 OR E-MAILJAZZ4BEENA@GMAIL.COM (located at 4536 Main St.)
and email me so i know how much to count towards COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE.
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Forwarded from a friend. K
Kathryn,
About three weeks ago Lee Hirsch, a talented director friend of mine, told me his idea of LOCAL VOICES. He wanted to film commercials in small town battleground states highlighting local persons and their reasons why they support Obama. A kind voice helped me guide him to TRUTHANDHOPE.ORG, a pro-Obama PAC, whom helped move the vision fast. Here is the first ad:
http://truthandhope.org/localvoices/index.htm
I love the sense of urgency with this group as well their mission of winning over blue collar voters back to the Democratic Party. They know have 2 teams in other battleground states filming but need donations to buy more air time.
I'll hope you check it out and consider helping out. Any amount helps. Each ad only costs $40 to air. 21 days left let's not ease up.
Sincerely,
Houston
--
Houston King
1041 North Formosa Ave
Writer's Building Suite 317
LA, CA 90046
p: 323.850.2757 / c: 213.925.7535 / f : 323.850.2787
e houstonbking@gmail.com
Happy Birthday, Georgianne. No longer triplets for the next 10 months. : (
xo, Ke
Tomorrow I'm going to be overseeing a Canvass and hope you can help. (I just found out this afternoon that I'm doing it! Hence the late notice.)
We'll be meeting at 4235 Baltimore and you can come at 8:45 - 12:45, 11:45 -3:45, or 2:45-6:45. Please see the first item under LOCAL below. The details are from George Mayer (the guy who came to my house to train us on registering voters).
Please try to make it tomorrow. If you can't, come on Sunday. There will be one shift; come at 3 for the 3:30-6:30 shift. These are sort-of training sessions/dry runs for GOTV on Election Day.
And happy reading!
Kristin
HUMOR/LINKS
http://www.myamericanprayer.com/video.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DIc8jdra0o
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This group, Rednecks for Obama, was started by the grandfather of a good friend of a Blue Hearts member! Here's the website. K
http://www.rednecks4obama.com/
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What can I say? The Daily Show could be in every one of my blogs. This is particularly good! How many times am I reassured that I'm not living in an alternate reality when I watch John Stewart?! K
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=188638&title=understanding-real-america-in
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From the New Yorker. Sedaris is always funny. K
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/10/27/081027sh_shouts_sedaris?currentPage=all
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Love this! K
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cc65ed650d
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Very funny. K
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/taking-back-t-4.html
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So You Think You Can Be Vice-President?
via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan by Andrew Sullivan on 10/24/08
The Palin story has now nuked the shark:
Who was the highest paid individual in Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October as it headed down the homestretch?
Not Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser; not Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications staff member. It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night.
Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show “So You Think You Can Dance?”, was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records.
Okay: $11,400 a week to do her make-up? And they were complaining about the Newsweek cover? This is no hockey mom. She's America's Next Top Super Model!
GENERAL
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This is a letter from an uncle to his nephew on why the uncle is voting for Barack Obama this year. It's very well thought out and worth sharing, I thought. K
In response to your question, and out of a desire to clarify my own thinking, I have undertaken to succinctly (not necessarily briefly) explain the reasons I have come to conclude that Barack Obama is the better choice to be our next president.
Tone and Approach to Campaign: Throughout the Clinton and Bush (43) administrations, and the associated campaigns, I have come to believe the single most destructive force in Washington, D.C. is the partisan tone of all discussions. I was pleased to hear both Obama and McCain promise to rise above this, and to run campaigns that were based on serious discussions of our pressing public policy issues, and to reject the politics of personal attack, as exemplified by Karl Rove and James Carville. Obama has kept his pledge. McCain has not. If you choose to employ the politics of personal attack to win the office, you will inevitably continue the game while in office to win a second term. During these times of such serious challenges and issues, we simply must get past this. I give Obama huge points for keeping his word on this, and it enhances my assessment of his credibility and integrity. McCain's approach hurts his credibility with me, and reveals a weakness in character. His approach shows his desire to win trumps his willingness to keep his word and do what he knows is in the best interest of the country. You want to fully understand how far out of hand this campaign rhetoric is getting? Read this Frank Rich column from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?em
Intelligence and Education: Obama was raised by a single mother and grandparents. His father was absent. Did not come from money. Did not come from power or privilege. He studied at Occidental College for two years, and then transferred to Columbia University. And, of course, we all know he went to Harvard Law School where he became the first African-American to be named Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review. He is smart. He is well educated. He had the discipline and drive to raise himself from the bottom to the top through working hard to get a good education.
McCain's track record is very different. It parallels that of George Bush. They are both underperforming third-generation men from powerful families. They are both men of modest intellect, poorly educated. Yes, they were educated at Harvard and Yale (Bush) and the Naval academy (McCain), but barely. Bush was a C student--which is all but a failing grade at the private institutions he attended. And McCain was nearly last in his class. Modest intellect, poor students, poorly educated. They have track records of disdain for education. They are where they are because of their fathers and grandfathers. Obama is intelligent, well educated. He is where he is despite his absent father. In a complex world full of pressing and complex issues, we need well-educated, intelligent leaders. Obama stands head and shoulders above McCain by this measure.
World View and Foreign Policy: What we see in Bush is a world view that sees the world as black and white, or good v evil--where we are defined as good and anyone who opposes us is evil. And what we have learned from Bush is that this world view is no longer workable. Under this view, we rely too heavily on our military power to impose our will. This is a mistake because we cannot afford even the level of military expenditures we are now incurring, and frankly what we are spending is not enough to make the rest of the world submit to our will. This is generational, in my view. McCain's generation sees the world through the eyes of the Cold War. US v Russia. Good v evil. Black and white. The world is more complex today. Less black and white, and more gray. Just like Obama.
Bush, McCain the the Neo-conservatives believe we need a larger military to achieve our objectives. I believe we need a smaller and more intelligent foreign policy. We do need to continue to compete in this world, and we need to do it effectively. We need to rely less on military might, and the mindset that accompanies it, and more on superior ideas, values and vision. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, said: "To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill; the acme of skill is to win the war without fighting." Bush cannot comprehend this. And I don't think McCain does either. McCain--get this--still believes to this day that we could have won the war in Vietnam, if only . . . [fill in the blank]. This is scary--a Commander in Chief who still does not comprehend the lessons of Vietnam. He comes from a military family and that was his history--all he knows is trying to win battles. I believe Obama offers more hope and a greater opportunity in this regard. To succeed on the world stage, we need to be perceived differently. The world will perceive McCain as another Bush. Obama changes everything on the world stage. Here, I see Obama's inexperience as a strength; he is not impaired with the baggage McCain carries from his experiences in a world that bears very little resemblance to the world in which we live today.
Financial Crisis--The Danger Now: The danger now, in the midst of this financial meltdown, is that we will look to the people who created this mess to fix it. Who created this mess? Both parties bear responsibility. The lending criteria directives to promote home ownership for minority and low income home owners that brought down Fannie Mae was created by the Clinton Administration. The former CEO of Fannie Mae is one of Obama's advisers, and that in my view is a mistake.
But I think we have a far bigger problem in that regard on the McCain side. When the history is written on this financial meltdown--which we now see this week is a global financial meltdown--we will see that perhaps nothing set the stage for this more than a piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. It was signed into law by Clinton, very late in his final term. Thus, you might conclude it was the Democrat's fault. The driver behind this legislation, however, and the "Enron loop-hole" in the legislation, was Senator Phil Graham. Graham is one of McCain's close friends and advisers, and McCain was a leading member of the Senate who passed this a similar legislation and refused to rescind it despite many efforts of some to do so over the years.
The Act exempted from regulation most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. What was the effect? This allowed Enron to be Enron, manipulating power markets in California that a few years ago brought the first rolling power outages to California since World War II. It lead to the fall of Enron, who built their house of cards on the back of this unregulated market system. And it has been the #1 driver of moving the price of oil out of the realm of actual producers and users of oil and into the realm of traders and speculators. This is how you get the spike we got recently to $150/barrel.
The Act also set the stage for the fall of AIG, an international insurer crucial to the health and well-being of the US and international economy. How? The act specifically banned regulation of credit default swaps. These unregulated instruments, insurance policies against default on financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns and risky investments like mortgage backed securities, are what necessitated the government bailout of insurer A.I.G. The unregulated market in credit default swaps has grown to some $60 trillion, and it remains a ticking time bomb that may yet cause more calamitous events. This fact illustrates the nature of these credit default swap transactions: the legislation decreed that they were exempt from the anti-gaming laws of the states. I have nothing against gambling in Vegas, but I do not think it should be permitted by the likes of A.I.G. I had credit default swaps explained to me three weeks ago by two guys who have spent their careers on Wall Street. Stated simply, this legislation allowed hedge funds to buy insurance on the credit worthiness of a Lehman brothers, for 2% down and 98% on margin, and then short the stock to put the institution on the brink of collapse. A more simple explanation: I buy $1 million of insurance on your $250,000 house, which I do not own. I pay 2% down and borrow the rest of the premium. And the next day I set your house on fire. This issue may yet bring this country to its knees. This massive financial deregulation has been a hallmark of the Republicans since 2000, and McCain has been a staunch supporter. We need accountability--we need to hold responsible those who are responsible--and McCain and his close friend and advisor Phil Graham were ring-leaders. This was primarily a Republican creation, and this factor alone weighs heavily in favor of throwing the Republican's out of power.
Negatives in Life Narratives: We have seen that both candidates have some negatives in their life narratives. McCain's negatives are summarized in the Rolling Stone profile on McCain, which tells the story of McCain's record from the Naval Academy, his military record, his POW record, and his political career. Many negatives. Obama's negatives are summarized in the Krauthammer column, which discuss Obama's past associations with people of ill repute, such as the pastor, the college professor that was a 1960s Weatherman, and the financier Tony Rezko. All fair game. One observation I would make--McCain's negatives are about him personally. His conduct, his behavior. Obama's focuses on his association with other people, who we find of questionable character and conduct. Fundamental difference. Still cause for concern on both sides, but we have to decide how to weigh the concerns.
The Sarah Palin Factor: As most know, I have a serious concern about the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christian thinking in our democracy. The reason for my concern is that this thinking is so often divorced from objective reality. Faith can be a powerful force for good. It can also be a powerful force for evil. I always admired Jimmy Carter's faith. My impression is that it was a source of strength for him. And I think his religious faith set a paradigm through which he saw himself as a humble servant of the people. The fundamentalist preachers who have decided to "go political", and the army of Christian fundamentalists who seek to infiltrate our government are of a different breed. They bear far more resemblance to Islamic fundamentalist extremists than they do to Jimmy Carter. They seek to integrate their distorted views into the fabric of our laws and our government. Sarah Palin is one of these.
McCain is not one of these. He is not a religious man. He is posing as one today to pander to this wing of the Republican party, which is rapidly becoming the only thing there is to the Republican party. When he ran against Bush in 2000, he was smeared by these people in South Carolina, and he was quite outspoken in declaring that these people had no constructive role to play in government. Which is why his selection of Sarah Palin ranks, in my view, as the single most cynical political act I have ever witnessed. McCain would have us believe he is a man of integrity; that he will not sacrifice principle for personal gain. That he is about country first. No objective person who is minimally informed can conclude that Sarah Palin would be in the top 100 most qualified VP choices in the Republican party. It was a desperate move to resurrect his campaign, and it established beyond debate that there is little McCain would not sacrifice by way of principle to get himself elected.
Where I come down on Palin is that if you take away the Assembly of God background and beliefs, and turn her into a mainstream Christian whose faith is personal and not a central part of her agenda, her selection still ranks as one of the most troubling and embarrassing developments of our time. This is a serious moment in our history. Palin is not a serious candidate. McCain's choice turns the race into a reality show. We like watching utterly average people strive for the prize on TV. Sarah Palin is well informed on virtually no issues of the day. I would love to see a journalist ask her about credit default swaps and the legislation that created them. You might as well ask me a question about molecular biology in Chinese. I could not comprehend the question. Yet, she brings what George Bush has brought on virtually every issue with which he has dealt as president--certitude. She knows virtually nothing, but she is certain she is the answer. As with Bush, this is related to her fundamentalist religious views. Throughout the history of time, no group of people have had more certitude on the issues of the day than fundamentalist religious extremists. It is true for Christian extremists, and for Muslim extremists. They are people without doubt; they have certitude.
In the end, I am relieved that I have concluded Obama is the better choice. If I believed McCain was the better choice, I would have to try to figure out how a vote to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency would be consistent with my duty as a citizen. I don't think I could ever find a way to rationalize such a vote. I am not saying that fair-minded people cannot find a way to do it; I am saying that I cannot.
So, I said I would be concise. I did not say it would be brief. We live in a complex world with complex issues, and they are not susceptible to sound bite analysis. This hits the major points.
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Very interesting. K
The punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election
Guess what? The Conventional Wisdom has blown it again in handicapping Obama vs. McCain in the homestretch.
By Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro
Oct. 23, 2008 |
This has been a campaign season when the conventional wisdom has fared about as well as Bob Barr's prospects for moving into the Oval Office.
During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House?
Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally fallacious theories about the fall campaign that have been the stuff of Sunday morning round tables and newspaper Op-Ed pages? Granted, we at Salon have sometimes stumbled on the road to omniscience. But that shared sense of humility does not dampen our glee in pointing out the punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders, homestretch edition.
1) The Cult of Sarah Palin
McCain's choice of a running mate on the eve of the Republican National Convention set off a wave of emotions that quickly veered from "Sarah Who?" to "Sarah Wow!" Even amid the initial gooey-eyed gush, there were dangerous signs that the McCain team had done a sloppy job in researching her background. But the boffo convention speech, the giddy poll numbers and Palin's rock-star crowds gave rise to half-baked theories about the veep pick's ability to transform the presidential race and even snare a chunk of the feminist vote. After the disastrous Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews, however, the Palin pick seemed less a moose-hunter's delight and more like stale (Dan) Quayle. A Pew Research Center national poll released this week found that 49 percent of voters now hold negative opinions about Palin, compared to 32 percent voting thumbs down in mid-September. The Pew survey discovered that a stunning 60 percent of all women under the age of 50 currently have negative feelings about Palin.
2) Steve Schmidt Is a Genius
When McCain took the lead after the GOP convention in many national polls, the immediate reaction was to lionize top strategist Steve Schmidt for imposing order and discipline on the unruly campaign. But, in truth, Schmidt's ascension probably only intensified a problem that has dogged McCain from the outset -- a focus on day-to-day tactics over long-term strategy and a coherent rationale for the campaign. McCain often dominated the daily news cycle, but failed to dominate the hearts and minds of voters. Many in the Obama campaign believe that the turning point in the race came when McCain dramatically suspended his campaign on the eve of the first debate in order to fly to Washington to join in the ineffectual dithering over the economic crisis. Schmidt's war-room mentality (he ran the rapid-response team for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004) may have been ill-suited for a political year when McCain needed a Big Idea to compete with Obama.
3) The Price at the Pump Will Fuel the Mood of the Voters
The headline on the Aug. 20 Quinnipiac University national poll is enough to prompt instant nostalgia: "Gas Prices Gaining As Americans' Biggest Worry." Brooding about a $100 fill-up seems so overwrought two months later with a financial system in tatters. Who would have ever guessed back then that oil prices would drop below $70 a barrel before Election Day. The moral, of course, is that voters choose a candidate based on what is bugging them in November, not August. The danger in political soothsaying is to blithely assume that external events will not reshape the political landscape before Election Day. Things always happen, though rarely as dramatically as September's Wall Street whirlpool.
4) Obama Should Have Taken the Money ... and Run
Obama could have received a check from the federal government for $84 million as soon as he officially accepted the nomination. That is what McCain did in accepting public financing -- a decision that ruled out directly raising private money for his own campaign. Obama, by contrast, gambled that he could do better on his own by becoming the first presidential candidate in modern history to spurn public financing for the fall campaign. But right after the conventions, the Obama campaign appeared to radiate a whiff of desperation on the fundraising front. Meanwhile, Republicans were gloating. Not for long, though. Obama, of course, raised a staggering $150 million in September (or about $208,000 every hour), and McCain is being badly outspent in almost every major media market. An important symbolic moment in the campaign came when word seeped out that Obama was buying ads in video games -- an epic illustration of too much money chasing too few undecided voters.
5) Obama Was Guilty of Hubris in Trying to Expand the Map
In late June in Washington, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe narrated a PowerPoint presentation for the press in which he boldly sketched out all the ruby red Republican states that the Obama campaign intended to contest. Plouffe faced a host of skeptical questions about Obama making heavy investments in Virginia and Indiana, states that the Democrats had not carried in 40 years. Over the summer, both Democrats and Republicans alike were puzzled that Obama continued to contest North Carolina, even though McCain had a hefty lead in the polls. Sure, there were a few wrong calls (Plouffe saw Alaska as "competitive" in the pre-Palin era). But Obama is now forcing McCain to devote the bulk of his dwindling resources to defending once-safe GOP states like Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina, while Virginia has moved into the leaning Obama category.
6) Down-ballot Democrats Will Flee From Obama
This was a constant trope during the primaries, and continued into the summer: Democrats, particularly in red states, would cut and run from the party's ticket faster than you could say "Barack Obama and his liberal allies." Oklahoma Rep. Dan Boren made headlines in June when he vowed not to endorse Obama; other House members from conservative districts were expected to do the same. One economic collapse later, and instead, it's Republicans -- in such Democratic strongholds as, ahem, Nebraska -- who are fleeing McCain. Incumbent GOP Rep. Lee Terry, whose Omaha district is being targeted by both presidential candidates as a possible source of one electoral vote, ran newspaper ads this month featuring a hypothetical "Obama-Terry voter." It turns out that to most Democrats, the pluses of an unprecedented turnout organization, wild enthusiasm among supporters and a gazillion dollars in campaign ads outweigh the minuses of a weird name and a liberal voting record.
7) The Hillary Holdouts Will Never Come Back
During July and August, just about the easiest way to get on television was to announce that you were an angry Hillary voter who would never, ever support Obama. Of course, political science studies dating back three decades show that party loyalty invariably trumps hurt feelings by the time November rolls around. Guess what? For all the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) nonsense that filled the airwaves over the summer, the Pew Research Center poll this week shows that Obama is beating McCain by a 91-to-5-percent margin among self-identified Democrats. So while independent-minded blue-collar voters who may have opted for Clinton in the primary are still being wooed by the Obama campaign in states like Pennsylvania, virtually all the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have (surprise!) returned to the fold.
But that's Conventional Wisdom for you. Often wrong, but never in doubt.
-- By Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
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Makes one hopeful, I think. K
Another election nightmare in Florida?
The Obama campaign has inspired a wave of early voters -- but the waits have been long and some fear havoc on Election Day.
By Mike Madden
Editor's note: This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
Oct. 24, 2008 |
Sure, Ted Ravelo likes Barack Obama. But two hours is a long time to stand in line to vote, especially considering that it's still October. "This has to be remedied," Ravelo, 72, said Wednesday morning, shaking his head, as he gave up on voting early -- at least that day -- at the North Miami Public Library, where a couple of dozen voting machines and their operators were struggling in vain to keep pace with a flood of citizens. "Something has to be done." A line stretched two blocks from the building, as other voters doggedly stood -- or sat on the folding chairs many of them had brought along -- for up to two hours while waiting to cast their ballots.
It may have been a bit too much for Ravelo. He said he'd probably have to give it another shot on Election Day, and that his daughters -- who have to work on Nov. 4, and who sent him to scout out the wait time -- might not get to vote at all. But compared to Monday here, when early voting opened, two hours on Wednesday was a breeze; on the first day, officials and community activists said, the wait was three times that long.
A visit to Florida in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign threatens to evoke a certain sense of déjà vu for another late October eight years ago. Once again, polls show the state is deadlocked -- and once again, there's a very real possibility that a lot of people who support the Democratic candidate could have trouble voting.
This time, of course, it won't be butterfly ballots or Brooks Brothers riots that get in the way, and there's no chance Pat Buchanan will pick up any votes from confused elderly Jews in Palm Beach or any other county (if only because he's not running). But even so, a combination of heavy turnout and widespread confusion over new I.D. laws at the polling places could overwhelm the system again. "I don't believe that anybody's going to be ready for the onslaught of voters," said Roger Weeden, an Orlando lawyer who's working with Election Protection, a national coalition of civil rights and public interest groups that will monitor problems with voting around the country through Nov. 4. The new law -- known as "no match, no vote" -- says you need identification at the polls, and your driver's license I.D. number or Social Security number must match what's in state or federal databases; if the data's wrong, you have to either cast a provisional ballot or fix the mistake. Rumors are flying, especially in minority communities, that the law is even more restrictive. On Tuesday night, Miami's "Hot 105" soul station spent a good 30 minutes during the evening rush hour discussing potential voting problems.
Another difference this time around, though, is that Obama's campaign seems to be ready for problems. Part of the reason early voting has been so busy (nearly half a million people voted in Florida in the first three days) is because the campaign isn't shy about telling supporters to get out and vote ahead of time. "You can vote early right here and right now," Obama told about 30,000 people at a downtown Miami rally Tuesday night. Aides were concerned enough that some of the wilder rumors would suppress turnout that they sent a campaign lawyer out to warm up the crowd before Barack and Michelle Obama appeared. "How many of you have heard the rumor that you won't be allowed to go to the polls and vote if you're wearing a Barack Obama button or T-shirt?" the lawyer asked, getting a big roar from the crowd. "Well, guess what -- that's just not true."
Obama's team has been gearing up to turn people out, focusing especially on getting them to vote early and avoid the crunch on Nov. 4. More than 100 field offices are set up around the state; deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and his consulting partner Paul Tewes, the duo who engineered the field strategy for Iowa and other early primary and caucus states that helped Obama win the nomination, moved to Florida a few weeks ago to help run their massive operation here. So far, it looks effective: More than 54 percent of the early ballots in have been cast by registered Democrats, according to state statistics, which might help offset a Republican edge in requests for mail-in absentee ballots.
Judging from what some people were saying -- at the Tuesday night rally and among those voting the next morning -- Obama's campaign didn't have to scare anyone into participating early. "I didn't want to take a chance of something happening and me not getting my vote in," said Rony Francis, 43, who directs operations for a transportation company. He waited 90 minutes to vote at the North Miami library, where most of the voters who joined him were Haitians and other immigrants.
"It's always in your mind, especially after eight years ago," said Al Morrell, 51, a truck driver, also from North Miami. "So you gotta be a little wary."
The night before, Tasha Thomas, 26, who works at the University of Miami's veterinary school, had told me she'd been besieged by weird, panicky questions from supporters since she started volunteering at the Obama field office in her Miami neighborhood. People thought they couldn't vote if their voter registration card was starting to fade, or thought they had to go back to the state where they were born to vote, even if they lived in Florida now. "It was eye-opening, how much wrong information so many people have," she said.
Election Protection plans to have lawyers roaming from polling place to polling place around the state on Election Day, ready to help voters who can't find their precincts or have questions about the process. (Though the group is officially nonpartisan, there's not much doubt that anyone working hard to increase turnout is probably sympathetic to Obama.) "Voter suppression is something that anybody who has any sense of commitment to democracy or civil rights would want to fight against," said Weeden, a criminal defense lawyer who also helped monitor election sites in 2004. Back then, he and other volunteers encountered people who had been called and told their polling places had changed, or found suspicious characters lurking outside precincts with clipboards, asking people if they had met rigorous requirements to vote that went above and beyond what the law says.
While McCain is contesting the state as furiously as he is any other battleground -- he made several stops on a bus tour along Interstate 4 on Thursday, crossing from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico -- his top surrogate, Gov. Charlie Crist, hasn't been entirely on message when it comes to issues surrounding the ballot box. (Some local Republicans say prospects for the McCain campaign here are looking dim anyway.) In most states, Republicans are busy whipping up a frenzy about alleged voter fraud, mostly trying to tie it to the community organizing group ACORN (which is a member of Election Protection) and, by implication, accusing Obama of trying to steal the White House.
Crist, though, isn't buying the party line on that one. "I don't think we anticipate much of a problem with voter fraud," he told reporters on a conference call organized by McCain's campaign Tuesday afternoon (which it probably regretted later). So far, the state government in Tallahassee hasn't moved to block a ruling that says voters whose I.D.s don't match their registration information can correct the problem in person on Election Day, rather than having to go to another office and fix it before their ballot is accepted. Perhaps as a result of Crist's calm, even McCain's die-hard supporters at a Thursday morning rally in Ormond Beach didn't seem too worried about voter fraud. Of course, that's a matter of degree; several insisted that Democrats always get away with some fraud, but they didn't expect things to be worse than usual this year.
If Florida were expected to go as easily for McCain as it did for George W. Bush four years ago (if not eight years ago), the issue might not matter that much. But the more people who show up to vote, the better the night is likely to be for Obama. Democrats are paying close attention. "We have a chance this year, as a nation, to go past that horrendous 48 percent of eligible voters who participate in presidential elections, with the unprecedented number of young voters, independent voters, minority voters, that are participating in this," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told Salon prior to appearing at an early-vote rally for Latinos in Kissimmee, Fla., on Wednesday. He noted that he's heard reports of rumors about voting problems among Hispanic communities in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico as well. But, he said of expected record turnouts, "It's very healthy for our democracy, and we should take advantage of it, not engage in negative tactics and voter suppression."
Obama's most passionate supporters, meanwhile, say they're ready to show up no matter what they hear. "We're smart," said Sherrie Kendrick, a retired phone operator from Miami, who will turn 54 on Election Day. "We may not look it, but we're smart."
-- By Mike Madden
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
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LOCAL
Here are the details for tomorrow until election day. Please come and help. K
You could be the difference between President-elect Obama and President-elect McCain in 2 very short weeks. You could also be the difference in allowing Barack’s coattails to help swing Missouri towards a bluer shade. We need your help now regardless of whether you’ve helped us before.
The campaign has unveiled its Get Out The Vote program and it promises to deliver enough votes to turn Missouri blue, but we can’t run the program without everyone’s help. If you can you help us then please reply to this message indicating whether you will help us canvass (the biggest need) or phone bank and which shifts you can work as described below.
What we need the most are door-to-door canvassers. This is the area where we really need your help. This is where we have the biggest potential to pick up votes. Studies have shown that we can pick up 1 vote for every 12 people we contact. So it becomes a numbers game much like voter registration where if you can talk with 36 people then you can be responsible for picking up 3 votes. That may not sound like much but when we have 1000 volunteers doing that each day in the state then we can turn the election.
For the next week, canvassers will be walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors for the purpose of identifying voters’ candidate preferences and identifying issues important to undecided or leaning voters. Beginning the weekend before the elections the canvassers will be knocking on the doors of supporters to leave literature and make sure that the voters know where their polling place is located, the hours of operation and identification requirements. On Election Day we’ll be knocking on the doors of supporters to make sure that they’ve voted.
Can you help us with canvassing?
Whereas canvassing is where we have by far the greatest need and where the campaign staff believes we can have the biggest impact on the election results, we also need to make a lot of phone calls. Right now we need to make calls such as this call to other volunteers to get them involved in the final push. We really would like volunteers who can make calls from their cell phones at a central location but have some opportunities for home-based calling as well. Could you help us with phone calling?
From this point on, volunteer activities will be coordinated out of our team’s Staging Location which is the red house at 4235 Baltimore. At that point Baltimore runs North/South between Main St and JC Nichols/Broadway. Come across 43rd St and then turn north onto Baltimore.
This Saturday (October 25), and then again next Saturday (November 1), we are going to have working practices of the GOTV program so that everyone will be trained and experienced and the operational procedures will have been tested and refined so that on Election day, the program will run flawlessly. We REALLY want all volunteers to have been trained and to have worked at least one shift before Election Day.
Can you help us this Saturday or next Saturday? If so, the schedules for this Saturday and next Saturday are
* Shift 1: 8:45AM – 12:45PM
* Shift 2: 11:45AM – 3:45PM
* Shift 3: 2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Volunteers who have canvassed or phone banked with OUR TEAM THIS YEAR can arrive 30 minutes after these shift times unless they would like to attend our training session again.
* Volunteers wishing to work 2 shifts should work the 1st and 3rd shifts, thus giving themselves a 2 hour break between shifts.
* Volunteers who can only work 1 shift but are flexible enough to work any of the shifts are encouraged to work the 3rd shift.
We’d like to get as many volunteers out both this Saturday and next Saturday because that will be the best way to test our plans so that they can be refined to optimize our effectiveness on Election Day.
In addition to the work to be done on this and next Saturday, we also have an ENORMOUS amount of doors to be knocked and phones to be rung in order to execute the campaign’s strategy to win Missouri. In keeping with that plan we will also be conducting the following shifts:
* Canvassing
* Sunday, 11/26 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 11/27 – Friday 11/31 1 shift/day: 4:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Sunday, 12/02 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 12/03 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM, 11:45AM – 3:45PM,
2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Election Day Tuesday 12/04 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM,
11:45AM – 3:45PM, 2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Phone Banking
* Sunday, 11/26 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 11/27 – Friday 11/31 1 shift/day: 6:00PM – 8:30 PM
* Sunday, 12/02 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 12/03 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM, 11:45AM – 3:45PM,
2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Election Day Tuesday 12/04 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM,
11:45AM – 3:45PM, 2:45PM – 6:45PM
Please allocate time and sign up for as many shifts and your schedule will permit. We cannot afford to let this historic opportunity to turn our country around to pass us by.
If you have any questions, or need to change your shift schedule, please email George Mayer or Mary Taves at gmayer @everestkc.net, or call them at 816 523-3535.
Thank you so much for your help!
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I mentioned this before but, just in case you haven't done this yet.... k
You are now able to vote at the Plaza Library M-F 10am-7PM. You just fill out an absentee form then proceed to vote. The source that gave me this info said that they are wanting as many people as possible to do this as they are anticipating election day to be insane. Please pass along to other Obama supporters……(Also, you can vote at the Election Board just north of Bob Jones shoes.)
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Sign up now to help us get out the vote for pro-choice candidates!
Please contact Victoria at victoria.pickering@ppkm.org or call 913-312-5100 ext. 257 to sign up or for more information!
Monday, October 27: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
Tuesday, October 28: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
Canvass in Clay County, 4:30 – 7:00pm (5005 NE Antioch Rd, KCMO)
Wednesday, October 29: Phone bank in Overland Park, 1:00-4:00pm
Saturday, November 1: Phone bank in Overland Park, 12:00-4:00pm
Canvass Against Question 1 in Johnson County, 12:00-4:00pm
Sunday, November 2: Phone bank in Overland Park, 12:00-4:00pm
Canvass in Clay County, 2:00 – 7:00pm (5005 NE Antioch Rd, KCMO)
Monday, November 3: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
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Great way to help the campaign even if you don't have much time to give!!! K
From: Beverly Ahern [mailto:bja4@earthlink.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 10:56 PM
Subject: Volunteers to make a Healthy breakfast foods for Obama campaign staff
Hi everyone,
I have been volunteering for the Obama campaign the last couple of weeks. This has brought me in contact with the loyal, hardworking young staff members who work day and night to help get out the vote and work with all of the local volunteers. As you all know, Missouri is till undecided for Obama so with just two weeks left before the election, there is a lot going on at the campaign headquarters.
The key staff members who are from all over the country, are very tired, looking worn down and generally not as healthy as they once were. They eat fried fast food and lots of sweets like cupcakes and Lamar donuts - evenings it is pizza- then they take vitamins. I asked the field coordinators if they would be interested in receiving healthy food. The answer was a relieved YES.
This original concept is to bring a healthy breakfast in the morning between 8:30 - 9:00 am - when the staff arrives and before all of the volunteers arrive. You should count on 20-25 people. The kitchen at the headquarters has a toaster, microwave, blender, sink, large fridge and lots of paper plates, plastic forks and spoons, napkins and some cups. I didn't see bowls. Hot or cold meals will work. Fruit, bagels, smoothies, breakfast sandwiches, granola, etc. Costco is really close by. It is up to you. Put your name on any plate, bowl or warmer you leave. I can help pick up anything left in the kitchen and get it back to you.
I would like to get the schedule filled in for this week to start a routine where the staff can count on good food in the morning. If it doesn't work out to bring breakfast you can always provide a meal later in the day. Just be aware there are lots of people there and you can't always guarantee it will go to the staff rather than the general volunteers. Also if it is a meal to be delivered later in the day, I would like to notify the contact person: Sheila Johnson so she can tell everyone that good stuff is coming at a certain time.
Here is the general info:
Obama Headquarters
3100 Gillham Plaza, Kansas City, MO 64109
Contact Person: Sheila Johnson - 816-585-7611
the dates are October 22 - November 4th.
October 22 - Wednesday - Beverly - hot egg roll-ups
October 23 - Thursday
October 24 - Friday
October 25 - Saturday
October 26 - Sunday
October 27 - Monday - Bonnie Winston and Beverly - whole wheat tortilla/egg wraps
October 28 - Tuesday
October 29 - Wednesday
October 30 - Thursday - Carol Bates and Suellen Dice -
October 31 - Friday
November 1 - Saturday
November 2 - Sunday
November 3 - Monday
November 4 - ELECTION DAY
Please let me know if you can help. Would appreciate suggestions, ideas, other people to ask.
Does anyone have Kathy Marchant and Susi Luaki's email. I would like to invite them to help too.
And thanks in advance. I know who I want for out next president and know this thoughtful generosity of spirit will help.
Best regards,
Beverly Ahern
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Can you believe MO is a swing state with a very strong chance of going for Obama? This can help make it happen. Please do what you can. Thanks, K
From: Sharon Hoffman
Date: October 22, 2008 12:59:36 PM MDT
To: Hoffman Sharon
Subject: WIN MISSOURI AND AND ALL THT JAZZ!
Ok, hopefully this is my last ask for the Obama campaign. Although the polls are looking good and the campaign raised a lot of money last month, we can't leave anything to chance. This election is too important to all of us and... America. The crucial game is on the ground and the campaign has set up a separate 'Committee For Change' to fund the battle ground states. We are definitely one of those. There are 1000 volunteers coming into town and thousands from here working the election. We need everyone of them, AND YOU, and more. And we need to be sure that we have the funds to keep the offices across the state going till the victory is in! So i'm asking you, one more time to donate, what you can to make sure we win THE STATE.. donate whatever you can $1000, $500, $100 or $50 to the COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE. We need to raise $40,000 by Friday. October 24th.. use this link to be sure it stays here in Missouri,
https://www.democrats.org/page/contribute/cfcmidwest?custom1=Sharon+Hoffman
AND LET'S HAVE SOME FUN...
JARDINES WILL BE HOSTING A “GET OUT THE VOTE” JAZZ EXTRAVEGANZA WITH JAZZ GREAT DAVID BASSE AND THE CITY LIGHT ORCHESTRA. MONDAY OCTOBER 27TH FOR OBAMA SUPPORTERS AND TUESDAY OCTOBER 28TH FOR MCCAIN SUPPORTERS.
LET’S ALL GATHER ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 27TH FOR THE 6:30pm PERFORMANCE , TO REGROUP, HAVE SOME FUN, AND REALLY SHOW MISSOURIANS THAT “YES WE CAN” AND “YES WE WILL” !!!!!!!!!
THE COST IS ONLY $100 AND WILL INCLUDE THE SHOW, DINNER AND 50% OF THE PROCEEDS WILL BE DONATED TO THE 'CAMPAIGN FOR CHANGE' which will be used in Missouri for the ground operation to wind up the election on november 4
MAKE YOUR RESERVATIONS NOW! SPACE IS LIMITED!
CALL HOLLY AT JARDINES 816 561 6480 OR E-MAILJAZZ4BEENA@GMAIL.COM (located at 4536 Main St.)
and email me so i know how much to count towards COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE.
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Forwarded from a friend. K
Kathryn,
About three weeks ago Lee Hirsch, a talented director friend of mine, told me his idea of LOCAL VOICES. He wanted to film commercials in small town battleground states highlighting local persons and their reasons why they support Obama. A kind voice helped me guide him to TRUTHANDHOPE.ORG, a pro-Obama PAC, whom helped move the vision fast. Here is the first ad:
http://truthandhope.org/localvoices/index.htm
I love the sense of urgency with this group as well their mission of winning over blue collar voters back to the Democratic Party. They know have 2 teams in other battleground states filming but need donations to buy more air time.
I'll hope you check it out and consider helping out. Any amount helps. Each ad only costs $40 to air. 21 days left let's not ease up.
Sincerely,
Houston
--
Houston King
1041 North Formosa Ave
Writer's Building Suite 317
LA, CA 90046
p: 323.850.2757 / c: 213.925.7535 / f : 323.850.2787
e houstonbking@gmail.com
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Blue Hearts 10-22-08
Hello All,
Here's the latest. Did you go to the rally in KC on Saturday? Wow! What a crowd, so diverse in every way. I LOVED it. And we couldn't even see the mass of people who could actually see the stage. 75K!
K
HUMOR/LINKS
This was sent to me. Definitely worth watching. K
Here is a little something my women friends and I put together, for girls and women everywhere.
Please watch and forward if you agree, to every woman you know.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart
Karin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OsGjelmbo&feature=emailhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OsGjelmbo&feature=email
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Not only click on doors, desk, windows but other items about the room... bridge, phone, pictures on wall, etc.... very funny. put up sound too
http://www.palinaspresident.com/
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From my buddy. K
so i'm friends with this young s.f. girl and somehow i commented to her totally creative and probably unemployed friend about his halloween card. he's now done this:
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Check this out. It's a fun way to be involved in the political process. K
http://yeswecarve.com/index.php
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Why I'd Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin
(Or, The Bridge to New Zealand)
by ROSANNE CASH
October 10, 2008
I'd like to formally submit myself to replace Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket. I feel confident that John McCain will see that the very attributes he desired in his VP choice can be met, and even exceeded in some areas, by me. For your consideration, my big, fat résumé:
1. Focus on the Family
I am the mother of five children, just like Governor Palin. I have known the demands of managing a full-time career and motherhood at the same time. I have juggled a breast pump and a BlackBerry, and I know when to put the BlackBerry down. (To be perfectly honest, I did once send a text to the baby and tried to nurse my bass player. You learn from your mistakes.)
2. Reproductive Issues
I also believe that a teenager's pregnancy is a "private family matter." In fact, I believe that every woman's pregnancy is a "private, family matter." (I bet the GOP never thought of making that leap!)
3. Church and State
Like the Governor, I now also believe that my will is perfectly aligned with God's will. When Governor Palin said that it was God's will for the Alaska pipeline to be built and asked for people to pray for that to happen, I was really inspired by her confidence in the absolute, seamless integration of her will and God's will. I have begun practicing this kind of supreme confidence on a smaller scale, but I am sure that I can quickly move to national issues. Starting with the sartorial, I know that it is God's will that I have the entire Chanel collection for the fall season, including those adorable high-heeled booties that were all over the runway shows.
(A couple things I'm still having trouble with regarding the will of God: I knew it was God's will that I win the Grammy in 2007 for my last record, but Bob Dylan won. This is clearly the work of Satan, but shouldn't my will/God's will have been strong enough to override that? And this Alaska pipeline--if it is God's will to have the pipeline built, then why isn't it built already? On a related topic, I don't own a single piece of Chanel.)
4. Environment
Along with Governor Palin, I don't believe that humans cause climate change.
(Okay, that is a bold-faced lie, but I've been paying really close attention to the campaign stump speeches, and I feel certain I am allowed a generous allotment of bold-faced lies.)
5. Foreign policy
Here's where I really shine. Governor Palin got her first passport in 2007. I got my first passport in 1970, when the Governor was only 6 years old! Not only do I have a passport, I have actually been outside of the United States, dozens of times. I have had relationships and conversations with real foreigners, in their own countries, in restaurants, shops, flea markets, museums, nightclubs, spas, hotels, all modes of public transportation, and even in their own homes. My foreign policies are fair, inclusive and sensitive to cultural differences. I don't ask for English Breakfast tea when I'm in France. I never call foreign currency "funny money" (even though it does look funny.) I don't shout at people to help them better understand English and, finally, I act on God's will when in Paris by going to Chanel, and to all the great boutiques, which is just an extension of God's will, as you can surely extrapolate by the above explanation of my will/God's will.
I know Governor Palin has one distinct advantage in living so close to Russia, in that she can keep a close eye on nefarious activity across the Bering Strait, but I, too, live very close to a foreign country. Canada is less than 400 miles from my home in New York City, and you never know when it might become necessary to invade a sovereign nation that has not attacked us, as we learned the hard way. Not only that, I have a girlfriend in Austin, Texas, whom I'm going to ask to keep an eye on Mexico.
6. Legal Experience
My understanding of the law is extensive, but here are a couple of cogent points: a photographer who thought I had used his photograph of me without his permission sued me. (I absolutely didn't use the photo without permission. When McCain does his meticulous vetting and background checks on me, I will explain the whole story. It was all a big misunderstanding.)
More importantly, I renegotiated my contract with the Sony Corporation in 1987. That was huge. You should have seen my legal bills. I negotiated an all-new contract with Capitol Records in 1995 and that, too, was an exhausting, contentious, but ultimately lucrative enterprise. Entertainment law is a blood sport, people. (Speaking of blood sports, I have to give it up to the Governor on the hunting issue. I have never shot a wolf from a helicopter, but I have thrown my cat off the bed. Hundreds of times.)
7. Higher Education
Governor Palin went to five different colleges to get her BS in journalism, but none of the colleges had entry requirements, whereas I went to a university that required a trigonometry credit before they would admit me. I had to take it the summer before school started. I don't remember a frigging thing, but I got a B. The other disparities in education are too numerous to mention, but suffice to say that I bet she never met Lee Strasberg.
It is true that I have no background in constitutional law, but I have read the Constitution, except for the amendments that don't have anything to do with me, and I watched the entire John Adams mini-series on HBO. Twice.
8. Ethics
I really think this whole investigation into the firing of the top state law enforcement official in Alaska, who wouldn't fire the state trooper who was mean to the Governor's sister, is just overblown. I once fired my assistant for making a pass at my husband, so I can totally understand this! And I would have fired an assistant who made a pass at my sister's husband, too. I love my sisters. Governor Palin loves her sister. People need to get over it.
But speaking of family, I've also had my fill of no-good boyfriends to my daughters, and boy, do I sympathize with the Governor over this Levi fellow and his MySpace page, with the guns and the cursing. My husband once took a broken chair out into the street to chase away a no-good boyfriend of my oldest daughter, and we didn't see the likes of him anymore. I have a zero-tolerance policy for miscreant youth, and I know I could help the Governor sort out her obviously conflicted feelings about setting limits for teenagers, just for her own peace of mind.
9. Iraq
The Governor says she hasn't "focused" on the war in Iraq, but I think she's just joshing us. No person in an executive position in the government of the United States could be so lazy that they would not familiarize themselves with every angle of what is potentially the greatest American debacle since the nation was founded, including all the terminology, like "Bush Doctrine."
If she's not kidding, then I respectfully submit the hate mail I received in 2003, at the beginning of the war, which came after my press conference with Musicians United To Win Without War, as proof of my "focus."
10. Executive Ability
Governor Palin was the mayor of a real town of 5,000 people. I have never been mayor of anything, but I have performed for crowds bigger than the population of Wasilla, Alaska, and I can tell you it's no picnic getting the monitors just right, working with cranky and egotistical musicians, changing clothes in dirty dressing rooms and eating bad backstage food, handling the hecklers and technical problems during a show, and then getting on the bus to go somewhere else and do it all over again the next night. Also, my last record sold about the population of Wasilla times forty, and they all seemed to like it. But dealing with the public is really difficult and they all have opinions about you, which are usually all wrong, so I've developed a thick skin, another requirement for life as the VP. Lastly, and the importance of this cannot be over-emphasized, the guy's head on the tail of the Alaska Airlines planes looks like my dad.
11. Maverick personality
Finally, there is one subject in which I find I am even more conservative than the Governor, and that is in the area of neo-natal responsibility. The Governor was eight months pregnant and in Texas to give a speech, when her water broke. She reportedly made her speech and then traveled eleven hours, dripping amniotic fluid, bypassing Seattle and Anchorage (major cities with world-class hospitals) to travel to a small hospital in Wasilla that had no neo-natal intensive care unit, and gave birth there. Call me a wimp, call me insecure, but you had better also call me a maverick, because I would have said "Damn the schedule! Damn the speech and the airline ticket!" If this had been me, as soon as my water broke, I'd be at the closest hospital and that baby would have been born in Texas! Just like my mom!
In summation, I present myself to the GOP as a woman, and I repeat, woman, who has held a passport for thirty-eight years, a lip gloss-wearing soccer-volleyball-softball-gymnastics mom of five, who can carry a six-pack home to her husband like nobody's business, whose will is firmly aligned with God's will, a neo-natal conservative and legally savvy public figure, a border-watching, trigonometry-credited, breastfeeding, BlackBerry-tapping, cat-throwing maverick whose daughters are out of their teens, therefore immune to teenage pregnancy (although this is a private, family matter), and whose dad's head (or an eerie facsimile) adorns a state airline.
I could offer more to recommend me to the job of vice president, but one last special quality that I share with Governor Palin is the fact that I also have a husband who wants his state to secede from the Union. Ever since the 2000 election, my husband has been all for the secession of not only New York, but the island of Manhattan! And I have to tell you, if Sarah Palin becomes vice president of the United States, he says we have to personally secede from the whole country. So please, people, write me in on the ballot in November, or write me in New Zealand, where I'll be making my new home.
Rosanne Cash is a singer-songwriter, and even though she has met Presidents Bush and Clinton (who appeared to note her décolletage with great appreciation), the ambassador to the Czech Republic and George Stevens, who produces the Kennedy Center Honors awards show, she does not think her knowledge of world leaders should be held against her, because her experience in Washington is limited to three days during the Million Mom March.
About Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash is a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter. Her fourteen record albums, released over the past twenty-five years, have charted eleven number-one singles. She has earned numerous accolades for songwriting and performance. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
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GENERAL
Although I can't confirm this story, there's a SNOPES link below that verifies something just like this. K
Ken,
Mom "early voted" today. She said the machine kept flipping to Republican every time she tried to vote a straight Democratic ticket. At first they patronized her, "Honey, here's the way you do this." After it flipped to Republican 3 times, she made them get the judge.
I did some online searches and find out, that this is not uncommon. The big suggestion, online, is to take a video camera in the booth and tape the process. I will definitely be doing just that.
They are trying to steal the election, again!
We must stop them!
Bill
p.s. Check this out to go along with the story above.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/straightticket.asp
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
McCain's political attacks inciting far right
E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group
Are we witnessing the re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger? McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among other things, a "decent person."
Yet McCain's own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama's association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain's attacks, she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." What other "terrorists" was she thinking about?
Because Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and because even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association. Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama's enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.
Precisely because Obama is not a Baby Boomer, he carries none of that generation's scars. Most Americans (including most Boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.
Yet culture war politics are relatively mild compared with the far right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s.
What we are now witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
False claims that Obama is a Muslim, that he trained to overthrow the government, that he was educated in Wahhabi Muslim schools, are a standard part of the political discussion. These fake stories come from voices on the ultra right that have dabbled in other forms of conspiracy, including classic anti-Semitism. McCain and his campaign do not pick up the most extreme charges. They just fan the flames by suggesting that voters don't really know who Obama is, hinting at a sinister back story without filling in the details. That is left to the voters' imaginations.
The tragic irony here is that McCain was the victim of some of the very same extremist forces in the 2000 South Carolina primary.
To bring McCain down, some of President Bush's supporters on the far right peddled all manner of falsehoods about McCain, raising despicable charges about his time as a POW and suggesting (again falsely) that he had fathered an illegitimate child of color. In the past, McCain publicly condemned some of the very people who are now going after Obama.
McCain cannot be blamed for all of the crazies who see in Obama a chance to earn fame and fortune by concocting lies about him. And yes, we should defend the speech rights even of those whose views we find abhorrent.
But the angry McCain-Palin crowds, and particularly those who threaten violence or shout racist epithets, should be a wake-up call to McCain. The dark hints about Obama that McCain's campaign is dropping dovetail too nicely with the nasty trash floating around the Internet and the airwaves.
We are in the midst of what could become - and here's hoping it doesn't - the worst economic downturn in decades. The last thing we need is a campaign that strengthens fanaticism, tarnishes the authority of the next president, and whips up the worst kinds of prejudice. This works both ways: Obama should not be delegitimized if he wins, and McCain should not want to win in a way that would undermine his own capacity to lead.
When Christopher Buckley, a novelist and former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush, announced last week that he would vote for Obama (his first vote ever for a Democrat), he referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. "You know," the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. said, "I've spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks."
McCain has an obligation, to his own legacy and the country he has served, to separate himself and his campaign from the kooks. Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but extremism in pursuit of the presidency is as dysfunctional as it is degrading.
To comment, e-mail E.J. Dionne Jr. at postchat@aol.com.
Copyright 2008 SF Chronicle
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October 14, 2008
Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants
By TOMMY McCALL
Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?
As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.
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FYI, from a MoveOn email. K
The GOP is trying to purge Democratic voters off the rolls to steal the election in states like Ohio, Florida, and Colorado.
We're hearing a lot about the trumped-up charges against ACORN these days—but very little about the massive voter suppression campaign being orchestrated by the Republicans. The GOP is trying to purge thousands of Democratic voters off the rolls in states like Ohio, Florida, and Colorado.1
John McCain and Sarah Palin are falsely accusing a community organizing group—ACORN—of voting fraud to distract the media from their own party's wrongdoing.2 Worst of all: It's working.
The truth is, McCain is vilifying ACORN to justify voter suppression—making it harder for Obama supporters to vote.
The GOP's voter suppression campaign could steal this election. But we can stop them with a rapid-response fund to support legal actions, run newspaper ads to get the media talking about GOP voter suppression, and prosecute anyone who tries to steal this election.
For over twenty-five years, Republicans have promoted the myth of voting fraud to argue for restrictive voting laws—but Bush's own Justice Department found virtually no organized voting fraud.3 Now McCain is attacking ACORN in order to justify a frenzy of lawsuits making it harder for Obama supporters to vote.
Here's what he's not telling you:
The only fraud committed was against ACORN itself. ACORN hired 13,000 workers to register a remarkable 1.3 million new voters. And a few of them turned in registration forms with inaccurate and even made-up names to get credit for work they didn't do. ACORN fired them and turned them over to the authorities.4
ACORN reported the fraudulent registration forms. In most states, ACORN is required by law to submit all forms collected whether they appear to be bogus or not—that way election officials, not partisan groups, can make the call. ACORN flags cards that may not be legitimate. And in many places, the charges of fraud only came up because ACORN was the one who flagged the cards!5
This won't have any impact on the election. No one is allowed to vote unless they are properly registered. And there is no evidence of false registrations actually leading to organized voting fraud.6
We can't let false charges of voting fraud distract us from the very real voter suppression campaign that is already well under way.
Republicans are looking for typos on voter registration forms, threatening to challenge homeowners facing foreclosure, and falsely warning that voters with outstanding traffic tickets may be arrested if they go to the polls.7
P.S. You can learn more about the false charges against ACORN by clicking here:
http://acorn.org/quickfacts
P.P.S. Republicans aren't just smearing ACORN—they're smearing Barack Obama, too, by sending around untrue emails about him.
Have your friends or family ever forwarded you an email with false attacks on Obama? If so, be sure they know the truth. Forward the email to The Center for Political Accuracy, and they'll reply with the true facts for you to respond with:
info@politicalaccuracy.org
Sources:
1. "States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal," New York Times, October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html
"Check-off box delays thousands of voter registrations," Denver Post, October 14, 2008
http://www.denverpost.com/previous2/home/ci_10713377
2. "ACORN defends efforts amid voter-fraud allegations," Associated Press, October 14, 2008
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081014/ap_on_el_pr/voter_fraud
3. "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud," New York Times, April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html
"The Truth About Fraud," Brennan Center for Justice
http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/
4. "The Truth About ACORN's Voter Registration Drives," ACORN
http://acorn.org/quickfacts
"Group Answers Charges of Voter Registration Fraud," New York Times, October 14, 2008
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/acorn/
5. "Voter Group Admits Mistakes, Defends Work," ABC News, October 14, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31241&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=5
"Is there ACORN fraud in Florida?," Orlando Sentinel, October 15, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31239&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=6
6. "'Fraud' vs. 'Suppression'," Politico, October 14, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31240&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=7
7. "After A Surge in Registration, A Surge in Suppression," Brennan Center for Justice, October 7, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31236&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=8
"Democrats fear GOP will turn away foreclosed voters; GOP won't rule out using residency change to challenge a ballot," Indianapolis Star, October 3, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31237&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=9
"Vote-scam fliers target black neighborhoods," Philadelphia Daily News, October 2, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31041&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=10
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LOCAL
This is from Jason Kander. Here's a great way to get involved locally on election day. K
Let's get out the vote for Obama
On Monday, November 3rd (the day before election day), I'll canvass the 44th District, putting literature on doors to remind Democratic voters to go to the polls the following day.
Then, on election day, I'm going to do it again. We're going to get every last Democratic vote out of the Fightin' 44th.
I HOPE YOU'LL JOIN ME!!!!
We'll go from 2pm to 7pm on Monday and 3pm to 7pm on Election Day. It's not every door, it's not convincing anyone of anything, it's just leaving reminders on the doors of folks we have identified as likely Democratic voters. And it's right here in the 44th. This election could be decided in Missouri, and Missouri could be decided by the turnout in Kansas City. Time to step up.
If you want to help, reply to me at this email address or contact Sarah White at 816 822 1627 or swhite@jaynixon.com and we'll get in touch by phone to give you the details.
Other volunteer opportunities:
The Missouri Democratic Party needs your help with a variety of other work between now and election day. They are located at 8043 Wornall. Walk in and offer your services or contact Elizabeth Birks at 816 260 1902 or birks.elizabeth@gmail.com.
Yard Signs:
Finally, I have a few Obama yard signs left. Let me know if you want one, but realize that I'm just going to hit you up to spend some time volunteering for Obama. Also, you can get signs for pretty much the entire Democratic ticket over at the Democratic Headquarters at 8043 Wornall.
Two weeks until we make history!
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If you are hoping to get a gig with the election board in MO, please check out the following. K
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 12:00 PM
Subject: KC Election Board - Worker Positions
Per our conversation, please find the referenced information attached. Thank you. J
"Rae”melle A. Davis
Executive Secretary/Tabulation Specialist
Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners
1828 Walnut - Suite 300
Kansas City, MO 64108
816-842-4820
Fax: 816-472-4960
raemelle@kceb.org
www.kceb.org
Please consider being a part of our team on election day!
On election day, more than 1,500 election workers are needed to serve the voters of Kansas City, within Jackson County. This presents a great opportunity to serve your community and be part of the election process.
You can join our Election Worker Team by completing the Election Worker form and mailing or faxing it to the KC Election Board office. Our address and fax number are listed below.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Election Workers are the Gatekeepers of Our Democracy!
Count me in!
I am interested in joining the Election Worker Team!
PLEASE PRINT – RETURN VIA E-MAIL OR FAX
Name
Address
City MO Zip 64 Date of Birth________ SSN (last 4 digits)
Home Phone Res. Email
Cell Phone Bus. Email
Bus. Phone
U.S. Citizen? Y___ N___ Resident of Jackson County? Y___ N___ Registered Voter in KCMO Y___ N___
Describe any physical limitations that require work accommodations
Where did you pick up this form: _______________
Party Affiliation: _______Republican _______Democrat
I’M INTERESTED IN
____Election Judge ____Pick up Personnel ____Voter Assistant Specialist
____Deputy Commissioner ____Greeter/Locator
Signature Date
Qualifications
• Citizen of the United States
• Resident of Kansas City, within Jackson County
• A registered voter, at least 18 years-old
• Available to work in any part of the city
Hours
• Polls are open from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
• Election workers report to their assigned location no later than 5:00 a.m. to prepare for 6:00 a.m. poll opening.
• Following the 7:00 p.m. close of polls, all election workers assist Supervising Judges in closing poll site.
Training/Compensation
• Required attendance at one training session
• Training pay applicable only if combined with election day work
• Compensation ranges from $25.00 to $125.00 depending on the position worked
• Training materials including laptops, cell phones and poll logs are provided
• Total election day payment mailed 7 to 10 days after the election
Benefits of Becoming an Election Worker
• Learning about and assisting others in the democratic process
• Showing your civic pride
• Giving back to the community
• Contributing personally to timely, free, fair, honest and accurate elections
• Promoting public trust and confidence in the democratic process
• Earning extra dollars!
POLL WORKER DESCRIPTIONS
*Supervising Judge
• Assign duties to election judges
• Provide directions for setting up poll
• Open poll at 6:00 a.m.
• Manage processing of voters
• Officially close poll at 7:00 p.m.
• Responsible for preparing designated supplies to be picked up at end of day
*Election Judge
• Assist Supervising Judges and share responsibilities including, but not limited to:
• Open and set up poll
• Check voter identification and ensure poll book signature
• Greet voters
• Assist voters as needed
• Issue “I Voted” stickers
• Assist Supervising Judges in closing poll
*Deputy Commissioners (DC’s) work in teams to visit assigned poll sites throughout election day to monitor and ensure compliance with voting procedures and laws governing elections in the state of Missouri. Authorized to report any irregularity or failure of duty, assist judges and voters – serves as the eyes and ears of the election board (must designate a party preference).
Voter Assistance Specialist (VAS’s) assist voters by verifying their registration, correct polling location or other information using the Missouri Certified Voter Registration database and a laptop computer, cell phone or poll log (provided by the election board).
Pickup Personnel (PUP’s) ensure timely retrieval of “digital” ballots and voting supplies from poll sites and deliver the supplies to the election board headquarters (a 3-4 hour shift).
Greeters/Locators help minimize lines at the polls by ensuring the voter is at the correct poll, has the correct identification and is in the correct line.
*Duties are performed in bi-partisan teams of two.
Here's the latest. Did you go to the rally in KC on Saturday? Wow! What a crowd, so diverse in every way. I LOVED it. And we couldn't even see the mass of people who could actually see the stage. 75K!
K
HUMOR/LINKS
This was sent to me. Definitely worth watching. K
Here is a little something my women friends and I put together, for girls and women everywhere.
Please watch and forward if you agree, to every woman you know.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart
Karin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OsGjelmbo&feature=emailhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OsGjelmbo&feature=email
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Not only click on doors, desk, windows but other items about the room... bridge, phone, pictures on wall, etc.... very funny. put up sound too
http://www.palinaspresident.com/
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From my buddy. K
so i'm friends with this young s.f. girl and somehow i commented to her totally creative and probably unemployed friend about his halloween card. he's now done this:
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Check this out. It's a fun way to be involved in the political process. K
http://yeswecarve.com/index.php
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Why I'd Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin
(Or, The Bridge to New Zealand)
by ROSANNE CASH
October 10, 2008
I'd like to formally submit myself to replace Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket. I feel confident that John McCain will see that the very attributes he desired in his VP choice can be met, and even exceeded in some areas, by me. For your consideration, my big, fat résumé:
1. Focus on the Family
I am the mother of five children, just like Governor Palin. I have known the demands of managing a full-time career and motherhood at the same time. I have juggled a breast pump and a BlackBerry, and I know when to put the BlackBerry down. (To be perfectly honest, I did once send a text to the baby and tried to nurse my bass player. You learn from your mistakes.)
2. Reproductive Issues
I also believe that a teenager's pregnancy is a "private family matter." In fact, I believe that every woman's pregnancy is a "private, family matter." (I bet the GOP never thought of making that leap!)
3. Church and State
Like the Governor, I now also believe that my will is perfectly aligned with God's will. When Governor Palin said that it was God's will for the Alaska pipeline to be built and asked for people to pray for that to happen, I was really inspired by her confidence in the absolute, seamless integration of her will and God's will. I have begun practicing this kind of supreme confidence on a smaller scale, but I am sure that I can quickly move to national issues. Starting with the sartorial, I know that it is God's will that I have the entire Chanel collection for the fall season, including those adorable high-heeled booties that were all over the runway shows.
(A couple things I'm still having trouble with regarding the will of God: I knew it was God's will that I win the Grammy in 2007 for my last record, but Bob Dylan won. This is clearly the work of Satan, but shouldn't my will/God's will have been strong enough to override that? And this Alaska pipeline--if it is God's will to have the pipeline built, then why isn't it built already? On a related topic, I don't own a single piece of Chanel.)
4. Environment
Along with Governor Palin, I don't believe that humans cause climate change.
(Okay, that is a bold-faced lie, but I've been paying really close attention to the campaign stump speeches, and I feel certain I am allowed a generous allotment of bold-faced lies.)
5. Foreign policy
Here's where I really shine. Governor Palin got her first passport in 2007. I got my first passport in 1970, when the Governor was only 6 years old! Not only do I have a passport, I have actually been outside of the United States, dozens of times. I have had relationships and conversations with real foreigners, in their own countries, in restaurants, shops, flea markets, museums, nightclubs, spas, hotels, all modes of public transportation, and even in their own homes. My foreign policies are fair, inclusive and sensitive to cultural differences. I don't ask for English Breakfast tea when I'm in France. I never call foreign currency "funny money" (even though it does look funny.) I don't shout at people to help them better understand English and, finally, I act on God's will when in Paris by going to Chanel, and to all the great boutiques, which is just an extension of God's will, as you can surely extrapolate by the above explanation of my will/God's will.
I know Governor Palin has one distinct advantage in living so close to Russia, in that she can keep a close eye on nefarious activity across the Bering Strait, but I, too, live very close to a foreign country. Canada is less than 400 miles from my home in New York City, and you never know when it might become necessary to invade a sovereign nation that has not attacked us, as we learned the hard way. Not only that, I have a girlfriend in Austin, Texas, whom I'm going to ask to keep an eye on Mexico.
6. Legal Experience
My understanding of the law is extensive, but here are a couple of cogent points: a photographer who thought I had used his photograph of me without his permission sued me. (I absolutely didn't use the photo without permission. When McCain does his meticulous vetting and background checks on me, I will explain the whole story. It was all a big misunderstanding.)
More importantly, I renegotiated my contract with the Sony Corporation in 1987. That was huge. You should have seen my legal bills. I negotiated an all-new contract with Capitol Records in 1995 and that, too, was an exhausting, contentious, but ultimately lucrative enterprise. Entertainment law is a blood sport, people. (Speaking of blood sports, I have to give it up to the Governor on the hunting issue. I have never shot a wolf from a helicopter, but I have thrown my cat off the bed. Hundreds of times.)
7. Higher Education
Governor Palin went to five different colleges to get her BS in journalism, but none of the colleges had entry requirements, whereas I went to a university that required a trigonometry credit before they would admit me. I had to take it the summer before school started. I don't remember a frigging thing, but I got a B. The other disparities in education are too numerous to mention, but suffice to say that I bet she never met Lee Strasberg.
It is true that I have no background in constitutional law, but I have read the Constitution, except for the amendments that don't have anything to do with me, and I watched the entire John Adams mini-series on HBO. Twice.
8. Ethics
I really think this whole investigation into the firing of the top state law enforcement official in Alaska, who wouldn't fire the state trooper who was mean to the Governor's sister, is just overblown. I once fired my assistant for making a pass at my husband, so I can totally understand this! And I would have fired an assistant who made a pass at my sister's husband, too. I love my sisters. Governor Palin loves her sister. People need to get over it.
But speaking of family, I've also had my fill of no-good boyfriends to my daughters, and boy, do I sympathize with the Governor over this Levi fellow and his MySpace page, with the guns and the cursing. My husband once took a broken chair out into the street to chase away a no-good boyfriend of my oldest daughter, and we didn't see the likes of him anymore. I have a zero-tolerance policy for miscreant youth, and I know I could help the Governor sort out her obviously conflicted feelings about setting limits for teenagers, just for her own peace of mind.
9. Iraq
The Governor says she hasn't "focused" on the war in Iraq, but I think she's just joshing us. No person in an executive position in the government of the United States could be so lazy that they would not familiarize themselves with every angle of what is potentially the greatest American debacle since the nation was founded, including all the terminology, like "Bush Doctrine."
If she's not kidding, then I respectfully submit the hate mail I received in 2003, at the beginning of the war, which came after my press conference with Musicians United To Win Without War, as proof of my "focus."
10. Executive Ability
Governor Palin was the mayor of a real town of 5,000 people. I have never been mayor of anything, but I have performed for crowds bigger than the population of Wasilla, Alaska, and I can tell you it's no picnic getting the monitors just right, working with cranky and egotistical musicians, changing clothes in dirty dressing rooms and eating bad backstage food, handling the hecklers and technical problems during a show, and then getting on the bus to go somewhere else and do it all over again the next night. Also, my last record sold about the population of Wasilla times forty, and they all seemed to like it. But dealing with the public is really difficult and they all have opinions about you, which are usually all wrong, so I've developed a thick skin, another requirement for life as the VP. Lastly, and the importance of this cannot be over-emphasized, the guy's head on the tail of the Alaska Airlines planes looks like my dad.
11. Maverick personality
Finally, there is one subject in which I find I am even more conservative than the Governor, and that is in the area of neo-natal responsibility. The Governor was eight months pregnant and in Texas to give a speech, when her water broke. She reportedly made her speech and then traveled eleven hours, dripping amniotic fluid, bypassing Seattle and Anchorage (major cities with world-class hospitals) to travel to a small hospital in Wasilla that had no neo-natal intensive care unit, and gave birth there. Call me a wimp, call me insecure, but you had better also call me a maverick, because I would have said "Damn the schedule! Damn the speech and the airline ticket!" If this had been me, as soon as my water broke, I'd be at the closest hospital and that baby would have been born in Texas! Just like my mom!
In summation, I present myself to the GOP as a woman, and I repeat, woman, who has held a passport for thirty-eight years, a lip gloss-wearing soccer-volleyball-softball-gymnastics mom of five, who can carry a six-pack home to her husband like nobody's business, whose will is firmly aligned with God's will, a neo-natal conservative and legally savvy public figure, a border-watching, trigonometry-credited, breastfeeding, BlackBerry-tapping, cat-throwing maverick whose daughters are out of their teens, therefore immune to teenage pregnancy (although this is a private, family matter), and whose dad's head (or an eerie facsimile) adorns a state airline.
I could offer more to recommend me to the job of vice president, but one last special quality that I share with Governor Palin is the fact that I also have a husband who wants his state to secede from the Union. Ever since the 2000 election, my husband has been all for the secession of not only New York, but the island of Manhattan! And I have to tell you, if Sarah Palin becomes vice president of the United States, he says we have to personally secede from the whole country. So please, people, write me in on the ballot in November, or write me in New Zealand, where I'll be making my new home.
Rosanne Cash is a singer-songwriter, and even though she has met Presidents Bush and Clinton (who appeared to note her décolletage with great appreciation), the ambassador to the Czech Republic and George Stevens, who produces the Kennedy Center Honors awards show, she does not think her knowledge of world leaders should be held against her, because her experience in Washington is limited to three days during the Million Mom March.
About Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash is a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter. Her fourteen record albums, released over the past twenty-five years, have charted eleven number-one singles. She has earned numerous accolades for songwriting and performance. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
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GENERAL
Although I can't confirm this story, there's a SNOPES link below that verifies something just like this. K
Ken,
Mom "early voted" today. She said the machine kept flipping to Republican every time she tried to vote a straight Democratic ticket. At first they patronized her, "Honey, here's the way you do this." After it flipped to Republican 3 times, she made them get the judge.
I did some online searches and find out, that this is not uncommon. The big suggestion, online, is to take a video camera in the booth and tape the process. I will definitely be doing just that.
They are trying to steal the election, again!
We must stop them!
Bill
p.s. Check this out to go along with the story above.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/straightticket.asp
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
McCain's political attacks inciting far right
E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group
Are we witnessing the re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger? McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among other things, a "decent person."
Yet McCain's own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama's association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain's attacks, she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." What other "terrorists" was she thinking about?
Because Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and because even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association. Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama's enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.
Precisely because Obama is not a Baby Boomer, he carries none of that generation's scars. Most Americans (including most Boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.
Yet culture war politics are relatively mild compared with the far right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s.
What we are now witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
False claims that Obama is a Muslim, that he trained to overthrow the government, that he was educated in Wahhabi Muslim schools, are a standard part of the political discussion. These fake stories come from voices on the ultra right that have dabbled in other forms of conspiracy, including classic anti-Semitism. McCain and his campaign do not pick up the most extreme charges. They just fan the flames by suggesting that voters don't really know who Obama is, hinting at a sinister back story without filling in the details. That is left to the voters' imaginations.
The tragic irony here is that McCain was the victim of some of the very same extremist forces in the 2000 South Carolina primary.
To bring McCain down, some of President Bush's supporters on the far right peddled all manner of falsehoods about McCain, raising despicable charges about his time as a POW and suggesting (again falsely) that he had fathered an illegitimate child of color. In the past, McCain publicly condemned some of the very people who are now going after Obama.
McCain cannot be blamed for all of the crazies who see in Obama a chance to earn fame and fortune by concocting lies about him. And yes, we should defend the speech rights even of those whose views we find abhorrent.
But the angry McCain-Palin crowds, and particularly those who threaten violence or shout racist epithets, should be a wake-up call to McCain. The dark hints about Obama that McCain's campaign is dropping dovetail too nicely with the nasty trash floating around the Internet and the airwaves.
We are in the midst of what could become - and here's hoping it doesn't - the worst economic downturn in decades. The last thing we need is a campaign that strengthens fanaticism, tarnishes the authority of the next president, and whips up the worst kinds of prejudice. This works both ways: Obama should not be delegitimized if he wins, and McCain should not want to win in a way that would undermine his own capacity to lead.
When Christopher Buckley, a novelist and former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush, announced last week that he would vote for Obama (his first vote ever for a Democrat), he referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. "You know," the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. said, "I've spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks."
McCain has an obligation, to his own legacy and the country he has served, to separate himself and his campaign from the kooks. Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but extremism in pursuit of the presidency is as dysfunctional as it is degrading.
To comment, e-mail E.J. Dionne Jr. at postchat@aol.com.
Copyright 2008 SF Chronicle
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October 14, 2008
Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants
By TOMMY McCALL
Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?
As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.
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FYI, from a MoveOn email. K
The GOP is trying to purge Democratic voters off the rolls to steal the election in states like Ohio, Florida, and Colorado.
We're hearing a lot about the trumped-up charges against ACORN these days—but very little about the massive voter suppression campaign being orchestrated by the Republicans. The GOP is trying to purge thousands of Democratic voters off the rolls in states like Ohio, Florida, and Colorado.1
John McCain and Sarah Palin are falsely accusing a community organizing group—ACORN—of voting fraud to distract the media from their own party's wrongdoing.2 Worst of all: It's working.
The truth is, McCain is vilifying ACORN to justify voter suppression—making it harder for Obama supporters to vote.
The GOP's voter suppression campaign could steal this election. But we can stop them with a rapid-response fund to support legal actions, run newspaper ads to get the media talking about GOP voter suppression, and prosecute anyone who tries to steal this election.
For over twenty-five years, Republicans have promoted the myth of voting fraud to argue for restrictive voting laws—but Bush's own Justice Department found virtually no organized voting fraud.3 Now McCain is attacking ACORN in order to justify a frenzy of lawsuits making it harder for Obama supporters to vote.
Here's what he's not telling you:
The only fraud committed was against ACORN itself. ACORN hired 13,000 workers to register a remarkable 1.3 million new voters. And a few of them turned in registration forms with inaccurate and even made-up names to get credit for work they didn't do. ACORN fired them and turned them over to the authorities.4
ACORN reported the fraudulent registration forms. In most states, ACORN is required by law to submit all forms collected whether they appear to be bogus or not—that way election officials, not partisan groups, can make the call. ACORN flags cards that may not be legitimate. And in many places, the charges of fraud only came up because ACORN was the one who flagged the cards!5
This won't have any impact on the election. No one is allowed to vote unless they are properly registered. And there is no evidence of false registrations actually leading to organized voting fraud.6
We can't let false charges of voting fraud distract us from the very real voter suppression campaign that is already well under way.
Republicans are looking for typos on voter registration forms, threatening to challenge homeowners facing foreclosure, and falsely warning that voters with outstanding traffic tickets may be arrested if they go to the polls.7
P.S. You can learn more about the false charges against ACORN by clicking here:
http://acorn.org/quickfacts
P.P.S. Republicans aren't just smearing ACORN—they're smearing Barack Obama, too, by sending around untrue emails about him.
Have your friends or family ever forwarded you an email with false attacks on Obama? If so, be sure they know the truth. Forward the email to The Center for Political Accuracy, and they'll reply with the true facts for you to respond with:
info@politicalaccuracy.org
Sources:
1. "States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal," New York Times, October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html
"Check-off box delays thousands of voter registrations," Denver Post, October 14, 2008
http://www.denverpost.com/previous2/home/ci_10713377
2. "ACORN defends efforts amid voter-fraud allegations," Associated Press, October 14, 2008
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081014/ap_on_el_pr/voter_fraud
3. "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud," New York Times, April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html
"The Truth About Fraud," Brennan Center for Justice
http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/
4. "The Truth About ACORN's Voter Registration Drives," ACORN
http://acorn.org/quickfacts
"Group Answers Charges of Voter Registration Fraud," New York Times, October 14, 2008
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/acorn/
5. "Voter Group Admits Mistakes, Defends Work," ABC News, October 14, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31241&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=5
"Is there ACORN fraud in Florida?," Orlando Sentinel, October 15, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31239&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=6
6. "'Fraud' vs. 'Suppression'," Politico, October 14, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31240&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=7
7. "After A Surge in Registration, A Surge in Suppression," Brennan Center for Justice, October 7, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31236&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=8
"Democrats fear GOP will turn away foreclosed voters; GOP won't rule out using residency change to challenge a ballot," Indianapolis Star, October 3, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31237&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=9
"Vote-scam fliers target black neighborhoods," Philadelphia Daily News, October 2, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31041&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=10
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LOCAL
This is from Jason Kander. Here's a great way to get involved locally on election day. K
Let's get out the vote for Obama
On Monday, November 3rd (the day before election day), I'll canvass the 44th District, putting literature on doors to remind Democratic voters to go to the polls the following day.
Then, on election day, I'm going to do it again. We're going to get every last Democratic vote out of the Fightin' 44th.
I HOPE YOU'LL JOIN ME!!!!
We'll go from 2pm to 7pm on Monday and 3pm to 7pm on Election Day. It's not every door, it's not convincing anyone of anything, it's just leaving reminders on the doors of folks we have identified as likely Democratic voters. And it's right here in the 44th. This election could be decided in Missouri, and Missouri could be decided by the turnout in Kansas City. Time to step up.
If you want to help, reply to me at this email address or contact Sarah White at 816 822 1627 or swhite@jaynixon.com and we'll get in touch by phone to give you the details.
Other volunteer opportunities:
The Missouri Democratic Party needs your help with a variety of other work between now and election day. They are located at 8043 Wornall. Walk in and offer your services or contact Elizabeth Birks at 816 260 1902 or birks.elizabeth@gmail.com.
Yard Signs:
Finally, I have a few Obama yard signs left. Let me know if you want one, but realize that I'm just going to hit you up to spend some time volunteering for Obama. Also, you can get signs for pretty much the entire Democratic ticket over at the Democratic Headquarters at 8043 Wornall.
Two weeks until we make history!
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If you are hoping to get a gig with the election board in MO, please check out the following. K
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 12:00 PM
Subject: KC Election Board - Worker Positions
Per our conversation, please find the referenced information attached. Thank you. J
"Rae”melle A. Davis
Executive Secretary/Tabulation Specialist
Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners
1828 Walnut - Suite 300
Kansas City, MO 64108
816-842-4820
Fax: 816-472-4960
raemelle@kceb.org
www.kceb.org
Please consider being a part of our team on election day!
On election day, more than 1,500 election workers are needed to serve the voters of Kansas City, within Jackson County. This presents a great opportunity to serve your community and be part of the election process.
You can join our Election Worker Team by completing the Election Worker form and mailing or faxing it to the KC Election Board office. Our address and fax number are listed below.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Election Workers are the Gatekeepers of Our Democracy!
Count me in!
I am interested in joining the Election Worker Team!
PLEASE PRINT – RETURN VIA E-MAIL OR FAX
Name
Address
City MO Zip 64 Date of Birth________ SSN (last 4 digits)
Home Phone Res. Email
Cell Phone Bus. Email
Bus. Phone
U.S. Citizen? Y___ N___ Resident of Jackson County? Y___ N___ Registered Voter in KCMO Y___ N___
Describe any physical limitations that require work accommodations
Where did you pick up this form: _______________
Party Affiliation: _______Republican _______Democrat
I’M INTERESTED IN
____Election Judge ____Pick up Personnel ____Voter Assistant Specialist
____Deputy Commissioner ____Greeter/Locator
Signature Date
Qualifications
• Citizen of the United States
• Resident of Kansas City, within Jackson County
• A registered voter, at least 18 years-old
• Available to work in any part of the city
Hours
• Polls are open from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
• Election workers report to their assigned location no later than 5:00 a.m. to prepare for 6:00 a.m. poll opening.
• Following the 7:00 p.m. close of polls, all election workers assist Supervising Judges in closing poll site.
Training/Compensation
• Required attendance at one training session
• Training pay applicable only if combined with election day work
• Compensation ranges from $25.00 to $125.00 depending on the position worked
• Training materials including laptops, cell phones and poll logs are provided
• Total election day payment mailed 7 to 10 days after the election
Benefits of Becoming an Election Worker
• Learning about and assisting others in the democratic process
• Showing your civic pride
• Giving back to the community
• Contributing personally to timely, free, fair, honest and accurate elections
• Promoting public trust and confidence in the democratic process
• Earning extra dollars!
POLL WORKER DESCRIPTIONS
*Supervising Judge
• Assign duties to election judges
• Provide directions for setting up poll
• Open poll at 6:00 a.m.
• Manage processing of voters
• Officially close poll at 7:00 p.m.
• Responsible for preparing designated supplies to be picked up at end of day
*Election Judge
• Assist Supervising Judges and share responsibilities including, but not limited to:
• Open and set up poll
• Check voter identification and ensure poll book signature
• Greet voters
• Assist voters as needed
• Issue “I Voted” stickers
• Assist Supervising Judges in closing poll
*Deputy Commissioners (DC’s) work in teams to visit assigned poll sites throughout election day to monitor and ensure compliance with voting procedures and laws governing elections in the state of Missouri. Authorized to report any irregularity or failure of duty, assist judges and voters – serves as the eyes and ears of the election board (must designate a party preference).
Voter Assistance Specialist (VAS’s) assist voters by verifying their registration, correct polling location or other information using the Missouri Certified Voter Registration database and a laptop computer, cell phone or poll log (provided by the election board).
Pickup Personnel (PUP’s) ensure timely retrieval of “digital” ballots and voting supplies from poll sites and deliver the supplies to the election board headquarters (a 3-4 hour shift).
Greeters/Locators help minimize lines at the polls by ensuring the voter is at the correct poll, has the correct identification and is in the correct line.
*Duties are performed in bi-partisan teams of two.
