More voters 'purged' mistakenly, in violation of fed law

Jeez, why can't we manage to run normal elections, without disenfranchisement, in the world's oldest democracy!?  Right-to-lifers say we should err on the side of life.  Well, when it comes to elections, we need to err on the side of letting citizens vote.  The right to vote is the most important right we've got in a democracy, without it our other rights and civil liberties don't mean squat.  The right to vote shouldn't be yanked away without warning, weeks before a national election, due to some bureaucrat's typo. 

These state attorney generals should be prosecuted for violating federal elections laws!

 

Some voters 'purged' from voter rolls

By Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein

October 26, 2008  | CNN.com

 

College senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to voting in her first presidential election, even carrying her voter registration card in her wallet.

 

But about two weeks ago, Berry got disturbing news from local election officials.

 

"This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote," a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections said.

 

But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth certificate to prove it.

 

The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked October 9.

 

"It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late, apparently,' " Berry said.

 

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information.  At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

 

Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or "purged," from voter rolls.

 

It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

 

"What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

 

"That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct it before Election Day."

 

Weiser acknowledged that "purging done well and with proper accountability" is necessary to remove people who have died or moved out of state.

 

"But the problem is it's not necessary to do inaccurate purges that catch up thousands of eligible voters without any notice or any opportunity to fix it before Election Day and really without any public scrutiny at all," she said.

 

Such allegations have flared up across the United States during this election cycle, most notably in Ohio, where a recent lawsuit has already gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

There, the state Republican Party sued Ohio's Democratic secretary of state in an effort to make her generate a list of people who had mismatched information. But Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said generating such a list would create numerous problems too close to the election and possibly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.

 

The Supreme Court last week ruled against the GOP on appeal of a lower court order directing Brunner to prepare the list.

 

In Florida, election officials found that 75 percent of about 20,000 voter registration applications from a three-week period in September were mismatched due to typographical and administrative errors. Florida's Republican secretary of state ordered the computer match system implemented in early September.

 

In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen sued the state's election board after it voted against a proposal to implement a "no-match" policy. The board conducted an audit of its voter rolls and found a 22 percent match failure rate -- including for four of the six members of the board.

 

The Brennan Center has also documented cases across the country of possible illegal purging, impediments to college student voting and difficulties accessing voter registration.

 

A lawsuit has been filed over Georgia's mismatch system, and the state is also under fire for requesting Social Security records for verification checks on about 2 million voters -- more requests than any other state.

 

One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit says Georgia is violating a federal law that prohibits widespread voter purges within 90 days of the election, arguing that the letters were sent out too close to the election date.

 

"They are systematically using these lists and matching them and using those matches to send these letters out to voters," said McDonald, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project in Georgia.

 

"It's not, you know, an individualized notion of people maybe not being citizens or not being residents. They're using a systematic purging procedure that's expressly prohibited by federal laws."

 

Asked if he believed that eligible voters were purged in Georgia, McDonald said, "If people who are properly eligible, are getting improperly challenged and purged, the answer would be 'Yes,' " he said.

 

Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said letters like those sent to Berry appear to violate two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election.

 

"People are being targeted, and people are being told they are non-citizens, including both naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens," said Shore, another plaintiff in the Georgia lawsuit. "They're being told they're not eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been checked and approved by the Department of Justice, and that we know has flaws in it."

 

Georgia's Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican who began working on purging voter rolls since she was elected in 2006, said that won't happen. If there are errors, she said, there is still plenty of time to resolve the problems.

 

Handel says she is not worried the verification process will prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot.

 

"In this state and all states, there's a process to ensure that a voter who comes in -- even if there's a question about their status -- that they will vote either provisional or challenge ballot, which is a paper ballot," she said.

 

"So then the voter has ample opportunity to clarify any issues or address them," Handel added. "And I think that's a really important process."

 

Handel denied the efforts to verify the vote are suppression.

 

"This is about ensuring the integrity of our elections," she said. "It is imperative to have checks and balances on the front end, during the processes and on the back end. That's what the verification process is about."

 

So someone like Kyla Berry will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot when she votes, but it's up to county election officials whether those ballots would actually count.

 

Berry says she will try to vote, but she's not confident it will count.

 

"I know this happens, but I cannot believe it's happening to me," she said. "If I weren't allowed to vote, I would just feel like that would be ... like the worst thing ever -- a travesty."

McCain, Obama on strikes in Pakistan

Leaving aside the debatable effectiveness of missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan, it is apparent that Bush, McCain, and Obama all agree they are necessary.  McCain criticized Obama for advocating such strikes and "telegraphing his punches," although McCain himself advocated them a year earlier.  Is that straight talk??

 

 

Suspected US strike kills up to 20 in Pakistan

By Ishtiaq Mahsud

October 27, 2008  |  Associated Press

 

 

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – A suspected U.S. missile strike on the house of a Taliban commander inside Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan killed up to 20 people Monday, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

 

The reported strike occurred in the South Waziristan region, part of Pakistan's wild border zone that is considered a possible hiding place for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri.

 

Missile strikes into Pakistan's border region have escalated sharply amid complaints from American commanders that Pakistani forces are not putting enough pressure on militant strongholds on their territory.

 

U.S. military and CIA drones that patrol the frontier region are believed to have carried out at least a dozen strikes since August. The United States rarely confirms or denies involvement.

 

Two intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to media on the record, said the targeted house in Mandata Raghzai village belonged to a lieutenant of local Taliban chief Maulvi Nazir.

 

The officials, citing reports from agents and informers in the area, said militants cordoned off the scene. The identities of the 20 bodies pulled from the rubble were not immediately known, they said.

 

The missile strikes have killed at least two senior al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan this year.

 

However, it has also put strain on the country's seven-year alliance with the U.S. in its war on terror, especially since stalwart U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf stepped down as Pakistan's army chief and president.

 

Pakistan's new leaders have protested the missile strikes — as well as a highly unusual raid by helicopter-borne commandos in September — as unacceptable violations of their sovereignty.

 

The attacks only fuel the militancy destabilizing Pakistan and undermining the nuclear-armed nation's already faltering economy, they argue.

 

Pakistani troops are battling militants in two areas of the country's troubled northwest. In the Bajur region, for instance, it claims to have killed some 1,500 suspected insurgents in a two-month offensive.

 

The operations have drawn U.S. praise.

 

Yet many Pakistani are weary of a war they believe is being fought at America's behest and the government has offered to negotiate with any militant group willing to renounced violence, regardless of their ideology.

 

"There is an increasing realization that the use of force alone cannot yield the desired results," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a gathering of Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders.

 

The meeting in Islamabad was part of a dialogue process begun last year in hopes that it could ease strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, both crucial allies of the U.S.

 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly accused Pakistan, which backed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, of secretly continuing to aid the militants as a way to exert influence over its poorer neighbor.

 

Pakistan denies the charge. However, it has also seized on recent indications that Afghanistan's government is also seeking talks with the Taliban to press for compromise.

 

Talks should be open to "sons of the soil willing to forsake the path of violence. With a patient air, we must listen to them," Qureshi said. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan "need a healing touch," he said.

 

Associated Press writer Riaz Khan contributed to this report from Peshawar.

 

Obama: Cool Customer

I'm going to take this op-ed one step farther, and posit that Obama's calm, cool demeanor might not be totally inborn, but rather it could very well be a product of his maturing as a black man trying to make it in the white establishment's eyes.  (Harvard being a pretty good example.)  You don't make it very far among privileged whites talking like a wild-eyed preacher.  You do it talking like a lawyer, like a professor, and that's what Obama is -- or rather, that's what he's made of himself, in the white man's world.  John McCain, on the other hand, had to go thru most of his adult life before people -- his colleagues in the Senate, particularly -- started taking him to task publicly for his temper, instead of indulging his tirades as they did in the U.S. military.  Obama learned the importance of temperament in his 20s, a lesson it has taken McCain a whole lifetime to absorb, partly.


One Cool Customer
By Paul Waldman
October 20, 2008  |  Prospect.org

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=one_cool_customer

'Simpsons' epitomize Christian love?

Below is a short, original, profound analysis of a show I've watched and thought about a lot, but I never quite saw in this way. Thesis: an all-loving, Christian God would love us just as we love the inhabitants of Springfield: not despite our sins and foibles, but because of them.


Daily Inquisition: The Simpsons, Amen
October 17, 2008 | Exiledonline.com

Today's Defendant: The Simpsons

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: We might as well stop beating around the bush and have the whole show canonized, if that's possible. If not, all the characters can be saints, right? Or would it have to be Matt Groening and his team? Whatever, we'll work it out.

Because The Simpsons is more that just a great show, perhaps the greatest TV show ever made. The Simpsons is bigger than that. It's a model of the world as observed by a god that loves humanity, if such a thing were possible, which Christianity claims it is.

See, those of us who've dabbled in the Christianity game, we can tell you—it's never really been operational. To paraphrase Homer, when trying to describe his own religion which he can't recall at the moment, "Y'know the one with all the stuff that sounds great but doesn't really work out in real life…?" It's the love thing, basically. Nobody can do it, "love thy neighbor as thyself" or however it goes. That's crazy talk. People are just so terrible. There are like four really charming ones, and all the rest—phfff!

But The Simpsons imagines it for us, the possibility of loving everybody in all their rottenness. All those god's-eye-views of the world the show gives us, all those overhead shots of the whole amassed community of Springfield, then plunging down to pick up one of them caught in some act of routine sin: Snake robbing somebody, Apu changing the expiration dates on old food containers so he can still sell them, Nelson beating up a small geek, Lisa hectoring Bart in superior tones, Moe just standing there expressing all his pent-up evil in the beady shifting of his eyes. But you love Moe, right? Impossible not to love his defensive stoop, the impacted rage in his voice, everything right down to the last knob on his misshapen head.

That's how the Christianity thing was supposed to work, see. Everybody awash in this strange god's affection that ultimately becomes contagious. Of course it never pans out, but The Simpsons allows one to contemplate it as a fully realized utopian vision, at least. You read the New Testament and you just can't get a clear picture. All those parables, I mean. You really need The Simpsons as an Addendum, or Appendix, or on a CD-Rom tucked inside of the front cover. Better yet, how about a fifth Gospel: The Book of Homer.

Statement of the Defense: There is no possible argument against The Simpsons.

Verdict: Start mass-producing the halos.

Uthman: Palin reveals McCain campaign's cynicism

OK, even if you hate this op-ed, you gotta check out the Chappelle show clip referenced herein!  I promise you'll laugh.


Palin-Drones
By Allan Uthman
The Beast

A few months ago, a friend asked me who I though McCain would or should pick to be his vice presidential candidate. "I think if I were working for McCain," I said, "I'd wait until Obama makes his choice, and if he picks a man, pick a woman, or if he picks a woman, pick a man." You know, work the difference. So it was no surprise to me that McCain picked a woman. But, just like everyone else, I was dumbfounded that woman was Sarah Palin, one-year governor of a state over twice the size of Texas with the population of El Paso (there is one person per square mile in Alaska).

It seemed at first that McCain may have thrown the election by choosing an unknown, unready running mate with a BS in communications from Idaho University and a hard-right Christianist ideology, in a ploy to woo disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. "We're not that stupid," came the cry from insulted feminists, and they were right to recognize that Palin did not in any way represent their ambitions.

But it turns out that they are that stupid, or at least some of them are. While it seems unfathomable that women who supported Hillary Clinton could flip to the GOP ticket for a woman who is pro-life, pro-assault rifle and pro-Bush just because she's a woman, McCain's numbers among white women have shot up with Palin's stunt nomination. This is incredibly disappointing.

Palin is so obviously not equipped to be president that her own surrogates are not willing to discuss the possibility that McCain could die or become incapacitated in office. "She's not running for president," is the refrain. But of course, the only relevant issue when considering a VP choice, according to both presidential candidates (at least before Palin was picked), is whether they are ready to become president. John McCain will be 73 by January, used to smoke, loves to eat barbecued meat, and has had multiple bouts with serious cancer. If any president was ever likely to die in office, it's McCain. The guy could go any minute, really.  And yet his campaign thinks it's okay to select a nominee based entirely on demographic appeal, after a single interview.  And then they withhold her from the press, an obvious sign that they know she is not knowledgeable enough to survive under the spotlight. She gives one speech—a single goddamn speech—over and over again, repeating the same, already debunked, self-flattering lies about her fabricated image as a reform-minded maverick, and the press stands up and cheers, just for the novelty of her. This is a step backwards for gender equality, because if Palin were a man, the press would have murdered him by now. Special dispensation is not equality.

What this selection says about John McCain is simple: He doesn't give a damn what happens to this country when he's dead. McCain's personal favorite choices, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, are much closer to him in terms of politics and experience. These are guys who McCain would have selected if he were a real maverick, bucking party orthodoxy for the good of the country. McCain would probably have won anyway, impressing independents by risking GOP mutiny to stay true to himself, although he would never have closed the fundraising gap. Of course, there's a good chance that all McCain ever had to do to win this thing was talk about Vietnam and stay white.

One of the most infuriating things to see on TV news—the only news that matters, when it comes to shaping public opinion—is when they do one of those "fact-check" segments while omitting relevant facts. A good example is the squashing of Palin's attempted book-banning episode when she was mayor of Wasilla, a town of 7,000 which Palin left $20 million in debt.

This is from The New York Times:

"[I]n 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book 'Daddy's Roommate' on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to [future Palin campaign director Laura] Chase and [former Wasilla mayor John] Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

" 'Sarah said she didn't need to read that stuff,' Ms. Chase said. ''It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it.'

As mayor, Palin asked the town's library director, Mary Ellen Emmons, three times, how she'd feel about book-banning, the last time asking if she'd change her mind if people were picketing the library. Emmons was staunchly opposed. Palin fired Emmons for "not fully supporting her efforts to govern," only rehiring her when there was an outpouring of public protest against the move.

To me, this is a really big deal. But the story has been "debunked" repeatedly in the press, relying on a factcheck.org report dismissing a hoax e-mail that provided a bogus list of books "banned" by Palin. So the story is "Palin never banned any books," which is true, but she sure as hell would have if she could have. The abortive firing episode gets nary a mention, giving the impression that the very idea Palin wanted to ban books is false, when it clearly is not.

And, since Obama's church is such a hot topic, it would seem strange that Palin's church, which preaches end-times theology and glossolalia, has received little mainstream scrutiny. You want crazy pastor quotes? Check out Palin's pastor, Ed Kalnins:

On John Kerry: "I'm not going tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation. I'm sorry."

On Bush: "I hate criticisms towards the president, because it's like criticisms towards the pastor – it's almost like, it's not going to get you anywhere, you know, except for hell. That's what it'll get you."

On Iraq: "What you see in Iraq, basically, is a manifestation of what's going on in this unseen world called the spirit world. ... We need to think like Jesus thinks. We are in a time and a season of war, and we need to think like that. ... Jesus called us to die. You're worried about getting hurt? He's called us to die. ... I believe that Jesus himself operated from that position of war mode. Everyone say 'war mode.' "

Yeah. That's where Palin learned about morality. And she was in attendance at the church just weeks ago, as a guest speaker from Jews for Jesus described Palestinian terrorism as a manifestation of God's "judgment of unbelief" against Jews for rejecting Christ. It's not surprising that evangelical Christians are fired up by Palin, but again, I can't fathom the idea that Hillary Clinton supporters are excited about her.

And then there's this little tidbit, from her RNC speech:

"A writer observed, 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.' And I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman."

That unnamed "writer" was unnamed for a reason. It was Westbrook Pegler, an openly racist columnist who wrote of wishing for the assassinations of FDR—and Robert Kennedy. Pegler's xenophobic, red-baiting politics were so extreme (he described Jews as "instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared") that he was booted from the John Birch Society. In 1963, Pegler wrote that it was "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry." And, by the way, Pegler described Truman as a "hater," and Truman called Pegler a "guttersnipe." High praise, indeed.

It's hard to imagine why Palin or her speechwriter would include a phoned in quotation about how much better small-town people are than the rest of us from such a toxic source, when so many similar folksy platitudes could be pilfered from more benign writers, even ones whose names could be mentioned in public. I can only conclude that this was a coded message to the fascist right, the worst element in American politics, the very people we were all hoping were waning in significance this election cycle, that it was game on once again. I suppose there are plenty of white women who are anti-labor, pro-life, evangelical Christians. It's just that I can't imagine any of them were planning to vote for Obama, or Clinton, before the Palin selection.

Before anyone starts claiming that black Obama voters are equally shallow, consider whether they'd have voted for Alan Keyes. Because that's the nearest analogy I can think of for Palin's politics. Black people wouldn't vote for Alan Keyes, even if he were running against Robert Byrd. They're just not that stupid. So what the hell is wrong with white women? Are they really so aggrieved that Hillary got edged out of the Democratic nomination by Obama that they're willing to ruin the country just for spite?

The tragedy here is that, for all McCain's groundwork in building an image of himself as a man of character, the McCain/Palin campaign is the most cynical in modern American history. No longer feeling the need to even find a fact to hang their hat on, they have broken through the limits of distortion into the realm of utter fabrication, revealing their total contempt for the voting public. They don't twist the truth; the truth's got nothing to do with their strategy. It's much easier to just lie. And it's working. For their lies about their opponents and about themselves, they have been rewarded by substantial gains in key demographics, especially white women. Palin's selection has also enabled them to deflect criticism by crying sexism whenever Palin's obvious deficiencies as a candidate are raised.

And about that: It was the Clinton campaign that opened the door on claiming gender victimization as an electoral tactic. As her chances in the Democratic primary waned, Clinton and her surrogates went hog wild on the sexism charges, lashing out at anyone who dared criticize her. Admittedly, there were some ignorant comments here and there, albeit never from the Obama campaign. But when things got hairy, the Clinton campaign and its supporters leaned on sexism as an all-purpose excuse for losing, and it was a big steaming pile of horseshit.  The fact is that Clinton's gender was pretty much the only thing that distinguished her from a field rife with old, white, compromised senators. If Hillary Clinton were a man, there would have been no telling her apart from Dodd, Biden, or John Kerry for that matter. But Obama, even if you made him white, would still have been young, eloquent, and charismatic. In other words, as weird as this sounds, if you made Clinton and Obama into white men, Obama would have kicked her ass—it wouldn't have been close.

But Hillary's dead-enders insist that their expected primary victories were robbed from them by the "rampant misogyny" of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, and somehow Obama himself. And as Hillary's defeat drew ever closer, she herself ratcheted up the faux feminist rhetoric, leaving Obama with hordes of angry, inconsolable women blaming him for their imagined oppression, and somehow admiring Sean Hannity at the same time. And now, the Republicans have picked up the tactic and run with it, accusing Obama of calling Palin "a pig" (willful ignorance of cliché metaphors is a symptom of this condition) and labeling anyone who dares scrutinize Palin a sexist, including Tina Fey. These allegations hold about as much water as calling condemnations of Michael Vick racist.

There's a great sketch from the Dave Chapelle show, wherein Chappelle and crew are dressed up as classic movie monsters. Charlie Murphy is Frankenstein's monster, and when he gets fired from his office job, he accuses his boss of racism. A black coworker looks at him and exclaims, "nigga, you a Frankenstein!"

Nobody is after Sarah Palin because she's a woman. The fact is, she's a Frankenstein. And if women are so angry about losing a primary fight that they're willing to elect a Frankenstein, even a female Frankenstein, then they really are gullible, emotional, weak-minded fools, and they really do deserve all the derision they've gotten and more.