President Bush’s exit from the political scene is replete with irony. In 2000, many thought he won an election by disenfranchising thousands of African-American voters in Florida through the intervention of the partisan U.S. Supreme Court. Now, the outgoing president is handing over power to the nation’s first African-American president (”The Obamas check out future home,” News, Last Tuesday).
(Greeting the future: President Bush hosts last Monday’s visit to the White House by President-elect Barack Obama)
The 2000 Florida race had a distinct Third World aura about it, featuring nepotism, biased officials, questionable counting of ballots and transparent voter intimidation. Allegations abounded of police barricades near polling places to intimidate voters, refusal to accept voter registrations from blacks and a disproportionate number of faulty voting machines in predominantly black areas. Also, a highly confusing ballot was used in a predominantly Democratic county.
The race also saw an unprecedented mobilization among African-American voters who supported then-vice president Al Gore over Bush by more than 90% to 9%.
With the election of Barack Obama, history has given its final verdict on Bush, who will remain a permanent scar on American democracy.
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NOTE 1:GOP back to square one with Hispanics — John McCain won just 31 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2004, Bush won 54 percent of Latino Protestants. This year, Obama won 67 percent. While the economic crisis eclipsed cultural values among all voters, the shift in the Hispanic vote was especially pronounced. McCain’s reputation among Hispanics was damaged when he backed away from his failed 2007 immigration reform bill in this year’s Republican primary, as anger among the party faithful about illegal immigration led to a competition among the candidates to offer the most aggressively enforcement-oriented immigration plans. McCain said he would not vote for his own bill if it were to be reintroduced. — [MORE]
NOTE 2:The Republicans are in serious denial. — The post-election Republican soul searching has featured a convenient amnesia about the party’s race-based “Southern strategy.”
A few heretics excepted, they hope to blame all their woes on their unpopular president, the inept McCain campaign and their party’s latent greed for budget-busting earmarks. The trouble is far more fundamental than that. The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election.
Scare tactics, dirty tricks used to sway voters — Desperate McCain-Palin camp and the GOP machine “climbing walls” like scared “hissing cockroaches.” The rotting corpse of the Republican Party is stinking up the United States from top to bottom.
Report By: Associated Press
[Enlarge] In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.
The intent usually is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation.
Complaints have surfaced in predominantly black neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.
In Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal have appeared saying fears of high voter turnout had prompted officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.
In New Mexico, two Hispanic women sued last week, saying they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration officials, even though they are U.S. citizens.
“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking for her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”
Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”
Mccain’s Sex-Talk Robocalls
Hate on Halloween
References:
1.The Right’s Final Attack:Obama is a Black Muslim, Anti-Christian Socialist Plotting with an Evil Jewish Billionaire 2.
….All the above in order to elect FRAUDULENTLY — A washed up, half-dead, dazed and confused WHITE man and his semi-illiterate lying COW!
Snake-Oil salesmen John McCain and Sarah Palin are in “Hyena Mode” — desperate and discombobulated, the McCain-Palin team are chewing at anything in their path, including each other.
The empty headed DIVA — Sarah Palin, is squabbling with her handlers, and every “Cockroach” in the McCain camp is scampering to save “dear hide,” in the face of imminent defeat, as THE ONE — Barack Obama takes the fight to them in Republican red-state turf.
The Huffington Post reports: Even two Republicans once on McCain’s short list for vice president sound skeptical. In a fundraising e-mail on behalf of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mitt Romney referred to “the very real possibility of an Obama presidency.” In the Midwest, Gov. Tim Pawlenty gave a dour assessment of McCain’s chances in his state, saying Barack Obama “has a pretty good advantage in Minnesota right now.”
Even tax cheat “Joe The Plumber” a.k.a “Joe Wurzelbacher The IDIOT,” now a McCain surrogate, has inserted himself into the pathetic scare mongering mix — boldly insinuating that an Obama presidency would mean the “death of Israel” and the “end of democracy in America. ”
Joe oozes GODLY stupidity like the Republican he is, alright.
Meanwhile a Republican attempt at electronic vote theft was caught on tape in Virginia:
…and some of McCain’s robo-calls have degenerated into “Phone-Sex.”
The negative and racist McCain campaign has driven almost ALL African American voters to Obama. In most polls, McCain is losing these black voters by margins like 97% to 1%.
You can bet the Latino vote is not far behind. John McCain the former champion of Comprehensive Immigration Reform recently did a one hundred and eighty degree turn, and is now in bed with the extremist “Tom Tancredo-Lou Dobbs Wing” of the Republican Party — Vicious xenophobic Mongrels, who I am sure, with sufficient provocation would KILL EVERY IMMIGRANT ON SIGHT.
Bob Herbert sums it up eloquently: “The heyday of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove is over. Yet Senator John McCain handed the reins of his campaign to Mr. Rove’s worshipful acolytes.” “The classic fear card that the Republicans have played to such brilliant effect for years — will not work anymore!” — [MORE]
Olbermann on Palin: Socialist, fraud
In a Special Campaign Comment last night, Keith Olbermann cited yet another example of the McCain campaign accusing Barack Obama of something of which they themselves are guilty. In this case, Sarah Palin is accusing Barack Obama of advocating socialism when she literally used that word to describe the collective wealth sharing in her home state of Alaska.
NOTES: Like, Socialism — Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out….by Hendrik Hertzberg | READ FULL ARTICLE |
Guilt By Association?
The McCain campaign has devoted considerable attention and resources to making the point that Barack Obama’s associations are a reflection on his judgment and character. With that in mind, Keith Olbermann takes a look at the staggering volume of questionable associations by the McCain/Palin ticket from disgraced lobbyists to Alaskan secessionists.
Every day I watch the polls and get excited because I know Barack Obama is going to win the whole thing,” said Corgins Banner, a 32-year-old Charlotte man who works for a bank. “Then it hits me. Something is going to happen. They are going to find a way to stop him.”
Blacks worry about polls vs. reality in Obama campaign
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The prospect that Barack Obama is primed to be the nation’s first black president has black voters giddy.
But the better the news gets for Mr. Obama, with bigger leads in polls the closer Election Day draws, the more they fear it’s too good to be true. It’s especially so in the South, where a history of oppression, voter suppression and near electoral victories make blacks more skeptical than most.
“Every day I watch the polls and get excited because I know Barack Obama is going to win the whole thing,” said Corgins Banner, a 32-year-old Charlotte man who works for a bank. “Then it hits me. Something is going to happen. They are going to find a way to stop him.”
The long-running campaign has taken its emotional toll on some blacks who are jubilant one moment and fearful the next, and the mixed feelings were evident in interviews conducted last week.
Many simply don’t believe white voters are telling pollsters the truth about whom they’ll back, though recent elections involving high-profile black candidates, including Mr. Obama’s own primaries this year, suggest polls are fairly accurate. Some voters also suspect something more sinister – malfeasance in the counting of votes come Election Day.
“Racism is still alive and well in this country,” said Washington-based Democratic consultant Ray Strother, who contends that polls don’t reflect some white voters’ reluctance to back a black candidate. “There will be people who go into the voting booth intending to vote for Obama but won’t be able to do it.”
The uneasiness hasn’t shaken black voters’ resolve. Their backing was crucial to him winning several early primaries, and a strong black turnout is expected to boost Mr. Obama in battleground states, including North Carolina.
“He’s so close, and I want to believe he’s going to do it,” said Amber Hinton, a 20-year-old college student from Charlotte. “But it’s hard for me to believe that it’s going to happen. I don’t think America is going to let him win.” … [MORE]
The GOP (Grand Old Propaganda) is working to keep eligible African-Americans from voting in several states. To get an idea of how many African-Americans nationwide lack driver’s licenses, recall Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when thousands were stranded without transportation. “Crawford Republicans” could make the old “Jim Crow Democrats” look like pikers when it comes to voter suppression.
It was a mainstay of Jim Crow segregation: for 100 years after the Civil War, Southern white Democrats kept eligible blacks from voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements. Starting in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these assaults on the heart of American democracy unconstitutional.
Now, with the help of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Crawford vs. Marion County (Indiana) Election Board, white Republicans in some areas will keep eligible blacks from voting by requiring driver’s licenses. Not only is this new-fangled discrimination constitutional, it’s spreading.
GOP proponents of the move say they are merely trying to reduce voter fraud. But while occasional efforts to stuff ballot boxes through phony absentee voting still surface, the incidence of individual vote fraud—voting when you aren’t eligible—is virtually non-existent, as “The Truth About Vote Fraud,” a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, clearly shows. In other words, the problem Republicans claim they want to combat with increased ID requirements doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, those ID hurdles facing individuals do nothing to stop the organized insiders who still try to game the system…..[ more ]
