It's about damn time. It's downright amazing how long this type of thing takes under the Bush Administration.
Looks like 58,000 absentee ballots are missing in South Florida. I wonder how that happened?
The Republican Party is reacting poorly to the tight Presidential race and the slew of newly registered voters in key states. In Florida and Ohio the GOP strategy is to challege the legal right of certain voters of certain racial groups: blacks and hispanics. The point of this exercise is to intimidate voters that the GOP thinks might not vote their way.
In Ohio the mechanism is a 1850s era law that is almost never used. This year, the GOP filed approximately 18,000 challenges to voter eligibility of mostly minority voters. Ohio law requires that the voters be notified within three days of a challenge, and that hearings on challenges be held at least two days before the election. So how is Ohio supposed to run all 18,000 challenge hearings in time for the election?
They're not. It just isn't possible. That's why the Democratic Party is taking the challenges to court. Otherwsie people whose challenges are still up in the air won't be allowed to vote. 18,000 votes is a lot in a tight race.
At least the Ohio method has at least the veneer of legality. In Florida, that's just not the case. The GOP tactic in Florida is called "caging", and involves an attempt to disrupt voting in Florida. To accomplish this, the GOP is circulating memos with over 1,800 names of Jacksonville voters, includng 49 that live at the Naval Air Station (that's right, the Republicans are acting to disenfranchise military voters). The GOP also apparantly called in a private investigator to videotape everyone participating in early voting.
The obvious question is why is a party that claims we are busy promoting democracy overseas (in Iraq and Afghanistan) attempting to keep people from voting at home? Aren't bullying anf intimidation the hallmarks of the regimes the President claims to oppose? Why is democracy more important abroad than at home?
I honestly can't think of a good answer.
Another example of how there is no such animal as the "Liberal Media". This isn't as bad as the whole Sinclair Broadcasting or Clear Channel Communications fiascos, or even Rupert Murdoch's fake news at Fox, though.
The problem we are now seeing in American media is that organizations are trying to claim that they are unbiased reporters of facts, when they are bowing to the political biases of their owners and senior management. If media organizations want to pick political sides, they need to declare them up front like was done in the 18th and 19th centuries. That way we don't have to read between the lines in order to pick up the inevitable slant.
Q. What do you call it when a nation violates the Geneva Convention to transfer prisoners of war to other nations so they can be secretly tortured?
A. A war crime, as defined in Article 49.
Q. How does this affect Americans?
A. The CIA was given authority to remove detainees from Iraq to other locales where they could be more rigorously questioned (tortured) for intelligence information. Even the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel says so. They also say that the CIA can remove illegal immigrants and do whatever they want to with them. At least twelve detainees have been removed from Iraq in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva COnvention.
Want to know how deeply our President (and the GOP) cares about individual freedom and libery? So deeply that campaign event staffers are threatening high scool students with death to keep them from asking difficult questions:
But when he got there, a campaign staffer pulled him aside and made him remove his button that said, "Bush-Cheney '04: Leave No Billionaire Behind." The staffer quizzed him about whether he was a Bush supporter, asked him why he was there and what questions he would be asking the president.
"Then he came back and said, 'If you protest, it won't be me taking you out. It will be a sniper,' " Sachs said. "He said it in such a serious tone it scared the crap out of me."
Sachs stayed at the event, but he was escorted to a section of the 7 Flags Events Center where he was surrounded by Secret Service and told he couldn't ask questions. "I was just in a state of fear," he said. "I was looking at the ceiling and I didn't know what to expect, I was so scared."
So why isn't this story getting the attention the Kerry/Communion story did? Isn't it relevant how Methodists view the President's actions? Why is it simply assumed that because President Bush endless talks about his faith that he is in good standing with his Church?
If he doesn't live up to the (admittedly high) standards of Methodism, whi is that not a campaign issue, when Kerry's disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church was?
When John Kerry claimed that the President had done little to assist Americans in finding new work, despite a loss of 1.6 million private sector jobs (558,000 total jobs, according to ABC News), the President responded that if you looked at it the right way, the No Child Left Behind program was also a jobs program because it added funding for schools to hire staff and provides quality eductation for students who might not otherwise get it.
There's just one (big) problem with this: No Child Left Behind has never been fully funded. That makes it an unfunded mandate, which merely punishes schools that don't show improvement. How the hell is that a "jobs program"?
No. In a big way. The number of terrorist incidents around the world is up, Al-qaeda is motivated, diversified, and organized in a more classical cell structure, and the war in Iraq is a constant motivator for Islamists around the world.
The Bush Administration has done little to add security beyond the violations of civil rights in the Patriot Act (which still haven't resulted in any terror convictions), and to harass and annoy airline travellers. On the negative side, the Bush Administration shutdown pre-existing anti-terror programs, failed to finish re-building Afghanistan, and invaded Iraq. They were also at the wheel of the ship of state on September 11, 2001.
So how is it that these guys get to claim that they are the only ones capable of keeping us safe?
Truthout.org and KLAS-TV in Las Vegas are reporting that a voter registration group that recives the vast majority of its funding has been illegally throwing out voter registration forms of Democratic voters. The same place is also registering voters in Oregon. This combines with the Washington Post/MSNBC article detailing how Duvall County, Florida's Republican Elections Commisioner is finding "legal" mechanisms to make it more difficult for blacks to vote, and Ohio allegations that Republican officials are trying to reduce Democratic voter registrations, to clearly show that the GOP is only interested in its sort of Democracy. You know, the kind where there's only one party...
I'll admit that it looks like I've abandoned this place, but I haven't. I'm just mentally exhausted. Two classes, work, preparation for comprehensive exams, and the election are definitely taking their toll.
There has been a lot to comment on lately, but I just haven't had the energy. I should be back to posting regularly this week.
