Friday, October 17, 2008
The Top Headline: Ohio Democrats Win at Top U.S. Court in Voting Fight
Posted by ed. dickau at 9:44 PM
The Top Headline: Ohio Democrats Win at Top U.S. Court in Voting Fight
“People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Guerilla Warfare-
Breaking: Obama Demands Special Prosecutor Investigate GOP Voter ...
By emiwest
Oct 17, 2008. By Ari Melber. Charging that the FBI probe of ACORN represents an “unholy alliance” between Republican operatives and potentially illegal conduct by law enforcement targeting voter fraud, the Obama campaign demanded Friday ...
Massachusetts Impeachment Coalition - http://www.mass-impeach.org/
Ohio Democrats Win at Top U.S. Court in Voting Fight (Update4)
By Greg Stohr
Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court, siding with Democrats, freed Ohio officials from a lower court order that might have limited participation by new voters in next month's presidential election.
Today's ruling means Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner doesn't have to provide county election boards with lists of new registrants whose information doesn't match up with government databases. A federal trial judge had ordered Brunner, a Democrat, to supply the lists by today.
The Supreme Court said Republicans who sued Brunner ``are not sufficiently likely to prevail'' because the provision of federal law they invoked doesn't authorize private suits. The two-page unsigned order was issued on behalf of the full court, without any published dissent.
Brunner said the judge's order could have affected as many as 200,000 Ohioans, potentially forcing them to cast provisional ballots instead of regular ballots. Democrats likely would have been disproportionately affected by the judge's order because of the party's efforts to register new voters this year.
Ohio is a crucial state for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in his race against Democrat Barack Obama. Without Ohio's 20 electoral votes, McCain would have to carry every other state that voted for George W. Bush in 2004, plus one that voted Democratic. Recent polls indicate Obama has pulled even or ahead in Ohio, a state Bush won by less than 118,000 votes four years ago.
Weeding Out Fraud
The Ohio Republican Party accused Brunner of ignoring her duty under a federal law to help weed out fraudulent registrations. The dispute was one of several fights that have made Ohio a center of legal controversy leading up to the Nov. 4 election.
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis in a statement said Brunner is seeking to ``minimize the level of fairness and transparency in this election.''
Brunner ``has fought at every opportunity the appeals of the people of the state and the county boards of election to provide an oversight of this election so it's done in a free, fair and open matter,'' said John McClelland, spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party.
Democrats hailed the ruling. The decision ``allows Ohio to move about the business of ensuring a free, fair, open and honest election without the threat of widespread voter suppression by the GOP,'' Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said in a statement.
`Myriad Discrepancies'
Brunner was elected secretary of state in 2006. She succeeded Republican Ken Blackwell, who was the target of Democratic criticism leading up to the 2004 election.
Brunner said in court papers that preliminary analyses showed ``myriad discrepancies'' in voter information. ``Many of those discrepancies bear no relationship whatsoever to a voter's eligibility to vote a regular, as opposed to a provisional, ballot,'' she said.
Brunner said the mismatches ``may well be used at the county level unnecessarily to challenge fully qualified voters and severely disrupt the voting process.''
The Ohio Republican Party argued that the 2002 Help America Vote Act, known as HAVA, requires Brunner to share the mismatches with county boards so they can investigate potential fraud before counting votes.
Republicans faulted Brunner for her ``steadfast refusal to provide the HAVA `mismatch' data to the county boards of elections in a meaningful way.''
Court Consensus
The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld U.S. District Judge George C. Smith's order on a 9-6 vote.
In overturning the order, the Supreme Court said it wasn't addressing the underlying question about Brunner's duties under HAVA, instead concluding that Congress probably hadn't authorized private lawsuits under the provision at issue. In reaching that conclusion, the court found a way to resolve the case without splitting along ideological lines.
``It's very good for the election process that it was unanimous,'' said Edward Foley, director of the election law program at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law in Columbus. ``It's more important that it was unanimous than whichever way it went.''
Robert Bauer, general counsel to Obama's presidential campaign, said the ruling might doom a similar lawsuit being pressed in Wisconsin by its Republican attorney general. ``It could be close to game, set, match,'' Bauer said.
Kevin St. John, a spokesman for Wisconsin Attorney General J.B Van Hollen, said there is a ``huge difference'' between the Ohio and Wisconsin cases. He said Van Hollen was suing in ``his official capacity to enforce state election law in state court.''
New Voters
More than 660,000 new voters registered in Ohio this year, many of them motivated by the chance to participate in the state's contested March 4 Democratic primary between Obama and New York Senator Hillary Clinton. While the state doesn't require party registration, Obama's aides say their party has a significant edge among new voters.
In Ohio and other states, would-be voters whose eligibility is in doubt can cast provisional ballots, which will count only if eventually validated by election officials.
The case is Brunner v. Ohio Republican Party, 07A332.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.
The End of the Rule of Law in America
By Editor
It was in 1999 that the government contracted to Kellogg, Brown and Root [KBR], a subsidiary of DickCheney's Halliburton, huge contracts to build a FEMA archipelago of 800 camps in secret locations across the US. They have ovens. ...
World Prout Assembly - http://www.worldproutassembly.org/
How You Can Help Prosecute Bush | Support Charlotte Dennett For
By Ed. Dickau(Ed. Dickau)
They were the same way with impeachment. But inernational media outlets from around the world are intensely covering what Bugliosi and Dennett are doing and the prospect of seeing Bush indicted for murder. ...
The Impeachment Hearing Room - http://theimpeachmenthearingroom.blogspot.com/
USA Today reported, "Less than three weeks before the November election, the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns are trading accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression and gearing up for possible court battles over the outcome." The rest of USA Today's report focused on allegations that ACORN demonstrated "a pattern of submitting fraudulent voter registrations," providing no examples of allegations of voter suppression, even though there have been numerous reported instances in battleground states. Read More
This Is What Has Them Scared To Death!
A Liberal Supermajority
Wall Street Journal - USA
Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time. It's always possible that events ...
And This Is What Has The Rest Of Us Scared To Death!
GOP to steal the election?
By Stacey A. Ward, Esq.
http://pol.moveon.org/donate/suppression.html?id=14429-1208854-MHrDyYx&t=3 . The simple act of raising funds to protect this election will send a warning to right-wing operatives who think they can get away with voter suppression. ...
Member Posts - http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/members
Waiting for the Barbarians | the GOP's machinery of hate has taken on a life of its own
In case you haven't heard, there's a guy running for president named Barack Hussein Osama Nobama. This Nobama was born outside America and secretly schooled in Islamic terrorism at a Wahhabi madrassa. He then moved to the United States to take up the radical '60s teachings of the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, while also organizing for ACORN, a subprime-lending, voter fraud-committing collective of affirmative-action welfare queens. All this happened before he became an elitist celebrity advocate of socialism, infanticide, the sexual abuse of children and treason.
Suffice it to say, this caricature stretches even the limits of comic imagination. The real Obama's Christianity, his patriotism, moderation and commitment to capitalism, law and order, and national security are matters of abundant public record--some of which displeases the left wing of his party. But this is of little import to the Republican rank and file.
For them, the fallaciousness of the whole counts for less than the suggestive appeal of the parts. All John McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates need to do is raise the insidious question--"Who is the real Barack Obama?"--and the zealots conjure the rest, along with cries of "Treason!" "Kill him!" and "Off with his head!"
The virulence of such rhetoric makes even Palin seem thoughtful; she at least inserts whole verb phrases like "palling around with" in between nouns like "Barack Obama" and "terrorists."
Such scenes are alarming not only because of the McCain campaign's willingness to stoke such murderous mania but also because of its apparent inability to control the madness once it has been unleashed. At more than one rally, McCain has been booed by the audience for attempting to interrupt panicked rants about the impending socialist or terrorist takeover of America.
The crowd's immediate anger is directed not at Obama and the Democrats but at their own party's standard-bearers, who should be "representing us" but have so far refused to "take the gloves off" and "take it to Obama" and "hit him" in "a soft spot." If the GOP leaders don't give these folks what they want, they had best watch their own soft spots, for there is no shortage of backbenchers ready to seize the helm. Take Jeffrey Frederick, the 33-year-old chair of the Virginia Republican Party, who said that Obama and Osama bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon." Denounced by the McCain campaign, Frederick has defiantly refused to apologize for his remark.
Perhaps he knows which way the wind blows: the Republican Party's electoral strategy of sowing resentment and fear--sprung from Nixon and nurtured by admen like Lee Atwater, Floyd Brown and the Swiftboaters--has finally taken on a life of its own. It thrives as a postmodern pastiche of conservative hate speech that no longer requires a master--a Frankenstein monster freed from his creator. What holds this beast together is not the fear and loathing of any particular despised identity so much as the idea that America is under siege, disordered, on the cusp of imminent and total collapse, threatened by terrorists abroad and undermined by enemies at home.
Of course, certain pariahs are useful in certain times. In the old lexicon it was Communists, feminists and gays who peopled the right wing's paranoid imagination, and if the sheer breadth of the slander by association against Obama is any indication, these bugaboos are still of value. But this time around the terror has been most sharply drawn along the lines of xenophobia and racism, a potent combination of hostile drives of which trolls like Andy Martin, the anti-Semite behind the "Obama is a Muslim" e-mails, are but minor instigators. The real enablers are demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, who have made careers out of inciting frenzied aggression at anyone to the left of Joe McCarthy. Only now it seems that even these right-wing pundits have been outdone by their formerly loyal listeners.
Coulter, whose contempt for Muslims ("invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity") is surpassed only by her scorn for liberals ("even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do"), has yet to call for the assassination of Barack Obama. But if she genuinely believes that liberals are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, she should follow the courage of her convictions and do so.
To pre-empt such embarrassing displays of weakness, softer propagandists like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens--who once brayed on and on about the left's "hatred of the United States" and its role as a "fifth column" "in favor of surrender and defeat"--have declared their support for Obama. But as Hitchens's recent endorsement in Slate amply demonstrates, he is not quite ready to give up the poisoned sword. Obama, he writes, is not a "capitulationist," even if he does "accept the support of the surrender faction."
If the polls are any indication, Obama will endure this smear campaign just fine, with or without the backhanded compliments of apologetic neocons. And if his election is not quite the ringing victory for civil rights and liberties, diplomacy and cosmopolitanism that we might like, it will at least beat back for a while the idea that defaming these values as traitorous constitutes sound electoral strategy. If Obama wins, and the barbarians do not show up to rattle the gates, what will the conservatives do next? For them, the barbarians were a solution, of sorts….
Obama the Adult vs. McCain's Economic Easter Bunny
Poll: Obama ahead in critical counties (VA)
Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye ... And Think Pot
On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal.
First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions.
These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government.
Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt.
George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher.
My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man's interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles.
This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft's near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken…..
CQ Race Ratings Changes, Part Two: Democrats Gain Ground
By Greg Giroux, Marie Horrigan, Rachel Kapochunas and Annie Johnson, CQ Staff
With the nation’s political environment running strongly against the Republicans for the second consecutive election, more congressional races than expected are now trending in the Democrats’ favor — prompting CQ Politics to change its ratings on 23 contests in the past two days, all indicating stronger chances for the Democratic contenders.
These changes do not necessarily imply that the Democrats are on the verge of enormous gains. The Republican Party still holds the edge in most of the contests that CQ Politics now deems more competitive.
But the Democrats’ success at recruiting and helping raise money for an expanded field of long-shot challengers is, at the very least, forcing the Republicans to spread their resources thin playing defense in many additional races — which in turn limits the GOP’s ability to apply maximum effort to their bids to take over Democratic seats. As a result, the majorities that the Democrats won in the Senate and the House in 2006 not only appear secure, but the party appears increasingly likely to make sizable gains in both chambers.
Most of the Democratic challengers and open-seat candidates in these re-rated races have been chosen by their party’s officials for the ”Red to Blue” program run by the Democratic Congressional Campaign (DCCC), the House Democrats’ political arm. The name of this program, which provides fundraising and logistical assistance to selected candidates deemed competitive, is based on the party’s effort to convert Republican-held districts — typically colored red on political maps — to Democratic blue.
The 14 rating changes in races in the South and West are summarized below. An analysis of the eight changes made in races in the Northeast and Midwest was published in a story Friday, along with a separate piece on a rating change in the key race in Ohio’s 1st District.
South
Alabama’s 3rd District (New Rating: Republican Favored. Old Rating: Safe Republican)
The DCCC on Tuesday added Josh Segall, a lawyer who is challenging three-term Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in Alabama’s 3rd District, to the Red to Blue program. After watching Segall’s developing campaign from a distance, Democratic officials were impressed by a fundraising operation that produced $807,000 in receipts through Sept. 30 to $1.3 million for the incumbent.
The 3rd — a conservative-leaning eastern Alabama district that includes part of Montgomery and also takes in smaller cities such as Auburn and Anniston — would have seemed very unlikely not long ago. Rogers won with 59 percent over a little-known and underfunded Democrat in 2006; two years earlier, President Bush received 58 percent of the 3rd District vote.
But Democrats believe they have stronger potential in the district, in large part because a strongly Democratic-voting black constituency makes up nearly a third of the population. And this segment of the district’s electorate is activated as never before by Democrat Barack Obama ’s strong presidential bid that would make him the first African-American to win the White House.
“This year, you’re going to see a different voter universe in District 3, and that means that District 3 could be a sleeper,” said Artur Davis , the three-term representative of Alabama’s 7th District, who is widely regarded as a rising star among black members of Congress. “I believe that race is probably closer today than some people around the country may believe it to be.”
Despite the district’s longstanding Republican leanings, there are other pockets of Democratic support in the 3rd, including around the Auburn University campus.
Florida’s 8th District (New Rating: No Clear Favorite. Old Rating: Leans Republican) Page: 1, ,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, | Next
Democratic Money Lessens Republican Chances for Victory
A worsening environment for Republicans and a massive infusion of cash from the Democratic Party are causing CQ Politics to change the ratings in two dozen congressional races, all in the Democrats' favor. READ MORE
Payback's A Bitch
OpEdNews - Newtown,PA,USA
Where were these folks back in 1998 when a group of serious and serial philanderers impeached a president for lying about a blow job? ...
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Republicans Poised To Do Anything To Win In A Desperate Do Or Die ...
By Ed. Dickau(Ed. Dickau)
The Impeachment Hearing Room - http://theimpeachmenthearingroom.blogspot.com/. The Only Viable Choice In Election 2008 YEH…THAT ONE! By Ed. Dickau(Ed. Dickau). The Only Viable Choice In Election 2008 YEH…THAT ONE! ...
The Impeachment Hearing Room - http://theimpeachmenthearingroom.blogspot.com/
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