Occupy OKC

ccupy OKC people at Kerr Park, OKC are reporting that eviction is imminent. I drove past the Bricktown police station earlier, and SWAT/SRT vehicles are staged forward there. Bricktown station is about a three minute drive from Kerr park.
I don’t know what to make of this because we hadn’t had any difficulties getting permits issued and renewed until yesterday.
I just got off the phone with a couple of the campers. The day shift captain from the Bricktown station addressed the GA a couple of days ago and told them that with the construction and demolition work going on across the street—this is true, one hi rise being renovated, one next to that being demolished—that those sites had reached a point where they had to have the whole area cleared. Then yesterday, the OCPD told them that they could stay in the lower park and clear out of the upper park and they’ed be OK. This morning, a Sergeant from Bricktown station told them they had to leave the park and that they would not be allowed to move to another park.
They set up a meeting with the Police Chief for 8:30 AM tomorrow morning, but they’ve noted that the Police, who normally have had two cars parked in the alley south of the park haven’t had a presence all day.
They’ve had good relations with the OCPD from the beginning, but it appears that a decision was made on high to remove them. Some campers have left, but through the day more and more people have been showing up as word got out, and a caravan from Norman had just got there at 9:30, raising their number to over 40.
The last thing they heard was that they would be evicted at 11:00 tonight. Since they heard that, they managed to arrange the meeting with the Chief for the morning, but apparently it’s about to happen—I just got a text that police are lining up on the south side of the park.
The livestream feed, http://www.occupyokc.com/index.php/media-and-resources/livestream is offline. They’ve been trying to conserve battery power all day, but they’ve said they would bring it up as soon as it appears something will happen.

 

Occupy OKC live stream at http://www.livestream.com/occupyspanol Update:  http://www.ustream.tv/channel/occupy-okc

This was reported on News9 OKC, the lead story for the 10PM broadcast.

 

OCPD police scanner

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In Your Base, In Fact Destroying The Credibility Of Your Doodz

Here’s the Up With Chris Hayes story that Anne Laurie was talking about earlier today:

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

The memo also suggests that Democratic victories in 2012 should not be the ABA’s biggest concern. “… (T)he bigger concern,” the memo says, “should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

It was pretty obvious that this was the plan and has been Wall Street’s response for some time now: demonize the Occupy movement among independents/swing voters to divide them from supporters (“They’re Dirty Effing Hippies and criminals!”) and further divide and demoralize the remaining supporters by trying to split them from the Democrats (“The Dems are just as much Wall Street lackeys as the GOP, there’s no difference!”)...all to avoid losing the “populist” mantle the Tea Party currently has, giving them license to happily loot the treasury and make the rest of us suffer.

It’s a pretty good plan from an Evil Overlord perspective, and it has made headway into reducing support for the movement.  Well, that was before the whole park evicting and pepper-spraying of grandmothers and college kids sitting peacefully on the sidewalk started happening.

I’m thinking that might change as a result.

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“Some Bullets Make History”

When John Hinkley failed to assasinate Ronald Reagan, I was working in a midwestern university library, and still young and stupid enough to blurt out a “joke” about sending a boy to do a man’s job. (This was so long ago, kids, all our spontaneous stupidity had to be delivered in the meatspace.) Since the head of the department was the widow of a minister in the short-lived Republic of Biafra, another librarian had left Hungary in early 1957, and a third’s earliest childhood memories involved fleeing Latvia with her parents in 1941, I was immediately educated that “nobody is happy in a place where political arguments are settled with machetes.”

Charlie Pierce at Esquire’s Politics blog brings up a certain piece of Texas Republican history in connection with Ms. “Tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama”:

... Every president has to live with the notion that any random nut can buy a gun and stand a pretty good chance of getting the job done if the random nut doesn’t mind getting ventilated in return. Presidents get briefed on this stuff. But, as is the case in so many things, this president is different. History has made him so. An attempt on this president’s life would resonate, in history and in memory, far beyond Ford’s Theater, and Union Station in Washington, and the Exposition Grounds in Buffalo, and Dealey Plaza. It would resonate, in history and in memory, back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and to an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and to 2332 Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where the blood of Medgar Evers still stains a driveway, and to a hundred dark roads, and to a thousand ghastly trees, freighted down with so much more than Spanish moss. Some bullets make history. A bullet fired at this president would gain its power from a history that we all have worked so hard to pretend never really happened before, and really could never happen again.

It would blow apart the illusions. It would shatter the carefully designed latticework we’ve thrown up around those parts of this country’s bloody past in which the government was not only helpless, but actively complicit. We had state violence against black citizens in this country all the way up into my lifetime. We had the local respectable gentry sponsoring it from the shadows almost as long. It did not erupt, the way sudden murder does. It was a steady, foul pulse through the country’s politics, as mainstream in some places as Republicans and Democrats were.

My god, nobody would ever believe it was a nut. It would be a harder sell than Oswald has been, all these years, and the polls indicate that the official explanation for John Kennedy’s murder is no more believable now to most people than it was in 1964. This, to me, always has been a remarkable thing. The American people have chosen to believe that their president was murdered in broad daylight, and probably with the connivance of elements of the government he led, and they have spent nearly 50 years walking around believing that, and the only concrete result of it all is that Oliver Stone got rich. There would be no official explanation possible for an attempt on the life of this president. There is nobody who would believe it. There would be too much damned history arguing from the other side.

I mention all this only because we’re coming up on November 22 again. There will even be a Republican debate in Washington on that day. On November 22, 1963, there was a newspaper advertisement that accused President Kennedy of treason. It had two photos that looked like mug shots. It ran in a newspaper on the day of the president’s visit. In Texas. The president came home in a box.

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Mitt Romney is always welcome here

We in Ohio were lectured for months by Governor Kasich and media that Kasich’s union busting law was not about unions. It was about health insurance. It was about merit pay. It was about budgets. It was about balancing the state budget. Very few in Ohio believed that, because it was obviously not true.

The Republican base in Ohio are now going to push a constitutional amendment that will destroy both public sector and private sector unions. That’s what opponents of Governor Kasich like me told Ohio private sector union members. We said “they’ll go after you next”. What we didn’t know is that they would go after private sector unions members even if they failed in destroying public sector unions, but it really doesn’t matter. What we said they were planning is in fact what they’re now doing.

This wasn’t hard to predict. Governor Walker in Wisconsin told us all about it, way back in February:

Gov. Scott Walker claims that Ohio’s overwhelming rejection of anti-labor legislation modeled on the measures he developed and promoted in Wisconsin has no bearing on the debate about whether he should remain in office.
The governor is in full spin mode.

By any measure, last Tuesday’s election results from Ohio represented a devastating rejection of the agenda Walker and his allies have been peddling since February. Offered an opportunity to endorse a Walker-style attack on collective bargaining rights for state, county and municipal workers and teachers, Ohioans voted “no” by 61-39 percent.
Of Ohio’s 88 counties — with big cities, small towns and rural areas — 82 voted to defend public employees and their unions. More Ohioans took a pro-union position in 2011 than voted for the governor who promoted the anti-labor legislation, John Kasich, in 2010.

Faced with the facts, Walker’s political team claimed that comparisons of Wisconsin and Ohio were “ridiculous.” Funny, that’s not what Wisconsin’s governor was saying back in February, when he refused to negotiate with unions representing state employees, and when he and his aides tried to lock hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites out of the state Capitol.
“I talk to Kasich every day — John’s gotta stand firm in Ohio,” Walker told the caller he thought was David Koch. Walker said that Kasich was one of the new Republican governors who, like the Wisconsinite, “got elected to do something big.” “You’re the first domino,” the Koch caller said of Walker’s anti-labor push in Wisconsin.“Yes,” replied Walker. “This is our moment.”

Throughout the conversation, Walker portrayed himself as the quarterback of a national push to cut pay and benefits for teachers and other public workers, and to crush unions. And he suggested that Kasich was on his team, carrying out the same mission in Ohio that Walker has undertaken in Wisconsin. “Little did I know how big it would be nationally,” Walker chirped. “This is our time to change the course of history.”

People don’t change the course of history by assessing public workers 15% more in health care costs. People don’t change the course of history by balancing a state budget. Governor Walker isn’t telling the truth about his objectives or his plans, just like Governor Kasich wasn’t telling the truth about his objectives or his plans. That’s now become painfully obvious in Ohio, because conservatives are moving ahead to destroy both public and private sector unions.

The campaign to recall Walker kicked off. It will be harder in Wisconsin than it was in Ohio, because in Ohio John Kasich is so disliked and his campaign staff were so inept and incredibly arrogant that we thought at times they were on our side.

We also got some last minute help from the entire GOP 2012 Presidential field, who parachuted in to tell everyone in Ohio that Kasich had lied to us all for nearly a year, and all the GOP superstars were 110% on board with the union busting campaign Kasich had been vehemently denying he was conducting. That must have been awkward for the former Fox News personality. Wisconsin, invite Mitt Romney to visit with Walker volunteers the week before the vote, and then sit back and watch as the entire GOP Presidential field endorses the anti-worker agenda Walker will have just spent six months denying. It’s magical.

We’ll be watching in Ohio, and we’re pulling for you.

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You’ll also want to vote on voting rights, because you’re good and decent people

Maine has a citizen veto, too, today:

Question 1: People’s Veto

Do you want to reject the section of Chapter 399 of the Public Laws of 2011 that requires new voters to register to vote at least two business days prior to an election?

You’d want to REJECT that, I imagine. Good for Maine for using such plain language on their ballot. It’s almost like they want people to actually know what they’re voting on. That would be YES to REJECT on Question One.

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Union Busting is Disgusting

These are photos of public sector and private sector union members and others here in northwest Ohio who have worked really hard the last however many months to put a citizen veto of Issue Two on the ballot.

Issue Two is a ballot referendum on former Fox News personality John Kasich’s union busting law, SB 5. Today, you want to Vote No On Two.

The idea sounded absolutely crazy to me when I went to their first meeting, and I never thought we’d get this far. It’s been a pleasure following their lead and working with and for them. They earned this. They did all the work. Now all Democrats and allies like us have to do is turn out and vote.

I’m doing GOTV today, so if I call you be nice. On election day 2010, I was given a name and a number for an older lady who said she needed a ride to the polling place. I called her, and she told me she wasn’t ready to vote just yet, so could I call her back later. I was so surprised that I agreed:”sure, when might be good for you?” That very funny request at 11 AM on election day turned out to be the highlight of the 2010 election for me. I believe this one may go a little better, but it won’t if we don’t vote.

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Too much voting going on, apparently

Why aren’t our friends on the other side of the aisle democracy enthusiasts?

County boards of election must stop early in-person voting as of 6 p.m. Friday, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has advised, prompting Democrats to cry foul. This occurs as a number of counties are reporting higher-than-usual absentee mail-in and early in-person voting for an off-year election, perhaps driven by interest in high-profile ballot issues such as Issue 2, which affects collective bargaining.
The early voting issue was created by a voter referendum effort on a controversial overhaul of state election law, House Bill 194, that had a spillover effect on separate legislation, House Bill 224, containing some similar language. The referendum effort has placed House Bill 194 on hold indefinitely, but the latter law passed unanimously and took effect last week.

As a result, Mr. Husted, a Republican, issued an advisory to boards of election in mid-October that early voting is prohibited during the last three days before Tuesday’s election. The Lucas County Board of Elections had scheduled business hours for Saturday and Sunday but canceled them to comply with last month’s advisory. Democrats, however, contend Mr. Husted based his advisory on a law dealing primarily with military ballots that had its legs cut out from under it by the referendum on the first law.

In Lucas County, roughly half of 16,150 absentee ballots requested as of yesterday had been returned. Elections Director Ben Roberts reported the board has received them at the pace of roughly 170 per day, up from an average of 123 at about the same time before the November, 2010, election. “We expect a deluge in the last two days,” he said.

Briefly, Democrats and allies gathered half a million signatures to delay a voter suppression law passed by the Ohio GOP. Now Republicans are using a different law to shut down early voting in some areas, because Democrats have gotten better at “banking votes”, or, getting our voters out prior to election day so it isn’t as crazy on election day.

I don’t know if we’re going to defeat John Kasich’s union-busting law, a law that was loudly endorsed last week by each and every GOP candidate for President, but I think this tactic will backfire. People love early voting, and they love convenient hours for voting, because those things make sense.

One really does have to wonder about a US political party who get all creative with directives and start putting the hammer down when people vote. Too much voting going on here, peons. Cut that out. This must be another brand-new, bed-rock principle of the ever-evolving Conservative Movement.

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Occupy Defiance

I went out to a county political event last night and saw my friend Dolores. She told me that she was involved in an Occupy group in a city east of here, so I went out there to see how it was going. Defiance is the name of the city. You can read about that name here.

General Wayne surveyed the land and declared to General Scott, “I defy the English, Indians, and all the devils of hell to take it.”

I saw this sign on the way into the small city:

Dolores wasn’t there, but I met these people when I arrived:

This is their statement:

Occupy Defiance is a group dedicated to eliminating corporate and financial influence on our government and to promoting positive community action at a grassroots level.

I did my usual disclosure, where I showed them Balloon Juice on my phone and told them I’d be posting pictures. I don’t want to get anyone fired. They were really welcoming and willing to talk.

They got a permit to set up in the location pictured, which is a grassy area right in front of the county courthouse. They had invited two state senators to speak with them, both Republicans (it’s a conservative area). One was a no-show and they didn’t know if the second was coming. He was scheduled at 3:30.

The two negative things they had heard was one outraged citizen complaint that they are located close to a veterans memorial and a local business owner who came out of his store to tell them to “get a job”. Most of them have jobs. Like a lot of lower-wage workers, they don’t have a regular, predictable work schedule.

It’s amusing that there are people in this country who still cling stubbornly to the belief that everyone who works has a forty-hour 9 to 5 job, with weekends off. That hasn’t been true for a very long time.

One of the main complaints I hear from lower wage service workers is that they don’t know from one month to the next when they’re working, because their schedules change constantly. That makes it very difficult to have a less than chaotic family or personal life outside work, let alone scheduling time for a movement, like these folks are doing. Of course lower-tier workers aren’t compensated for erratic or impossible-to-predict work schedules the way Paul Ryan’s makers are. They’re not makers, they’re takers, and they have to take whatever random 32 hours in a 7 day period they’re given by the makers.

Maybe the “get a job” guy thinks all those people he sees working Sundays and nights (when he’s off) are volunteers.

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Good news for voting enthusiasts

From cautious optimism:

Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. John Kasich® signed a sweeping bill intended to make it harder to vote in his states’ elections. Kasich’s anti-voter law drastically cuts back on early voting and erects new barriers for absentee and even for election day voters. Today, however, opponents of Kasich’s war on voting will submit over 300,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office — well over the 231,000 signatures necessary to suspend the law until it can be challenged in a referendum in November of 2012. If enough of the signatures are deemed valid, the practical effect of this petition will be that Kasich’s law will not be in effect during the 2012 presidential elections when Republicans hoped the law would weaken President Obama’s efforts to turn out early voters who support his reelection.

The number was 318,000, and that’s too close for comfort, because a lot of signatures will get thrown out as invalid. However, people who think legally registered voters should be permitted to vote no matter their net worth or wholly subjective degree of “real americanism” had two weeks to continue to gather signatures after submitting the initial petitions, and they did that.

Probably a done deal:

Last week, it was reported that the Ohio GOP had filed public-records requests of numerous boards of election across the state, apparently hoping to find irregularities to disqualify HB 194 (voter suppression) repeal petitions after 318,000 signatures were turned in to try to meet the requirement of just over 231,000 valid signatures Now that number probably would have done it, but it was a little close for comfort. And clearly, the Republicans were looking into anything they could to squeeze some signatures and petitions out of contention. But the repeal proponents had another two and a half weeks to gather signatures, and it appears they’ve hit this one well out of the iffy range — and probably out of range of any GOP challenge. Friday the Ohio Democratic Party announced that another 150,000 signatures were collected in that additional time period.
With almost 480,000 signatures — more than double the number needed — you’d need exceptionally sloppy petition circulators to get enough invalid signatures to block the repeal from the ballot. So it looks like we’ll be voting on this come November 2012.

This move puts the law’s provisions on hold for the 2011 and 2012 election cycles. The voter suppression law won’t be operative in Ohio for the 2011 election or the 2012 election, because we’ll be voting on whether to repeal it.

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I keep seeing this sign

The local police are parking this truck with the No On Two sign in the back all over town. This picture is from Thursday evening, when it was parked at a spot on the courthouse square. I heard yesterday that the mayor told them they were “not allowed” to park it in front of the courthouse, but that’s not true. As long as they move it once every 24 hours and do that on their own time, there’s no ordinance forbidding a giant political sign in the back of a legally parked pick-up truck. Maybe he’ll write one.

I was pleased to hear that the mayor objects to the mobile truck-sign, because I think it’s a great idea and I dislike my mayor. We have history. Some time ago, I worked at a tiny post office about 30 miles from where he and I now live and work. During the period I was there, my now-mayor worked in that same town. This post office was too small to offer city delivery, so the now–mayor would walk down and get his business mail every day. He was always short with us, and he complained a lot.

The post office was red brick, and it had a built-in planter box out front, also red brick, between the building and the sidewalk. The planter ran most of the length of the (tiny) building, and ended at the entrance, which was a handicapped ramp. The postmaster, Ruth, was not a gardener and she had always left the planter bare. Part of my job was to maintain the front area, and sweep or shovel and salt the ramp. I’m a good gardener, so I eventually asked Ruth if I could put flowers in the planter.

I planted the box with bulbs and then annuals, for a succession of bloom. I like bright colors, I mix reds, and the box just baked in full afternoon sun, so this planter got so colorful it bordered on eccentric. I received a lot of compliments from people who aren’t serious gardeners, don’t read garden books and don’t know any better than to like, say, low splashes of bright orangey-yellow backed with something much bigger and gaudier in red. The praise only encouraged me to move the Overton window. Toward the end of my time there I was planting things like groupings of 4 foot tall orange Mexican sunflowers that practically looked the postal patrons right in the eye as they went up the handicapped ramp. I got along well with the postmistress, Ruth, and I really think I could have planted rows of Indian corn out there and she wouldn’t have objected. It wasn’t a big job, this garden. It took maybe ten minutes a day, spring and summer, and twenty dollars a year in bulbs and seed to keep the sidewalk garden looking like a box of crayons.

This was a a grim little town with a dying downtown. The post office flowers were the only bright spot in the whole miserable, run-down landscape. The one and only objection I ever heard over several years was from the man who is now the mayor in the larger city where I live. I was out dead-heading the gone-by tulips one day, and he said “my tax dollars at work” as he went up the ramp, with a nasty edge to his voice. I’ve never really forgiven him for that.

I saw the cops had the truck with the sign in the back parked this morning in the Wal-Mart parking lot when I went by there, which made me smile.

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Defeat the radicals, and restore tradition

We talked about how shameful it is that conservative elected leaders in Tennessee are working hard to deny this person the right to vote:

Dorothy Cooper is 96 but she can remember only one election when she’s been eligible to vote but hasn’t. The retired domestic worker was born in a small North Georgia town before women had the right to vote. She began casting ballots in her 20s after moving to Chattanooga for work. She missed voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because a move to Nashville prevented her from registering in time. So when she learned last month at a community meeting that under a new state law she’d need a photo ID to vote next year, she talked with a volunteer about how to get to a state Driver Service Center to get her free ID. But when she got there Monday with an envelope full of documents, a clerk denied her request.

She just wants to be able to vote. In her decades of going to the polls, “I never had any problems,” she said, not even before the Voting Rights Act passed in the 1960s. In her 50-plus years working for the same family, she never learned to drive so she never needed a license. She retired in 1993 and returned to Chattanooga from Nashville. Now, on occasion, one of her bank’s tellers or a grocery store clerk will ask for photo ID when she writes or cashes a check, Cooper said. “I’ve been banking at SunTrust for a long time,” she said. “Sometimes they’ll say, well, do you have a Social Security card?” And she shows it to them. She also has a photo ID issued by the Chattanooga Police Department to all seniors who live in the Boynton Terrace public housing complex, but that won’t qualify for voting.

And we talked about how democracy enthusiasts in Tennessee were fighting back:

In Nashville on Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of organizations announced an effort to repeal the law. Groups such as the ACLU of Tennessee, various chapters of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and Tennessee Citizen Action announced a petition drive and get-out-the-vote effort.
“This is a nonpartisan issue. It’s a fair voting issue,” said Mary Mancini, executive director of Citizen Action, in a phone interview. “It’s all about the legislators seeing that the people of Tennessee don’t want this law.”

Mary Mancini sent us a thank you:

Thank you so much for covering the story of Dorothy Cooper. It’s funny, I had a call from the Lt. Governor’s office to tell me that the state Dept. of Safety was bending over backwards to help Ms. Cooper and that she would get her ID. I told them that was great but there are thousands of Mrs. Cooper’s across the state and then asked, what’s being done about them? There was a very long pause on other end of the phone.
Tennessee Citizen Action and other groups have formed a coalition and are getting signatures on a petition to repeal. More info is at http://www.tnca.org
Thank you again for your coverage of this issue.
Mary
Mary Mancini
Executive Director, Tennessee Citizen Action

If you’re in Tennessee and are a supporter of the traditional US view that Dorothy Cooper holds, and you believe eligible citizens have a right to vote whether they have a driver’s license or not, here is where you can go to help to restore that old-fashioned idea in Tennessee.

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Occupy Toledo

I went down to Occupy Toledo this morning. I was told a couple of years ago to count police officers and not protestors, with the general rule being one police officer for every twenty protestors. If that holds true, there were about 200 protestors there.

This police officer was not actually protesting, although I appreciate how he joined right in for the picture-taking.

This girl did not want her face revealed, because she is looking for work and is afraid public protesting will harm her chances with an employer. When she’s not covering her face with this sign, she wore a bandanna pulled up over the lower half of her face, which made her look a little dangerous and mysterious.

The No On Issue Two folks were there, and the voting rights people, and lots of cheerful and stoic union members (including Justice For Janitors), and two Ron Paul supporters. Every Ron Paul supporter I have ever met is young, male and has tools snapped to his belt: knife sheaves, chains, lariats, big bunches of jangly keys. You can hear a Ron Paul supporter approaching behind you, if you remain alert. Just put your hand out to receive the Repeal the Fed leaflet, because it’s coming.

I couldn’t stay for the general assembly, but the protest itself was just great. A real positive feeling. There were lots and lots of local media trucks there.

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VIDEO: Occupy Portland March Draws 5000 Protestors

My favorite sign? “The Beginning is Near”

As Fox News and CNN try to downplay the grassrootsiness of the Occupy movement, it’s pretty clear that the movement is spreading like wildfire:

My parents were hippies and met at a demonstration for something or other in the 60s (when it just wasn’t cool for a white Jewish girl to be cavorting with a black man).  I was dragged to demonstrations as a kid.  My grandma worked with Women’s Strike for Peace in Philadelphia for many years, and was protesting and demonstrating well into her 70s.

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Republicans find their voice: turns out, it’s whiny

The New York Time interviewed some US elected officials and their boss, Grover Norquist. It’s worth a read because it’s really pretty funny:

The first dissenter:

Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has signed a pledge never to raise taxes. He signed another pledge too, one that made it nearly impossible to vote for a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. But right before that vote over the summer, in a meeting with scores of his Republican colleagues, he stood up and proclaimed that he would never sign another pledge.

It spreads, and goes public:

On Tuesday, Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, took to the House floor for a rare excoriation of the anti-tax activist Grover G. Norquist and his strictly worded pledge, which has been signed by almost the entire Republican caucus as well as a few Democrats.

A day later, Senator John Thune of South Dakota suggested that anti-tax pledges ought to be revisited, because they can be interpreted too broadly in closing loopholes or eliminating tax deductions. “We shouldn’t be bound by something that could be interpreted different ways if what we’re trying to accomplish is broad-based tax reform,” he said.

John Thune just got around to reading the pledge he signed, apparently. I love that he’s offered to negotiate terms, unlike the rabble-raisers in the House. Very senatorial of him. I guess he and Norquist meet, and Norquist tells the Senator from…wherever what modifications or revisions he, Norquist, will accept.

Mr. Norquist, who heads the group Americans for Tax Reform, uses his pledge, which began in 1986 with the endorsement of President Reagan, as a litmus test for candidates on taxes. Known as the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, it makes candidates and incumbents “bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases.” Hundreds of Republicans have signed it, including all six on the bipartisan Congressional deficit reduction committee.

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who also signed it, said in an interview: “I’ve signed more pledges than I should have over the years. All of us ought to be somewhat reluctant to make these pledges. I think people who have been here longer do fewer.”

In other words, chumps sign pledges, which leads us to the Men Who Would Be President:

To be sure, the majority of Republican lawmakers are not running away from Mr. Norquist. All the Republican presidential candidates other than Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah, have gotten on board.

Mr. Norquist said that those who raise questions about the pledge often do not understand it. “The pledge specifically says you can eliminate tax deductions if you bring rates down at same time,” he said. “The people who say that the pledge would get in the way of tax reform, well their point is they want a tax increase.”

The pledge specifically says...can’t you just hear the snotty tone as he says that?

Since “those who are now raising questions about the pledge” are the spineless morons who signed one, Grover Norquist is telling us that conservative lawmakers, including at least one Senator, signed a pledge that they didn’t understand.

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Another proud day for conservatives

No one could have predicted:

Dorothy Cooper is 96 but she can remember only one election when she’s been eligible to vote but hasn’t. The retired domestic worker was born in a small North Georgia town before women had the right to vote. She began casting ballots in her 20s after moving to Chattanooga for work. She missed voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because a move to Nashville prevented her from registering in time

So when she learned last month at a community meeting that under a new state law she’d need a photo ID to vote next year, she talked with a volunteer about how to get to a state Driver Service Center to get her free ID. But when she got there Monday with an envelope full of documents, a clerk denied her request.
That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander “But I didn’t have my marriage certificate,” Cooper said Tuesday afternoon, and that was the reason the clerk said she was denied a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.
In Nashville on Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of organizations announced an effort to repeal the law. Groups such as the ACLU of Tennessee, various chapters of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and Tennessee Citizen Action announced a petition drive and get-out-the-vote effort.

Absentee ballots don’t require photo ID, and the new state law was crafted to allow that exception. A U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a similar Indiana statute cited the absentee ballot exception as one of the reasons the Indiana law didn’t infringe on constitutional voting rights.

Still, Cooper said she will miss the practice of going to the voting precinct located in the building next door to hers.

Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, is one of the main proponents, and even he is backpedaling. Yesterday, as liberal groups launched a petition drive against the law and the Senate held hearings into whether it’s disenfranchising voters, Ketron introduced a bill to let anyone over the age of 60 vote by absentee ballot without a photo ID. Ketron said he doesn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want a photo ID. “They make you proud,”he said.

Oh, conservatives should be very proud.

There’s a lot of shame to go around here, and every time I post on this I get questions in the comments like: “why is this allowable under federal law?”

The short answer is it’s allowable under federal law because the US Supreme Court considered the Indiana law that set the legal precedent that allows partisan Republicans in these states to attempt to disenfranchise certain voters, and the US Supreme Court blithely and cavalierly rubber-stamped that Indiana law.

The Supreme Court on Monday backed Indiana’s law requiring voters to show photo identification, despite concerns thousands of elderly, poor and minority voters could be locked out of their right to cast ballots. The 6-3 vote allows Indiana to require the identification when it holds its statewide primary next week. It also will give most state legislatures time to revise their voter laws for the November elections. This was perhaps the biggest voter rights case taken up by the justices since the 2000 dispute over Florida’s ballots, in which George W. Bush prevailed to gain the presidency.

That’s where this started. That’s what opened the flood gates and led us to today.

I don’t want to leave anyone out of today’s stunning conservative victory. An honorable mention in the big win should go to two millionaire media stars: Fox News personality/reporter Greta Van Susteren and her fellow Murdoch mouthpiece, John Fund at the Wall Street Journal. These two soulless ghouls pushed the voter fraud lie relentlessly and helped get us here. What a great day for media giants Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. They managed to push a 96-year-old woman out of her neighborhood polling place.

You go, Tennessee voting enthusiasts. Put this law to a citizen veto. Ohio just did it, and you can too.

h/t Benen

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