Voter Suppression Depression? Time To Fight Back

I said in my introduction that Republican voter suppression efforts are the major issue facing this country right now, and if this study is anywhere close to accurate the time to start pushing voter registration and education efforts is now.

Restrictive voting laws in states across the country could affect up to five million voters from traditionally Democratic demographics in 2012, according to a new report by the Brennan Center. That’s a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.

The new restrictions, the study found, “fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election.”

The GOP takeover at the state level over the last several years has led directly to voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise millions of traditionally Democratic voters.  2010 proved that when turnout is low, Republicans run rampant.  In a presidential election year next year, that could very well prove to be fatal to the country.  If your cynical, jaded self recognizes only one difference between the GOP and the Democrats, it’s that the GOP wants to make voting as difficult and as exclusive as possible.  Where they have gained power, they turn to voter ID efforts to limit turnout in order to maintain power.  Even if you dispute the numbers in the study, the GOP intent is clear.

Here’s the real kicker:

Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.

One of those states is Ohio, and as Kay across the river from me can attest to, Ohio’s battle to stop John Kasich and the GOP from disenfranchising tens of thousands of Ohio voters is just beginning.  So far opponents of Ohio’s measure have collected more than enough signatures to put the law to a referendum in 2012, meaning that as soon as the petitions are validated, Ohio will operate under the same voting laws as the 2010 election both this year and next.

But that’s only one state.  The efforts to reduce turnout are national, well-funded, and well-coordinated.  Ohio proved that efforts to fight these restriction can work, but the bottom line is turnout and GOTV efforts in 2011 and especially 2012 are vital to preventing a complete Republican takeover.  It’s past time to examine what you can do where you live to help locally with these efforts.  No matter what the GOP does, we have to get people out there to vote, period.

It’s astonishing to think that in 2011, a major US political party is running on a platform to limit voting as much as possible.  So far they haven’t paid a political price for doing so.

That needs to change.

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Things that make Grammy laugh and laugh

The following are the results of Hot Air’s Monthly Presidential Candidate Poll Results. If you want to sully your computer with the detailed “polling results”, then you can go over here, but frankly one of us giving them hits is probably more than enough. I spent thirty seconds looking at their front page and feel more soiled than the time Andy secretly filmed me doing a wee on Joe Dellasandro.

Anyhow, just in case you were wondering who the cream of wingnuttery* wants to be President this month, the winner, in an almost unprecedented (well, since two months ago) breakaway surge to the front, is – Herman Cain.

Yes, Rick Perry is dead and the new king of the dribble-stained is Herman Fucking Cain. Cain’s only real challenger (for the next ten minutes, until most of them change their mind again) is Sarah Palin, followed far behind by the sad assortment of boobs and god-botherers and was-popular-a-month-agos who make up the remainder of the pack. Interestingly Palin is the only one on the chart who shows any form of consistency, hanging around the magic 30% mark, which just goes to show that once you have managed to tear an acne-riddled virgin away from his semen-stained copy of The Fountainhead, and convinced him to vote for the pretty one with the sparkles, he can be remarkably loyal as long as he believes that there is the smallest possibility that he might get to see those sparkles up close and in person.

I also love this chart:

which appears to show that among the polling group, who have in the last year had Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Cain (twice!) in their top two front runners, whose poll results have gone up and down like Rick Perry eating a weiner-on-a-stick while riding on a roundabout, 60% are “very committed” to their chosen candidate (just like last month when 70% of them were “very committed”), which either means that the other 30-40% of them are changing their votes almost every month or they are all fucking stupid.

I realize that doesn’t need to be an either/or sentence, but I like the way it scans.

* “cream” in the sense that it’s thick, unctuous and if you leave it on its own for three weeks in a basement it begins to smell like old feet and socks that have been used for purposes that god did not intend. ▲

Eric Cantor Eats Irony for Breakfast

You can’t make this shit up:

Uh… Open Thread!

[cross-posted at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]

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Minority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Pinnochio) is Lying About President Obama’s Jobs Plan…

...wears flammable pants

True to the GOP plan to make sure not to put any Americans back to work in the hopes that the economy and high jobless rate will kill President Obama’s reelection chances, Kevin McCarthy gleefully reported that everybody hates President Obama’s jobs bill.

He then linked the blog post (which I assume someone on his staff wrote) on Twitter and lied about what the blog post says.

First the blog post/press release:

More » Tags: Crab Bucket Politics cracks me up even though I don't know what it means. ▲

ZOMG! ScheduleGate!! President Obama is a Cave-Dwelling Cave Meister!

This is Obama’s Katrina.

 For those of you who aren’t aware, Obama caved BIG-TIME yesterday… or something.

See, he wanted to address Congress about his jobs plan on September 7, which is Congress’s first day back from summer recess. (You remember jobs, right?  Most of you probably don’t have one because Congress refuses to do its job and come up with a plan to put Americans back to work.)

John Boehner, in an unprecedented yet unsurprising move, sent a letter to Administration saying, “No”—after initially offering no objection to the Obama administration’s chosen date:

[A]s the Majority Leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening. With the significant amount of time – typically more than three hours – that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving a President, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.

Despite the fact that the date was floated to the GOP and the GOP didn’t object, the White House pushed the address back a day because getting into a slapfight with Boehner would have only served to make everyone—not just the GOP, but also the Administration—look like asshats.

He pushed back the date by a whole day? The horror! The horror!

Delaying the address definitely proves that Obama caves on everything, and this is why he’s going to lose in 2012. Voters will remember the Day the Address Got Delayed By A Day, and voters will view it as Obama being a wimp (as Markos called him) or petty and incompetent (as Jon Walker of FDL called him) or so weak that he doesn’t even realize he’s being weak (as Cenk Ugyur called him).

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Every single Professional Left blog has front-page posts claiming that Obama is a wimp, a cavemeister, naive, petty, or incompetent:

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Honest Questions

Atrios links to this Media Matters post about the day of service on 9/11, where they find a bunch of stupid wingers (Gateway Pundit, Pam Geller, somebody at Fox Nation*, Weasel Zippers and, of course, El Rushbo) calling Obama a socialist because he asked us to serve soup at a kitchen instead of shop.

My questions: is it worth even paying attention to those blogs? Are they influential enough to bother? Does what they say trickle down to Fox News and then into major media outlets?

In other words, I wonder if energy spent calling out the fringe-y, absolutely predictable “Obama can do no right” critics just empowers them. Should they be treated like trolls and simply ignored, or does shining a light on them help further discredit them?

Just to be clear: I think Media Matters does a great job, I think Geller and others say is despicable, and I don’t think there’s anything to fear by calling them out. I’m asking a question of practical politics: I’m pretty sure that pissing off liberals puts some gas in Geller and Rush’s tank, so is it worth calling them out over every issue? I just don’t pay that much attention to right-wing blogs, so I don’t know how these bloggers rank and what influence they have in the general media environment.
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[*] My understanding is that anyone can post at Fox Nation—it’s not an official Fox News vehicle. Correct me if I’m wrong.

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Jack Layton, RIP

Canadian reader Bob sends the sad news that Jack Layton, leader of the NDP and the Canadian opposition, died this morning at age 61. Layton took a leave of absence last month to fight a cancer recurrence.

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread

Via Emptywheel (now at her very own free-standing url, and you should check it out if you haven’t already), because it seemed like the right way to start another morning.

What else is on the mid-week schedule?

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reality check: state legislator recall election history

From the “this is excellent news for Republicans!” file, early indications are that the media are going to spin Wisconsin as a big failure for Democrats and their base. This is about as surprising as Mark Halperin saying something stupid, so I’m not shocked, but to inject a little reality into the discussion—here is a website that contains a list of recall elections in state legislatures. There have only been twenty attempts in American history. Recalling state legislators is really, really rare. Getting two in one night, in a rebuke of a governor who won by a 6 point margin less than a year ago, is a big deal. Yes, we all wanted the Democrats to get the majority, and yes, two Democrats stand a chance of being recalled and making it a wash. But to cast this as this major disappointment is—well, it’s the media doing what the media does. I genuinely think every reporter at Politico has some version of “this is excellent news for Republicans” saved as an AutoText.

The liberal media knows that Everything is Always Good for Republicans, because of their dastardly liberal bias.

Update: Some commenters are making fair points about reasons to be discouraged by these results. A point I meant to make here: sure, there is room for debate in this instance. But there isn’t a national forum for that debate in our media. Since everything is always good for Republicans and bad for Democrats in the Beltway media, parsing these kinds of distinctions is impossible. If Politico was ever willing to call any close issue a win for Democrats, I could take Politico more seriously when it runs its same old “good for the GOP!” story. But they aren’t willing to do that, the media in general isn’t willing to do that, and so there’s no space to look at the issue openly. Nor is there any context presented about how very rare recalling state legislators really is.

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Doug Lamborn (R-Co): Tar Baby? Really?

Perfunctory Outrage

THis is one of those posts that I’m jotting off quickly simply because not writing it means I’ve become immune to the racist bullshit being spewed hither and yon.  

I meant to write about this nonsense 5 hours ago, but I couldn’t muster up the energy.  So I went to a bar run by a couple of French chaps and had some damn fine fajitas, and now, I’m fortified with beer.  So here goes:

Doug Lamborn (R-CO) is opposed to Obama and everything he does.  Lamborn wants to stay as far away from Obama as possible.  Lamborn doesn’t even want to touch Obama because Obama is like a tar baby, and if Lamborn touches Obama, Lamborn will get stuck or get cooties or some horrifying combination of the two:

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Good morning

Pick up the phone and yell at someone.

Find your Congresscritter here.

Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Guide for first-timers here.

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Like the woman said

TooManyJens.

[N]o wonder the Teabaggers are kicking our asses. Do you really think the ones in D districts sit around whining “he won’t listen to me, so I might as well do nothing.”? Is it that hard to pick up a phone? If you have a phobia, send a fax or even a damn email*. It takes the same amount of time that pissing and moaning here does. I’m sure the Republicans would love to see liberals voluntarily taking themselves out of the game.

Indeed.

(*) Do something other than email. Email is too easy to automate and nobody reads it.

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Arkansas High School Prevented Black Female Student From Being Valedictorian

Now THIS is some racist bullshit.

A high school in Arkansas would not permit a black female student with the highest GPA in her high school to be valedictorian of her graduating class, and appointed a white student with a lower GPA to serve as the black student’s co-valedictorian.

I wish I was kidding.   And yes, it is 2011.

When I first read this article, I figured it must be a joke.  I thought it was more life-imitates-The Onion theater.   It couldn’t possibly be serious, I thought, because: (a) it’s fucking ridiculous; (b) the high school is in Pine Bluff, which is less than an hour from Little Rock; and© the young woman’s name is Kimberly Wymberly (my apologies, you brilliant beautiful young woman, but I can’t let “Kimberly Wymberly” slide without comment.)

But nope! It’s not a joke.  It’s shameful and all involved should be fired.

Despite being told by school counselor’s that she had the highest GPA, Kimberly was not permitted to serve as valedictorian alone.  The girl’s mother claims to have overheard school personnel fretting about letting the Kimberly be the sole valedictorian for fear of causing “a big mess.”

That’s right. School personnel turned what would have been the proudest moment of Kimberly’s young life into sheer humiliation. And, to add insult to injury, when Kimberly’s mother showed up at a school board meeting to protest the decision, the school superintendent would not let her speak because she had filled out the wrong form—the ‘public comments” form instead of the “public participation” form.

Unfortunately, this is not a hoax:

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“Homegrown Terrorists”

The day before the Norwegian attacks, Esquire posted Charles P. Pierce’s smart, heartbreaking article on Spokane’s “Bomb That Didn’t Go Off“:

... At the beginning of this year, not long after they’d found the bomb on the bench in Spokane, a journalist named David Neiwert put together a list of nearly thirty acts of right-wing political violence that had taken place, or had been foiled, in the United States since the summer of 2008 — or roughly since Barack Obama’s presidency began to be seen as a genuine possibility. The list began with Jim David Adkisson, who killed two people in a Unitarian church in Tennessee because he was angry at how “liberals” were “destroying America.” It included two episodes in April 2009, one in Pittsburgh and one in Florida, in which men who were sure that Barack Obama’s government was coming for their guns opened fire on law-enforcement officers who had come to investigate them on other matters.

Some of the crimes on the list were briefly sensational — Scott Roeder’s murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, or Joseph Andrew Stack’s flying his small plane into a building in Austin in protest of the Internal Revenue Service, or the incoherent array of violent crimes committed by the “Sovereign Citizens Movement.” But most of them barely made the national radar at all. In December 2008, a woman in Belfast, Maine, named Amber Cummings shot to death her sleeping husband, James, who’d been savagely abusing her. Upon arriving at the Cummings home, investigators found Nazi paraphernalia and a stash of chemicals indicating that James Cummings was preparing to make a “dirty bomb” that he planned to detonate at Obama’s inauguration. Except in the local media, that aspect of the case disappeared completely. James Cummings and his bomb had nothing to do with Scott Roeder’s handgun or Joe Stack’s airplane.

It is a fertile time for such things. The country elected a black president with an exotic name. The economy, wrecked by a rigged game at the highest levels, continued to grind through a jobless recovery. The national dialogue grows coarser and wilder, and does so at a pace accelerated by technology. People sense the fragmentation — things are falling apart — even while they take refuge in those fragments of life that seem safest and most familiar…

The bomb in the bag on the bench in Spokane was a shrapnel bomb, a direct descendant of Henry Shrapnel’s original brainchild. It was specifically designed and carefully placed to create an expanding killing zone, a sideways rain of lethal fragments. A child could have been killed by the blast itself, or by a piece of the bench, or by a chunk of the child’s own father. After all, shrapnel is nothing more than undifferentiated fragments with sufficient force applied.

That the bomb did not do what it was designed to do was a combination of luck and human agency. (It was a triumph for public employees, to put it in the context of our current political argument.) That the events of January 17 largely have faded from the news has nothing to do with luck at all. That is all human agency — how a fragmented country gathers the pieces of an event like this and tries to construct from them, not necessarily the truth of what happened, but a story that the country can live with, one more fragment among dozens of others that the country has remembered to forget.

Don’t talk, then, about the wildness in our rhetoric today, and its undeniable roots in that deep strain of political violence that runs through our national DNA, on a gene that is not always recessive. Don’t relate Centennial Park in Atlanta in 1996 to Oklahoma City to murdered doctors to Columbine, and then to Tucson and to the bag on the bench in Spokane. Ignore the patterns, deep and wide, that connect each event to the other like a slow-burning fuse to a charge. That there are among us rage-hardened, powerless people who resort to the gun and the bomb. That there are powerful people who deplore the gun and the bomb, but who do not hesitate to profit from their use. And when the gun goes off or the bomb explodes, the powerful will deplore the actions of the powerless, and they will reassure the rest of us that We are not like Them, who are violent and crazy and whose acts have no reason beyond unfathomable madness. But above all, they will say, Ignore the fact that there is still a horrible utility in political violence, the way there was during Reconstruction, or during the labor wars of the early twentieth century. If there were not, it wouldn’t be so hard to get an abortion in Kansas, and assault weapons would not have been accessories of choice at recent rallies purportedly held to discuss changes in the way the country organizes its health-care system.

(My emphasis)

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News of the World Whistleblower Sean Hoare Found Dead!

Whaaaaat!

The News of the World scandal is bananas.  Every day another bombshell drops.  And now this—
the dude who blew the lid off the whole hacking scandal was “found dead” :

A former News of the World journalist who made phone-hacking allegations against the paper has been found dead.

Sean Hoare had told the New York Times the practice was far more extensive than the paper acknowledged when police first investigated hacking claims.

Hertfordshire Police said the body of a man was found at a property in Langley Road, Watford, on Monday morning.

A police spokesman said the death was currently being treated as unexplained, but was not thought to be suspicious.

The spokesman said: “At 10.40am today [Monday] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street.

“Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

“The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”

You know what “found dead” means.  It means somebody killed his ass.

The Guardian has a story about his coke-snorting, booze-swilling lifestyle:

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