Buckeye State Blog - News of the Day

"Just A Guy Who Lives In My Neighborhood."

tudorman — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:07:20 -0700

From the Chicago Tribune on December 21, 1997.

Republican PAC Bringing its Slime to Ohio

mlberman — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 05:52:56 -0700

Politico is reporting that the National Republican Trust PAC will begin airing an ad in Ohio this weekend that attacks Obama for supporting drivers licenses for undocumented workers (or, it the language of the ad, "illegal aliens"). The ad is here.

The ad absurdly claims that Obama's policies are what allowed 9-11 to happen, and then it goes on to make the even more ridiculous claim that "2.3 million illegal immigrants will illegally vote on Nov. 4th." With no ideas to run on, the Republicans are back to their old fear-based campaigning, stoking fear of both immigrants and terrorists, while offensively conflating the two.

The CATO Foundation -- no friend of Obama's -- call the ad "despicable and wrong." CATO's Jim Harper explains:

This is terror-pandering of the highest order. While it’s true that several 9/11 hijackers got driver’s licenses and other documents, this has the same relationship to the success of their attacks as the brand of shoes they wore. They could have used their Saudi passports to board flights that day, and the same people in the same circumstances could get on planes today. Even if the REAL ID Act were implemented and we all carried a national ID, terrorists would not be prevented from boarding U.S. flights....
If it’s true that Obama would allow illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses — by the way, it wouldn’t be his decision because driver’s licenses are issued by states — it wouldn’t affect our security against terrorism.

Despicable indeed. With less than three weeks left to the election, it's time to duck from the flying kitchen sink.

More on the National Republican Trust PAC here.

Debate III

mlberman — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:07:28 -0700

Promoted from the forums. -- David

My quick take on the debate:

Obama: Cool and confident. Didn’t even bring in notes. Wow.

McCain: I could feel the frustration through the TV. Knows he’s losing, and still can’t understand why. And – not that I care – but what’s with McCain not wearing a flag pin? I thought those were required.

Bob Schieffer: Best moderator so far, but the bar was set pretty low.

Obama did a great job of pointing out that even if McCain has broken with his party on some issues, on the BIG issue – the economy – he’s more of the same. McCain is getting WAY too much credit for his “you should have run four years ago” line. Obama was talking about McCain’s record of voting for Bush’s budgets -- something McCain didn’t – and couldn’t – dispute.

On health care, Obama was right on target. Should we control costs or expand access? Obama stated the obvious – we must do both. As Obama advisor Jacob Hacker said today, the current financial crises makes investing in health care more important, not less.

McCain tried again to raise his false claims about Obama wanting a government-run health care system (as if that would be the worst thing) and forcing businesses to have the “plan that Obama wants for you.” Obama clearly called him on these mischaracterizations, though he could have added more. I doubt anyone’s falling for these tired old Republican talking points any more.

CNN’s reporting that post-debate polling is favoring Obama again. This election can’t come soon enough…

The Disptach Changes Its Mind...

mlberman — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:12:08 -0700

...now that a Democrat is in charge of the Secretary of State's office. Apparently they think we all have short memories...

Today's Editorial: "The 2004 presidential election and the current one have been riven by partisan charges and lawsuits over election decisions handed down by the Ohio secretary of state. In these struggles, the biggest loser has been public faith in the impartiality of the state's top election official. That's why Ohioans should consider revamping the administration of elections by putting that duty into the hands of a bipartisan board."

OCT. 30, 2005 Editorial: "Issue 5 would strip the election-oversight duties from an elected official, the secretary of state, and give it to an unelected, nine-member Board of Election Supervisors. This measure is a needless overreaction to the overt politicking of the current secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell. . . . The state has had a solid election-oversight system and will continue to have one if this needless amendment is defeated."

As someone who supported Issue 5 (part of the Reform Ohio Now amendments) in 2005, it's cold comfort to have the Dispatch come around -- 3 years too late.

There goes the election...all "legal like".....

Notrol — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:24:37 -0700

Well, when you cant beat 'em, run to the 6th circuit court of appeals and appeal your ass off for a rush remedy that you can contest later.

Poor Jennifer Brunner.

But, she's shown such a steady hand so far, I'm betting she also has a contingency for this. At least I hope so.

So, once again, the Republican Party and Diebold- saving us all from democracy.

It must have been the paper ballots.

Here's the link, read it and weep.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27188603/

Dmitry Medvedev calls for Europe to freeze out US

JeanLR — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:06:17 -0700

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3159998/Russian-president-Dmitry-Medvedev-calls-for-Europe-to-freeze-out-US.html

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev calls for Europe to freeze out US
The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has called on European leaders to create a new world order that minimises the role of the US.

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 6:33PM BST 08 Oct 2008

"...Mr Medvedev sought to show that the United States was at the root of all the world's problems.
He blamed Washington's "economic egotism" for the world's financial woes and then accused the Bush administration of taking Europe to the brink of a new cold war by pursuing a deliberately divisive foreign policy. He also maintained that the United States was once again trying to return to a policy of containing Russia.
"After toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States started a series of unilateral actions," Mr Medvedev said. "As a result, a trend appeared in international relations towards creating dividing lines. This was in fact the revival of a policy popular in the past and known as containment."
While he called for a cooling of the noxious rhetoric that has blighted East-West relations in the past two years, Mr Medvedev clearly laid the blame for the deterioration on the United States, which he said was again viewing Russian through the prism of the Cold War.
"Sovietology, like paranoia, is a very dangerous disease, and it is a pity that part of the US administration still suffers from it," he said.
To remedy Washington's ambitions to play the global policeman, Mr Medvedev proposed an overhaul of the world's security and financial structures. ..."

Business to McCain: No Thanks

mlberman — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:14:07 -0700

The New York Times reported this morning that business groups are coming out against John McCain's health care plan. According to the Times:

The officials, with organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Federation of Independent Business, predicted in recent interviews that the McCain plan, which eliminates the exclusion of health benefits from income taxes, would accelerate the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance and do little to reduce the number of uninsured from 45 million.

When I'm on the same side of an argument as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, you know we're talking about a really bad plan. Not only would the McCain plain function as a huge tax increase on middle class families, but the McCain campaign conceded this week that McCain's plan would also require cutting Medicare and Medicaid more than a trillion dollars. Where exactly would they cut? The McCain camp wouldn't say.

Such cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are either entirely fanciful (in which case McCain's plan would explode the deficit even more), or they would be devastating. The Center for American Progress says:

To put this into perspective, the cut [to Medicare under McCain's plan] in 2012 would be equal to the entire amount that Medicare spends on nursing home care, or hospital outpatient services, or low-income subsides for the Medicare drug benefit.
McCain’s deep and unsustainable program cuts would threaten health care coverage for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens and raise the cost of insurance for everyone else. These blows would come as Americans of all incomes are facing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

On a more local note, I know I'm a bit behind, but I just saw this despicable ad targeting Democratic House candidates John Carney and Nancy Garland. The first thought that occurred to me -- and perhaps to anyone else who was in Ohio in 2004 -- is that the Republicans seem to be suggesting that Carney and Garland are terrorists. Beyond that, the sheer hypocricy of this ad from a party running candidates like career lobbyist Steve Stivers (who lobbied for banks, not -- like Garland -- for physical therapists) and Michael Crites (who boasts on his website of -- gasp! -- acting as a lawyer and defending some unpleasant clients) is just incredible. Maybe Carney or Garland will respond with my favorite tactic of this election cycle: the Al Franken strategy.

100th Anniversary of Water Chlorination

Dr. Patrick Moore — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:15:01 -0700

(Re-posted from Huffington Post)

I became an environmental activist in the early 1970s just as I was completing my doctorate in ecology at the University of British Columbia. It was the height of the Cold War and the height of the Viet Nam War and we were compelled to take a very public stand against activities we thought to be catastrophic both for people and for the planet.

I joined a small committee that was meeting in the basement of the Unitarian Church. We organized a protest voyage against U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska and had tens of thousands marching in the streets. When that H-bomb was set off at Amchitka Island in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the U.S. ever detonated.

It was the birth of Greenpeace, the organization I co-founded, spending 15 years in its top committee, helping to lead environmental campaigns around the world.

But it's ironic in the extreme that, as we mark the 100th anniversary of drinking water chlorination, my old organization and other activist groups aligned with it continue to oppose this most important public health achievement.

Activist organizations like Greenpeace have access to a full century of observations on the results of water chlorination in the US, all the way back to September 26, 1908 when Jersey City, NJ became the first US city to chlorinate its public water supply.

It's true, there were those back then who vehemently opposed the use of this "poison" in public water supplies. According to one official at the time, continued chlorination to eradicate typhoid was akin to being "between the devil and the deep blue sea, for at present we don't know whether typhoid fever or the (chlorinated) drinking water is the worst."

Thankfully from the perspective of human health, chlorination of water supplies spread rapidly. Today, chlorination is the overwhelming choice for treating public water systems.

The results are clear. This widespread adoption of chlorine disinfection across the U.S. has had very important results. Waterborne diseases like typhoid, Hepatitis A and cholera that once killed thousands of Americans each year have been virtually eliminated. Typhoid fever cases fell by more than 99 percent between 1900 and 1960. Related childhood mortality fell dramatically. And average life expectancy rose from 47 years in 1900 to nearly 78 years in 2006.

Yet, many of my old environmental colleagues continue to vilify chlorination of water by raising unwarranted fears about health risks of chlorine and disinfection byproducts. In fact, it was a Greenpeace decision in 1986 to support a world-wide ban on all chlorine use that turned out to be a breaking point between my old organization and me.

My strongly held view is that chlorine is essential for our health. It is that simple. At the time I explained to my fellow Greenpeace International directors that water chlorination was the biggest advance in the history of public health, and in addition that the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry. As the only board member with an education in science, my words fell on deaf ears.

In short, my former colleagues ignored science and supported the ban, giving me no choice but to leave the group as I could not support such a policy. Despite science concluding no known health risks - and ample benefits - from water chlorination, Greenpeace and other environmental groups have continued to oppose its use for more than 20 years.

I believe the opposition to the use of chemicals such as chlorine is part of a broader hostility to the use of chemicals in general. I often cite Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, as having had a significant impact on many pioneers of the green movement. The book raised some legitimate concerns, many rooted in science, about the risks and negative environmental impact associated with the indiscriminate use of chemicals.

But the day-to-day water chlorination that occurs across America is not in the category of indiscriminate use. For Greenpeace and groups like it, the healthy skepticism learned from Carson has hardened over the years, and given way to a mindset that treats virtually all use of chemicals with suspicion.

After a century of use and the resulting eradication of waterborne diseases across the US and the world, those activists who continue, absurdly, to oppose water chlorination only illustrate the need for an alternative environmental policy based on science and logic - not misinformation and campaigns of fear.

After all, campaigns based on groundless fears distract the public from real environmental threats such as air pollution and tropical deforestation for example.

As we mark one of the key milestones in improving the public health of Americans right across the country, let's always remember we all have a responsibility to be environmental stewards. But stewardship requires that science drive our public policy, just as it did a hundred years ago in Jersey City.

Fact Checking on Health Care

mlberman — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:47:50 -0700

I was going to get all fired up about health care, but Bill Clinton beat me to it.

Still, it’s worth some brief fact-checking of last night’s debate.

BIDEN: “John recently wrote an article in a major magazine saying that he wants to do for the health care industry deregulate it and let the free market move like he did for the banking industry.”

FACT-CHECK: MOSTLY TRUE. Ok, probably a stretch to argue that “Contingencies” – the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries -- is a “major magazine.” Still, here is what John McCain said in the current issue of the magazine: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

BIDEN: “[D]o you know how John McCain pays for his $5,000 tax credit you're going to get, a family will get? He taxes as income every one of you out there, every one of you listening who has a health care plan through your employer.

FACT-CHECK: TRUE. Under McCain’s plan, the $5000 tax credit is paid for by making employer-provided health benefits taxable -- a huge tax increase on working Americans. Obama has a great new ad making this point.

BIDEN: “[John McCain] has not been a maverick in providing health care for people. He has voted against -- he voted against including another 3.6 million children in coverage of the existing health care plan, when he voted in the United States Senate.”

FACT-CHECK: MOSTLY TRUE. McCain was only one of 31 senators to vote against extending the S-CHIP program to provide health coverage for more uninsured children. Estimates vary as to how many children would have been covered under the Senate’s plan, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated the number at 3.2 million.

PALIN: “Barack Obama's plan [is] to mandate health care coverage and have universal government run program and unless you're pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately, I don't think that it's going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds.”

FACT-CHECK: ABSURDLY FALSE. Barack Obama’s plan is not a “universal government run program” or anything close to it. It would allow anyone happy with their current coverage to keep it. It would also create new, affordable options for those without coverage. The Commonwealth Fund (citing numbers provided by the Brookings Institution) projects in a new report that McCain’s plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 2 million; Obama’s plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 34 million. And, Obama’s plan is projected to cost less than half as much. Finally, as you may remember from the debates in the primaries, Obama’s plan does not mandate health coverage, except for children. Hopefully this ad will help to rebut Palin's false attacks.

Congress threatened with Martial Law if bill is not passed.

JeanLR — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:52:03 -0700

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaG9d_4zij8

Rep. Brad Sherman says Congress threatened with Martial Law if bill is not passed.

Keepin' it Real in Stockport

Notrol — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:41:46 -0700

The Canton Repository which endorsed Obama over the weekend ran the following in their "Notes and Quotes" section today:

"The color of Mr. Obama's skin — he will not carry this area. Down here, Friday afternoon is when you wash the sheets. Saturday is when you hang them out. Sunday is when you wear them."
William Nesselrode, 64, of Stockport, Ohio, on why people there are unlikely to vote for Sen. Barack Obama for president.

The more the differences between Obama and McCain come into focus, the more the race becomes generational. Those of Mr. Nesslerode's age remember in stark horror and indignation "Rough Hough". It has crystallized their views of race relations ever since, and set us on a very hard road. Those with the "white is right" mindset will never change. I don't believe all the dinosaurs died in just a few years, and I don't believe all the racists will pass in just a generation. More's the pity.

Invest in Sprinklers, Not Just Fire Trucks

mlberman — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:03:28 -0700

Rather than spend $700 billion dollars to bail out our financial sector (that’s $700,000,000,000), perhaps some earlier preventive action would have been far less costly. Obama was certainly correct to emphasize that point in the first debate:

Obama: The question, I think, that we have to ask ourselves is, how did we get into this situation in the first place?
Two years ago, I warned that, because of the subprime lending mess, because of the lax regulation, that we were potentially going to have a problem and tried to stop some of the abuses in mortgages that were taking place at the time.
Last year, I wrote to the secretary of the Treasury to make sure that he understood the magnitude of this problem and to call on him to bring all the stakeholders together to try to deal with it.

The continuing escalation of health care expenses will be our next crisis. Just this week, two separate reports found that family health care deductibles increased 29% in just the past year, and that 57 million Americans live in families struggling to pay their health care bills.

As with the financial crises, only one presidential candidate seems to realize that preventive action is needed to avoid a crisis. Obama’s health care advisor David Cutler recently explained:

In today's health-care market, less than one dollar in 25 goes for prevention, even though preventive services -- regular screenings and healthy lifestyle information -- are among the most cost-effective medical services around. Guaranteeing access to preventive services will improve health and in many cases save money.

McCain’s plan would do just the opposite. By forcing people to buy health insurance on their own (rather than through their employer), more people will end up with more expensive, high-deductible plans. These plans may not cover preventive care, and even in those that do, the high deductibles will discourage people from seeing their doctors in non-emergency situations. In the long run, McCain’s plan will increase costs and lower standards of care at the same time – the worst of both worlds. No wonder 74% of employers think McCain’s health care plan makes no sense.

Battleground States See Pervasive Systemic Efforts to Block the Vote

Project Vote — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:27:51 -0700

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

"I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone." - Allen Raymond, former GOP operative

Voter fraud by individuals has been a major partisan debate in recent elections, inspiring multiple states to consider or pass laws that purport to stop it, including "no-match, no-vote" list maintenance procedures and strict voter ID requirements. Despite federal findings that the act of casting an illegal ballot is exceedingly rare, partisans often cite large scale voter registration drives as voter fraud culprits, and perpetuate the myth of voter fraud by spreading the fear that such votes cancel out legitimate ones. With rising registration rates - particularly among historically underrepresented Americans - it is no surprise that partisans are spreading this myth, and the media often perpetuates the hysteria by printing stories on the small numbers of bad registration cards submitted by large scale voter registration drives (including the 1.2 million submitted by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN).

Despite the constant trickle of "voter fraud" scares in the media, however, it is becoming more evident that elections are more often compromised by systematic efforts to suppress eligible voters, including the very measures that are meant to protect against the extremely rare instances of ineligible voters attempting to cast a ballot. The real enemy to fair elections are organized voter suppression efforts that are seen in these poorly devised election laws, partisan dirty tricks, and systematic partisan efforts to challenge legitimate voters. From the alleged plan to challenge foreclosure victims in Michigan and Ohio to the potential "no-match, no-vote" fiascoes in Wisconsin and Florida, many Americans have cause to wonder, "will my vote count in November?"

On Monday, September 22, KCRW's To the Point host, Warren Olney, discussed voter fraud and voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election with Project Vote Executive Director Michael Slater, Doug Chapin of the Pew Center, former GOP strategist Allen Raymond, and Wall Street Journal columnist, John Fund.

In "major states like Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania" this year, Slater warned that we can expect some "election administration problems," which run the gamut from logistical issues, such as poorly distributed voting machines, to voter suppression tactics, including voter caging, which historically affect low income and minority communities. These communities, which have historically been systematically shut out of the electoral process, have shown signs of increased political interest and higher registration rates they year, prompting fears of increased partisan efforts to suppress this tidal wave of new voters.

Fund repeated stories of small numbers of allegedly invalid voter registration cards being submitted out of the more than 1.2 million turned in this year by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN, and said "some of these voter registration efforts have been questionable." But former GOP operative Allen Raymond, explained that there was a critical difference between a "systematic" voter suppression program "versus one that is part of the process." For one, he said, systematic efforts, like voter caging, are far more detrimental to election integrity than voter registration drive employees submitting bad applications.

Raymond was dismissive of the allegations against voter registration drives. "Look, those are a couple of people who are just trying to earn a buck, collecting signatures. I've seen it all the time on ballot access petition efforts," he said of the voter registration fraud allegations. "I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone...and so I think what you really need to address are those systematic efforts," said Raymond.

Election Dirty Tricks

Raymond knows all about partisan use of systemic voter suppression efforts; he has written a book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which describes his years as a dirty-tricks specialist for the GOP. Raymond served time for a 2002 Republican phone jamming scheme. In a September 15 interviewwith the Michigan Messenger Raymond said "holding down Democratic turnout is a key part of Republican strategy for victory in November." Asked about reports of Republican attempts to challenge the voting rights of foreclosure victims, Raymond said that if he were still in the dirty-tricks business he "would be doing that all day long."

Other stories that have surfaced in recent weeks contribute to fears that partisans are ramping up their voter suppression machines. Last week, a mailer from the Republican National Committee that went to multiple registered Democrats in Florida left many confused about their party affiliation, according to Pam Fessler of NPR. While some Democratic officials consider the mailer an attempt to challenge voters based on returned mail, particularly Democratic senior citizens, Republican officials claim the confusion was not intentional and denied allegations of voter caging, according to the Naples Daily News on Sunday.

But in recent weeks several media and Internet outlets, including Air America, have reported on accounts of massive mailings of absentee ballot applications from the McCain campaign sent to registered Democrats and Obama supporters in other battleground states as well, including Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; many of the mailings appear to contain the wrong preprinted return addresses for ballots, which would direct them to the wrong precinct.

Of even greater concern than dirty tricks is the possibility of voter suppression through election administration problems that are expected to run the gamut in key states.

No-Match, No-Vote

Voter advocates claim thousands of Wisconsin voters may "lose their right to vote" as a result of a lawsuit filed by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen just six weeks before the election. Van Hollen, who sued the Government Accountability Board – which oversees elections in the state - to "seek an order requiring the board to compare voter information to the Department of Transportation records for more voters," is being scrutinized for his ties to the McCain campaign (he is the campaign’s co-chair in Wisconsin), according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Van Hollen hopes to quickly implement a notoriously faulty voter list maintenance system known as "no-match, no-vote," which experts say could result in purging eligible voters from the Wisconsin registration rolls. This system was found to incorrectly fail 22 percent of voters during an initial test in August (additionally, four out of six judges on the G.A.B. also failed to match the system). Under "no-match, no-vote", voters could mistakenly lose their registration as a result of "transposed digits, variations in names ("Becky" instead of "Rebecca," for instance) or poor handwriting on voter registration forms," the Journal-Sentinel reports. "Apt to fail are people with apostrophes, hyphens or spaces in their names. Voter records usually drop punctuation and spaces - 'ONeil' instead of 'O'Neil' - while driver's license records often keep them."

A similar practice is being enforced in Florida that could "turn Election Day 2008 in Florida into a catastrophe akin to the hanging-chads debacle of 2000," Florida Today editorialized this week. "With no time for troubleshooting the system, that could falsely disenfranchise many who've done nothing wrong." The state's dormant 2005 "no-match, no-vote" law was revived by Republican Secretary of State Kurt Browning in early September after challenges failed in court. Browning’s decision to enforce this practice caused a critical uproar from voting rights activists, who claim such a move could disenfranchise thousands of Floridians, according to a Miami Herald report earlier this month.

"No-match, no-vote laws" are sold to the public as a way to prevent fraudulent voting, but as Florida Today correctly notes; "few people try to vote under someone else's name. A five-year hunt for voter fraud by the Justice Department under the Bush administration found almost no evidence of organized efforts to tilt national elections."

The Elections Supervisor of Leon County, Florida, Ion Ian Sancho, is quoted in the Florida Today piece as saying that the real problem is not potential fraud by voters but partisan manipulation of the process. Sancho has been vocal about his opposition to the Florida laws he is required to enforce, including how the state makes eligible voters vulnerable to partisan challenges. Speaking on WGCU radio in Florida on September 12, Sancho told host Sasha Rethati that in the past ten years the Florida legislature had written rules to "make sure that the party in power could stay in power." He pointed to a 2005 Florida law that stripped the state's voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls, and how challengers now only needed to express a "good faith belief" that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot. "You can supply a list containing 10,000 names to the supervisor of elections," said Sancho, "and I have to make all 10,000 members vote by provisional ballot."

"What we have here is partisans attempting to use anything they can possibly find to gain an advantage on the other party," said Sancho. "Quite frankly, I’m fed up with it as an election official. The reason I came into this field was to make sure Americans had the right to vote, and to have their votes counted properly."

Quick Links:

Minnite, Lorraine. The Politics of Voter Fraud. Project Vote. March 2007.

In Other News:

Same-day voter signup getting serious look - Decatur Herald-Review [Ill.]
...Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, is investigating moving to same-day voter registration in two years. That means a person who was eligible to register but had not done so could walk into a polling place on Election Day, register to vote and be handed a ballot...

GOP: Lose Your Home, Lose Your Vote – The Nation
Senator John McCain was a foot soldier in the deregulation revolution, which triggered the current banking crisis and the wave of foreclosures. In Michigan, his party wants to deny the right to vote to victims of the GOP's misguided economic policies and the sleazy banking practices they encouraged.

Oklahoma election officials disagree with ACLU - Associated Press
State law prohibits former felons from registering to vote until the full length of their prescribed sentence has expired - even if they are not in prison and are no longer supervised by the Department of Corrections, the secretary of the state Election Board said Monday.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

$627.4 Billion on bailouts under Bushes

JeanLR — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:19:20 -0700

That's BEFORE the $700 BILLION more this Bush wants to add!!!

"I got to figure, we all got to figure. There's some way to stop this. It's not like lightening or earthquakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change." Grapes of Wrath

http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts

History of U.S. Gov't Bailouts
September 22, 2008 1:35 pm EDT

With the flurry of recent government bailouts--and a much larger one likely on the way--we decided to try to put them in perspective. The circles below represent the size of U.S. government bailout, calculated in 2008 dollars. They are also in chronological order: http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts

[Video] 2002: Bush on home ownership for minorities with bad credit

JeanLR — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:52:08 -0700

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW9viaJatpo

[Video] 2002: Bush on home ownership for minorities with a bad credit history