http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c0cf508ff8/prop-8-the-musical-starring-jack-black-john-c-reilly-and-many-more-from-fod-team-jack-black-craig-robinson-john-c-reilly-and-rashida-jones

Hey, Everybody! Wall Street Journal has a new Op-Ed, "Krugman's Recipe for
Depression". Anybody want to take a crack at it. I did but doubt my submission
to the "Forum" will be published there. I'll try to recall it right here:

Unions are a tough and delicate problem but Paul Krugman makes
some good points. While history is important we also want to "Be Here Now",
and in the '00's, one of the big problems is the banks were just bailed out with no strings
attached, they were expected to lend and now they are not lending.

I probably will come back to this later in more detail, but should anyone decide to take
this up, Have Fun!   Read More »

BEFORE ELECTION DAY

1. Check your registration. Even if you think you're registered, you may not be. Check online at www.CanIVote.org.

2. Vote now. Check if early voting is possible in your state. If youÂ're voting by mail, check carefully where you need to sign, how to seal the envelope, and how to mark the ballot. And note: Some ballots require extra postage.

3. Practice your vote. Electronic voting machines can be difficult to use. Verifiedvoting.org is preparing links to video demos of how to vote on the machine you will find at your polling station. If you'll be using a paper ballot, check out the sample included in your voter pamphlet.

4. Find out whoÂ's in charge. Make a phone list of your county and state election officials-it may save valuable time on Election Day if you need to get registration verification or other information.


ON ELECTION DAY

5. Vote early. Avoid the frustration of long lines. Also, if you encounter problems, you'll have time to sort them out and may be able to help others.

6. Take your government-issued ID and your cell phone, if you have one. If you have problems, or see problems, call a hotline immediately (see point #9). You may not need ID to vote, but it's best to have it. If you have trouble with your registration, ask for a provisional ballot.

7. Avoid Straight Party Voting, if it's an option in your state. Vote for each race individually, even if it takes a little longer.

8. Verify your vote. If youÂ're voting on an electronic voting machine, check the review screen to make sure it reflects your vote. If the machine produces a paper record, check as you go along that everything is working correctly. If not, speak to a polling attendant-donÂ't leave until youÂ're sure your vote has been properly recorded.

9. Document and report. If you encounter difficulties, or see others experiencing difficulties (excessive lines, voter harassment, malfunctioning machines, etc.), make a detailed record. Get all the facts you can-location, names, specific problem.

The best way to report problems is to call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683), which has volunteer lawyers in 15 locations standing by to provide rapid-response assistance. You can also contact your party of choice. We have more suggestions here.


AFTER ELECTION DAY

10. Call your candidate. If there are questions about an election result, urge your candidate to ask for an audit. Ask how you can help.

11. Call your election officials. If you have concerns, let your county and state election officials know, and monitor their response. Ask them not to certify the election before all challenges and recounts are finished. And send a copy of your message to your local newspaper editor. If you're confident about the election result, thank the officials for a difficult job well done.


INTO THE FUTURE

12. Work for fair, transparent elections. 66% of Americans don't trust the electronic voting machines many of us will be voting on this November. Join the movement for election reform in between elections. Use our YES! Tools to find out how.

Yours for democracy,

Fran Korten
Publisher, YES! Magazine
www.yesmagazine.org

Beyond Diebold: 10 Ways to Steal This Election

From caging to robo-calls, a MoJo field guide to vote-blocking tactics.

Sasha Abramsky
October 20, 2008

Tactics to deny Americans the right to vote are as old as, well, the right to vote. Democrats have been at fault in the past-take the literacy tests Southern states used to deprive blacks of their suffrage from the Civil War up through 1965. Today's shenanigans-which still target minorities and vulnerable first-time voters-are more often designed to stifle Democratic turnout, perhaps never more than in 2008. "This is obviously an important election, and the turnout may break records," says Rice University sociologist Chandler Davidson, who has studied vote suppression, "so there is every reason to expect these tactics will be employed."


Card the Centenarian
Arizona's Proposition 200, passed in 2004, makes would-be voters prove their citizenship with a passport, birth certificate, or other federal ID, but poor and elderly citizens often lack such proof. One 97-year-old woman who cast her first vote for fdr in 1932 had to wage a nine-month campaign to regain her voting rights after relocating from Kentucky. Lawyer Linda Brown of the Arizona Advocacy Network, part of a coalition suing to disable Prop. 200, says activists are dubbing Arizona "the state of Darwinist democracy. If you've got the stamina and an insatiable desire, you just may be able to register and vote before you die."
Similar battles are playing out in Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Utah, and Indiana, which saw its ID law upheld by the US Supreme Court in April, despite evidence that up to 43,000 citizens lacked the necessary ID-including a dozen retired nuns turned away from the polls during primary season.
sleaze meter: 8 out of 10 Fighting fraud is just a pretext for "a purely partisan effort, " says Neil Bradley of the aclu's Voting Rights Project.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, and Utah.


Playing With Matches
Four states-Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, and South Dakota-only let residents register if their Social Security or driver's license numbers can be matched with entries in a state database. If you register as "Bill" but the database says "William," or if a data-entry clerk sticks a typo in your name or birth date, tough luck.
sleaze meter: 3 Incompetence may be bipartisan, but critics argue that there will be more typos in the names of Hispanics, immigrants, and black women.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, and South Dakota.


Prior Restraint
Felon disenfranchisement is the mother of all anti-suffrage tactics. When George W. Bush took Floridaby a few hundred votes in 2000, more than 600,000 state residents had been barred from voting because of prior offenses. Florida has since made it easier for some ex-felons to regain their rights, and several other states have tinkered with their laws. Even so, more than 5 million Americans will be unable to vote this fall because of felony records.
sleaze meter: 9 Because of disproportionate drug law enforcement, as many as 1 in 8 black men nationwide is excluded from the political process.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Florida.


Papeles, Por Favor
Starting in 2004, Sheriff Terry Johnson of North Carolina's Alamance County used county election rolls to investigate the citizenship of 125 voters with Hispanic-sounding names.
sleaze meter: 9 Even the current Justice Department told him to back off.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in North Carolina.


Mom, I Wanna Come Home
In Statesboro, Georgia, citizens challenged the voting status of 900 Georgia Southern University students, claiming they weren't legal residents of the college town.
sleaze meter: 7 Using similar logic, local officials grilled 18 students from Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina, a historically black college, after they'd voted in a special election in the fall of 2007.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Georgia and North Carolina.


Armed and Dangerous
Kentucky Republicans have been challenging the voting status of black residents in a variety of ways for decades. In 2004, following a contentious gubernatorial election, a voter-advocacy group reported that party members had "planned and organized what they hoped would be a well-publicized effort to place white Republicans primarily at black Democratic polling places, ostensibly to protect against vote fraud."
sleaze meter: 11 "The appearance of people ostentatiously videotaping voters in line, or wearing official-looking uniforms, sometimes including sidearms, is another widely used tactic," notes sociologist Chandler Davidson.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Kentucky.


Counting Crows
In 2007, a group called the Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (cera) unsuccessfully sued the state of Montana, arguing that polling places should be removed from the Crow Indian Reservation to prevent fraud. Native Americans in other states have also reported intimidation; allegations include gop poll workers copying down license plate numbers and following voters home.
sleaze meter: 9 From a cera dispatch: "When a separate government controls one minority, and its individual minority (Native American) voters can be coerced into bloc voting, that minority becomes a renegade 'swing' vote."
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Montana.


When a Robo Calls
Malicious robo-calls during the 2006 congressional elections sent would-be voters to the wrong locations or harassed them at all hours. In California's 50th District, residents got late-night calls that seemed to be from Democrat Francine Busby; when people hung up, the computer redialed up to 14 times. (Busby lost.) Expect more of the same in November: "The price point has decreased so that anyone can set up these calls from their basement," says robo-call watchdog Shaun Dakin.
sleaze meter: 10 Does the expression "ratfucking" ring a bell?
Leave a comment about voting conditions in California.


Political Hacks
High-tech voting continues to wreak havoc across the country. Monitors expect huge lines this November in Ohio's poorer precincts, some of which have bounced from one flawed technology to another; voters in Cuyahoga County will be on their fourth system since 2004, notes Dan Tokaji, an associate law professor at the Ohio State University. In 2006, touch-screen machines in Sarasota, Florida, came up 18,000 votes short during a congressional race that was decided by fewer than 400 votes. In 2007, University of California researchers successfully hacked into three state-sanctioned e-voting systems, compelling election officials to abandon the pricey machines. And during this year's gop primary, e-voting machines failed in 80 percent of the precincts in South Carolina's Horry County.
sleaze meter: 4 Voting experts largely agree that poor neighborhoods fare worse in the face of such meltdowns.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in California, Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina.


Weapons of Mass Mailing
The Jim Crow-era trick known as "caging" has been revived by 21st-century gop operatives. Mass mailings go out to low-income areas, and if a letter is returned as undeliverable, the party uses it to challenge that voter's eligibility. Besides intimidating voters, the challenges create mayhem at polling stations. Caging has been reported in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, among others.
sleaze meter: 9 Measures to outlaw the practice have never made it out of committee in Congress.
Leave a comment about voting conditions in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Sasha Abramsky is the author of a Ford Foundation report on the nation's voting infrastructure due out this month.
http://motherjones.com/news/outfront/2008/11/outfront-10-ways-to-steal-an-election.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 9, 2008
Last month, when the U.S. Treasury Department allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, I wrote that Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, was playing financial Russian roulette. Sure enough, there was a bullet in that chamber: Lehman's failure caused the world financial crisis, already severe, to get much, much worse.

Paul Krugman's Blog is called "Conscience of a Liberal"

The consequences of Lehman's fall were apparent within days, yet key policy players have largely wasted the past four weeks. Now they've reached a moment of truth: They'd better do something soon." in fact, they'd better announce a coordinated rescue plan this weekend," or the world economy may well experience its worst slump since the Great Depression.

Let's talk about where we are right now.

The current crisis started with a burst housing bubble, which led to widespread mortgage defaults, and hence to large losses at many financial institutions. That initial shock was compounded by secondary effects, as lack of capital forced banks to pull back, leading to further declines in the prices of assets, leading to more losses, and so on," a vicious circle of deleveraging. Pervasive loss of trust in banks, including on the part of other banks, reinforced the vicious circle.

The downward spiral accelerated post-Lehman. Money markets, already troubled, effectively shut down. one line currently making the rounds is that the only things anyone wants to buy right now are Treasury bills and bottled water.

The response to this downward spiral on the part of the world's two great monetary powers: the United States, on one side, and the 15 nations that use the euro, on the other , has been woefully inadequate.

Europe, lacking a common government, has literally been unable to get its act together; each country has been making up its own policy, with little coordination, and proposals for a unified response have gone nowhere.

The United States should have been in a much stronger position. And when Mr. Paulson announced his plan for a huge bailout, there was a temporary surge of optimism. But it soon became clear that the plan suffered from a fatal lack of intellectual clarity. Mr. Paulson proposed buying $700 billion worth of troubled assets, toxic mortgage-related securities, from banks, but he was never able to explain why this would resolve the crisis.

What he should have proposed instead, many economists agree, was direct injection of capital into financial firms: The U.S. government would provide financial institutions with the capital they need to do business, thereby halting the downward spiral, in return for partial ownership. When Congress modified the Paulson plan, it introduced provisions that made such a capital injection possible, but not mandatory. And until two days ago, Mr. Paulson remained resolutely opposed to doing the right thing.

But on Wednesday the British government, showing the kind of clear thinking that has been all too scarce on this side of the pond, announced a plan to provide banks with �£50 billion in new capital: the equivalent, relative to the size of the economy, of a $500 billion program here, together with extensive guarantees for financial transactions between banks. And U.S. Treasury officials now say that they plan to do something similar, using the authority they didn't want but Congress gave them anyway.

The question now is whether these moves are too little, too late. I don't think so, but it will be very alarming if this weekend rolls by without a credible announcement of a new financial rescue plan, involving not just the United States but all the major players.

Why do we need international cooperation? Because we have a globalized financial system in which a crisis that began with a bubble in Florida condos and California McMansions has caused monetary catastrophe in Iceland. We're all in this together, and need a shared solution.

Why this weekend? Because there happen to be two big meetings taking place in Washington: a meeting of top financial officials from the major advanced nations on Friday, then the annual International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting Saturday and Sunday. If these meetings end without at least an agreement in principle on a global rescue plan; if everyone goes home with nothing more than vague assertions that they intend to stay on top of the situation, a golden opportunity will have been missed, and the downward spiral could easily get even worse.

What should be done? The United States and Europe should just say, "Yes, prime minister." The British plan isn't perfect, but there's widespread agreement among economists that it offers by far the best available template for a broader rescue effort.

And the time to act is now. You may think that things can't get any worse, but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.

People were worried that home prices have fallen.
But the housing crisis hit partly because housing prices
had gotten to high in relation to people's real incomes.

Don't wages have to come up?
I know, I know: "Employers can't afford to raise wages."
It seems like they'll never do it, and the last wage-increase
in Congress took NINE years!

How odd that no one even mentions that aspect
of the bailout and recovery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

[WSJ.com said I was posting comments too fast and I hadn't even posted this yet!


http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/09/29/house-republicans-blame-pelosis-speech/

Pelosi definitely lost her temper and it wasn't pretty, especially at a moment when people were trying to work together(What up, Nancy!?), I agree. But that's no excuse to plunge the nation into horrific failure is it?

How many tranks will it take the no-voters to sleep tonight(Some of those who voted "no" were also pressured by constituents at home)?

Unfortunately it may have seemed like "crying wolf" when Bush spoke, as well. People can't recognize when he's right, despite progress in Iraq & the great donotcall.gov

Here's what we get for McCarthyism and all sorts of present-day whipping up of fears of socialism with Russia and China (and hard to believe, France!) as the big bad bears. It's the obverse of: "If cops are pigs, next time you need one, call a hippie!"

Permalink | Trackback URL: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/09/29/house-republicans-blame-pelosis-speech/trackback/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/opinion/29krugman.html?hp

It's 3 a.m., a few months into 2009, and the phone in the White House rings. Several big hedge funds are about to fail, says the voice on the line, and there's likely to be chaos when the market opens. Whom do you trust to take that call?

I am not being melodramatic. The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out, sufficiently so to be worth passing. But it's not what you'd actually call a good plan, and it won't end the crisis. The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.

So what do we know about the readiness of the two men most likely to end up taking that call? Well, Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.

About Mr. Obama: it's a shame that he didn't show more leadership in the debate over the bailout bill, choosing instead to leave the issue in the hands of Congressional Democrats, especially Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. But both Mr. Obama and the Congressional Democrats are surrounded by very knowledgeable, clear-headed advisers, with experienced crisis managers like Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin always close at hand.

Then there's the frightening Mr. McCain, more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago.

We've known for a long time, of course, that Mr. McCain doesn't know much about economics as he's said so himself, although he's also denied having said it. That wouldn't matter too much if he had good taste in advisers but he doesn't.

Remember, his chief mentor on economics is Phil Gramm, the arch-deregulator, who took special care in his Senate days to prevent oversight of financial derivatives the very instruments that sank Lehman and A.I.G., and brought the credit markets to the edge of collapse. Mr. Gramm hasn't had an official role in the McCain campaign since he pronounced America a nation of whiners, but he's still considered a likely choice as Treasury secretary.

And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had assembled an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin Hassett, the co-author of Dow 36,000. Enough said.

Now, to a large extent the poor quality of Mr. McCain's advisers reflects the tattered intellectual state of his party. Has there ever been a more pathetic economic proposal than the suggestion of House Republicans that we try to solve the financial crisis by eliminating capital gains taxes? (Troubled financial institutions, by definition, don't have capital gains to tax.)

But even President Bush has, in the twilight of his administration, turned to relatively sensible people to make economic decisions: I am not a fan of Mr. Paulson, but he's a vast improvement over his predecessor. At this point, one has the suspicion that a McCain administration would have us longing for Bush-era competence.

The real revelation of the last few weeks, however, has been just how erratic Mr. McCain's views on economics are. At any given moment, he seems to have very strong opinions, but a few days later, he goes off in a completely different direction.

Thus on Sept. 15 he declared for at least the 18th time this year that the fundamentals of our economy are strong. This was the day after Lehman failed and Merrill Lynch was taken over, and the financial crisis entered a new, even more dangerous stage.

But three days later he declared that America's financial markets have become a casino, and said that he'd fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which, by the way, isn't in the president's power.

And then he found a new set of villains in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lenders. (Despite some real scandals at Fannie and Freddie, they played little role in causing the crisis: most of the really bad lending came from private loan originators.) And he moralistically accused other politicians, including Mr. Obama, of being under Fannie's and Freddie's financial influence; it turns out that a firm owned by his own campaign manager was being paid by Freddie until just last month.

Then Mr. Paulson released his plan, and Mr. McCain weighed vehemently into the debate. But he admitted, several days after the Paulson plan was released, that he hadn't actually read the plan, which was only three pages long.

O.K., I think you get the picture.

The modern economy, it turns out, is a dangerous place and it's not the kind of danger you can deal with by talking tough and denouncing evildoers. Does Mr. McCain have the judgment and temperament to deal with that part of the job he seeks?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/business/30bailout.html?pagewanted=1&hp

PS: If anyone can explain to me the proper way to do links here I'm all ears but I think
there may be a technical problem that it's not as self-explanatory, at least for me,
as it once was here.

In a Washington Post article, Spitzer described how the Bush administration kept states from protecting their citizens with any rules against predatory lending.

I think Krugman has something important to say here!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

New Voting Laws,
Untested Machines
Might Be Factors

By CHRISTOPHER COOPER


"...A second law allows citizens to challenge the legitimacy of fellow voters. Challengers need not prove their accusations. Instead, the challenged voter has two days to justify his right to cast a ballot."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122185985239258235.html

Any voter can challenge any other voter's right to vote and the burden of proof that
he/she can vote is on the challenged voter!
It's the ugliest thing I've heard yet--except of course for the biggest republican campaign donors quietly hacking the vote through touch-screen voting or if they're forced to
provide a paper-trail, then extremely unprofessional foot-dragging and slow-downs
to sabotage the paper-trail. Everyone have a lovely election.

But credit where credit is due: This admission of the existence of vote-fraud is a first for the Wall Street Journal.

through appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

A trusted environmental expert writes:

"Hey folks,

Here is a very disturbing portrayal of McCain. Many of the snips in it seem taken out of context, and it plays to our worst fears, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/v/PdJUCU1UH2w&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1
NOTE: there are scenes of extreme violence."

It's true McCain is steeped in war. His grad school was The Naval War College.
It's a foregone conclusion with him that we're always at war. And though
he was a heroic POW, he shows over and over again that he learned nothing
positive from the experience.--Why would anyone vote for the ticket that would be even further right of Bush 43?

I) A McCain-Palin ad has FactCheck.org calling Obama's attacks on Palin "absolutely false" and "misleading." That's what we said, but it wasn't about Obama.

Our article criticized anonymous e-mail falsehoods and bogus claims about Palin posted around the Internet. We have no evidence that any of the claims we found to be false came from the Obama campaign.

The McCain-Palin ad also twists a quote from a Wall Street Journal columnist. He said the Obama camp had sent a team to Alaska to "dig into her record and background." The ad quotes the WSJ as saying the team was sent to "dig dirt."


Note: This is a summary only. The full article with analysis, images and citations may be viewed on our Web site:

II) Off Base on Sex Ed
September 10, 2008

A McCain campaign ad claims Obama's "one accomplishment" was a bill to teach sex ed to kindergarten kids. Don't believe it, on several fronts.
Summary
A McCain-Palin campaign ad claims Obama's "one accomplishment" in the area of education was "legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergarteners." But the claim is simply false, and it dates back to Alan Keyes' failed race against Obama for an open Senate seat in 2004.

Obama, contrary to the ad's insinuation, does not support explicit sex education for kindergarteners. And the bill, which would have allowed only "age appropriate" material and a no-questions-asked opt-out policy for parents, was not his accomplishment to claim in any case, since he was not even a cosponsor â€" and the bill never left the state Senate.

In addition, the ad quotes unflattering assessments of the Illinois senator's record on education but leaves out sometimes equally harsh criticism directed at McCain in the same forums.

FactChecking McCain
September 5, 2008

Summary
We checked the accuracy of McCain�s speech accepting the Republican nomination and noted the following:

McCain claimed that Obama�s health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs" and would put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor." In fact, the plan exempts small businesses, and those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have.

McCain attacked Obama for voting for "corporate welfare" for oil companies. In fact, the bill Obama voted for raised taxes on oil companies by $300 million over 11 years while providing $5.8 billion in subsidies for renewable energy, energy efficiency and alternative fuels.

McCain said oil imports send "$700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much." But the U.S. is on track to import a total of only $536 billion worth of oil at current prices, and close to a third of that comes from Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

He promised to increase use of "wind, tide [and] solar" energy, though his actual energy plan contains no new money for renewable energy. He has said elsewhere that renewable sources won�t produce as much as people think.

He called for "reducing government spending and getting rid of failed programs," but as in the past failed to cite a single program that he would eliminate or reduce.

He said Obama would "close" markets to trade. In fact, Obama, though he once said he wanted to "renegotiate" the North American Free Trade Agreement, now says he simply wants to try to strengthen environmental and labor provisions in it.

Note: This is a summary only. The full article with analysis, images and citations may be viewed on our Web site:

http://www.factcheck.org

Jon Stewart deconstructs the republican media's defense of Sarah Palin's candidacy:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184086&title=sarah-palin-gender-card

A man in a suit walks into a deli in early August and says to the cashier, "Obama's gonna raise your taxes!"
Hello, He's gonna raise YOUR taxes; not HIS!

But even with the rich, we don't know whether Obama will get his entire program through Congress. This is a scare tactic. Thank you, FactCheck.org for reclaiming the obvious because that's what women and minorities have to do to get a fair hearing:

   Read More »