Posts Tagged ‘voter registration’
Ten Thousand Tuesday Links
* Susannah Bartlow has been writing about her side of the Assata Shakur mural controversy: 1, 2.
* Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.
* Ursula K. Le Guin Calls on Fantasy and Sci Fi Writers to (Continue to) Envision Alternatives to Capitalism. What Can Economics Learn From Science Fiction?
* Muslim fiction writers are turning to genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and comics.
* Slavoj Žižek’s Board Game Reviews.
* How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition.
* Post-tenure review: BOR-ed to death. Don’t believe the lies about UW and tenure. On Tenure and If You [Really] Want to Be a Badger. Upocalypse Final Update. Does Tenure Have a Future? An Open Forum. Twilight of the Professors. The End of Higher Education As We Know It.
* Now more than ever: “Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.
* Meanwhile: college presidents are getting paid.
* Counterpoint: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.
* How to Tailor Your Online Image, or, Don’t Go to Grad School.
* McKinney nightmare. Disciplining Black Bodies: Racial Stereotypes of Cleanliness and Sexuality. Memories of the Jefferson Park Pool. Summer heat.
* America is still incredibly segregated.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* Bernie Sanders: Let’s Spend $5.5 Billion to Employ 1 Million Young People.
* Meanwhile, Clinton advance the Canavan position on voter registration: just make it automatic. Now let’s talk about letting noncitizen permanent residents vote!
* And Chafee wants the metric system! This Democratic primary is truly devoted to Canavan demo.
* The Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare.
* NLRB: Duquesne Adjuncts May Form Union.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* The Apple Watch could be the most successful flop in history.
* Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation, which oversees the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California’s water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.
* The rules of Quidditch, revised edition.
* What’s Happening To Players At The Women’s World Cup, Where The Artificial Turf Is 120 Degrees.
* All about Fun Home: Primal Desire and the American Musical.
* Here’s what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. Bring on 2099!
* Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child.
* The quick, offstage choreography of SNL costume changes.
* 100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school.
* How Clickhole Became the Best Thing on the Internet.
* Shocked, shocked: claw machines are rigged.
* Everything you know about wolf packs is wrong.
* Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter.
* Sleuthing reveals Shorewood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
* I’ve been spending too much time on recommendation letters.
* I also chose the wrong career: I should have been a psychic, or at least whatever this guy was doing before he managed to lose three-quarters of a million dollars to a psychic.
* Different People Have Different Opinions About Burning Their Own Children Alive, And That’s Okay.
* “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Can Teach Us About Great Customer Service.”
* Warp drives and scientific reasoning.
* The things you learn having a good editor: “Mexican Standoff” predates film by fifty years, and probably is participating in anti-Mexican prejudice.
* Language is like gymnastics.
* But keep hope alive: J.K. Rowling says there’s an American Hogwarts.
Politics Monday
Politics Monday.
* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann’s now desperately trying to backpeddle.
* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.
* West Virginia electronic voting machines don’t work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.
* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?
* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn’t working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.
* Or, you know, don’t: John McCain doesn’t really seem to mind losing. A lot of “moderate” conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.
* It turns out McCain’s also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.
* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.
* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.
* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.
* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates’ health, McCain’s in particular.
* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its “Building the New Energy Economy” theme.
* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.
CNN Accidentally Tells the Truth about ACORN
CNN accidentally tells the truth about ACORN.
…Griffin correctly reported, “Our research is showing — this more looks like a fraud perpetrated on ACORN,” not by ACORN. The people who ACORN paid by the hour to register voters committed fraudulent acts against the organization.
Joe the Plumber Isn’t Registered to Vote
An absolutely devastating blow for John McCain: it appears Joe the Plumber isn’t registered to vote. All that hard work securing his vote, wasted!
Understanding ACORN
There’s a lot of misinformation going around about ACORN as Republicans try to drum up support for a big we-wuz-robbed lie next month. ACORN’s released a memo that speaks to this.
Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.
Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.
…
Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.
Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.
Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to “disrupt the system” with phony cards.
Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorneygate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.
There’s more at Yglesias and Daily Kos. What’s often lost in the shuffle here is the fact that an organization like ACORN shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. The U.S. government knows who and where you are—registration should be automatic, as it is in most advanced democracies around the globe. We’d probably have universal voting registration here, too, if one political party didn’t have a long-standing self-interested investment in keeping “undesirables” from exercising their right to vote.
Nightime Politics
Nighttime politics.
* Great chart from Ezra Klein and Grist about the incredible insignificance of off-shore drilling.
* “Bush Doctrine” is the buzzword coming out of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson—she seemed to not know what it was.
GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: The Bush — well, what do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His world view?
GIBSON: No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq war.
PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell-bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership — and that’s the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.
GIBSON: The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense; that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
Here’s the video. A lot of people are quoting Marc Ambinder’s Twitter feed on this: “deer-in-the-headlights.” A Republican in P.R. gives her a B- at TNR, writing:
I would give her a B or better, B-. I liked her confidence, combativeness but the answers were scripted, she had to repeat one mantra over and over again. What it shows about the way McCain’s people are handling her is worse: they are trying to get her to memorize answers rather than being honest, within limits, about what she doesn’t know.
* Sarah Palin dropped the thanks-but-no-thanks-for-that-Bridge-to-Nowhere lie from her speech today in Alaska. Pandering, or did she just know they’d see through it?
* Maybe the last word on Sarah Palin: Rasmussen reports she’s bombing with moderates.
Among all voters:
39% very favorable
17% somewhat favorable
14% somewhat unfavorable
26% very unfavorableGee, approval ratings are just a few points off of 60% for the “wildly popular governor.” But, let’s look a little closer at those numbers. Conservatives love her, but what about moderates? Those numbers paint a different picture:
20% very favorable
15% somewhat favorable
26% somewhat unfavorable
35% very unfavorable
3% not sure
* Switzerland: the greenest country in the world.
* Followup on themes from the week: More numbers that suggest McCain can’t win outside the South. Meanwhile, Daniel Nichanian at the Huffington Post talks more about the underappreciated importance of Obama’s ground game.
Gerry Canavan 