Dancin’ In The Streets
I know I’m a few days late with this, but it’s been a busy and hectic week for me. Lot’s of stress and worry on Monday and Tuesday, then the day or so of pinching myself, shedding uncontrollable tears of joy, experiencing delicious Schedenfreude while watching Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchannan whine, an airline experience from hell, and I find myself here on Saturday morning in Chicago and I realize that we really did it.
Yes we did! Congratulations! Yay us!
Now the hard part begins. The people on the right will not be going away, as much as we all wish they would. They are not the type to say, “Oh, our ideas must have been wrong”. No they will be back. The hate, the fear, and the racism has not been vanquished, yet. We can’t sit back the way we did in the early 1990’s and let them shred President-elect Barack Obama (man, I like the sound of that!) the way they did Bill Clinton. But the Republican Party has been gravely wounded and it will be interesting to watch how they deal with this ass whupping. My popcorn popper is ready.
I am optimistic. A lot has changed since 1993, the last time a new Democratic President took office after a Republican Administration. We have the netroots, which has turned out to be more powerful than any of us could have imagined even four years ago, and we have a Democratic Party that has been re-energized with the leadership of Howard Dean and President-elect Obama. We have an enormous and enthusiastic base of new, young voters who know how to use a computer. We have a flock of new Progressive Representatives and Senators. If We The People stay active and keep pushing hard for Progressive principles we will be able to beat back the right-wing attack that is sure to come soon.
(Video h/t Jesus’ General)
Yes We Carve
On Boy! Something to look forward to for Halloween.
Go here for pumkin stencils and lot’s of pumpkin pictures.
What Is Our Plan B?
I had a bad feeling yesterday, and I need to write about it. I see the video above, and I worry about election day. I think we all know that there have already been massive attempts to suppress the vote by the Republican Party. And this morning The New York Times has a story about registration irregularities in the swing states.
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.
Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect their party’s supporters disproportionately. The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states — Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina — could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers.
The Republicans have already said that they will be challenging voters. I expect that there will also be attempts to intimidate canvassers and GOTV community organizers. And after watching the video I wouldn’t count out the possibility of mob violence at the polls, especially if McPalin keeps whipping up the racist frenzy. And if I really let my paranoid fantasies get the better of me I see mob violence leading to the shutdown of the election, Martial Law, the end of America. Now that’s just MY paranoid fantasy, but remember that you heard it here first.
Now, there’s another thing. We all know that the Republicans are going to try to steal this election. And I remember all too clearly the anger, hurt and frustration I felt in 2000 and 2004 when those elections were stolen, and I do not relish feeling those feelings again, but I have to consider this possibility and how I will react to it. So here is the question:
If we wake up on November 5th to find out that this election has been stolen from us, what are we going to do?
When I asked this question yesterday in a comment at dKos I was chastised for “hanging out the crepe”. I guess that means that that particular commenter thought I was being negative with my question, but I haven’t seen any plan of action for this eventuality. I think that this is something we should all be thinking about. What will we do? Will we sit at home and watch on TeeVee as another election is stolen? Or will we take to the streets the way the Ukranians did during the Orange Revolution?
In our excitement and joy at the implosion of the McCain Campaign and the prospect of a new progressive era being born with the presidency of Barack Obama, we need to also have a Plan B. And if, as I really expect, Barack is indeed elected and everything turns out all right on election day, then we can then turn it into a really big block party.
h/t: Blogger Interrupted for the video
UPDATE: From a commeter at dKos, where I cross posted this:
it wont be stolen
let me ask you a frank question: are you working in your area with the Obama campaign at all? I ask b/c i find that working closely with them gives me insight into just how together they are. They are anticipating all angles but you would’nt know it if you’re not working with them. I live in FL, BTW.
Examples:
1. when we register voters, we bring the registration forms FIRST to the campaign office. They log them into their OWN system before taking them BY HAND to the SOE office.
2. we just spend a week calling every single person in our county who registered on VoteForChange.com to remind them to send in their registration form. We logged if they said they already did.
3. we spent another week calling every single 18+ voter in my county who was NOT registered to vote. I have NO idea where the campaign got this info but it turns out that it generated a lot of new voters, once they were prodded.
4. behind the scenes Obama’s legal staff has gotten FL’s election office to publicly state that the driver license address no longer has to match the voter card address as long as the person is at the right precinct that is on the voter card. This ruling came down about 17 days ago and is a victory for us herein FL.
This is just a very small example of how tightly this ship is being run. I could easily give you many many more.
Obama has been very on it right from the start. What you’re feeling is the jitters. Its like preparing for the Boston marathon and suddenly ts TIME.
Relax.
And to make you really understand the position we’re in right now, here this from Lambros otherwise laughable article today:
As of this week, the freshman liberal senator led or held the edge in Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico and Colorado - eight states that can deliver 111 electoral votes to the winner.
President Bush previously won all these states along with a bunch of others that gave him 286 electoral votes to John Kerry’s 251. Mr. McCain can’t afford to lose any of these Red states, unless he can offset his losses by picking off a number of Democratic Blue states and that seems rather problematic right now (though polls show the race tightening in Minnesota and Wisconsin).
But with a little more than four weeks remaining in the presidential race in a brutal economic environment, the grim reality facing Mr. McCain is that his rival leads in more than a half-dozen Red states, while he cannot point to a single Blue state where he is ahead.
OBee-JoeBee ‘08
Whew! That helps, but I still won’t really relax until Barack Obama is sworn in on 1/20/09.
Landslide
A landslide will bring you down.
1000 Words
There is nothing more to say.
Update 1: DARN! The original photo was removed. Oh well. It was nice.
Update 2: Although the original photo that I had here has disappeared, this new one is almost as good.
In case you missed it, the original photo was also very moving. It was a picture of a 60-something white woman hugging Barack Obama at a rally in Pennsylvania. She was moved to tears as she hugged him, and all the camera saw was the side of his shoulder and the back of his head. It was all in the woman’s expression. It was the perfect picture of hope.
This new photo that I found today has many of the same qualities as the original. The woman is African-American, but the expression of hope is the same.
Vote For Obama, The Anti-Christ, And Fulfill God’s Plan For Mankind
It seems that Barack Obama really is the Anti-Christ.
God’s anointed spokesman, Clerical Error, explains it all, and it makes perfect sense to me.
h/t Jesus’ General
Racism And Voting
This is the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka speaking to the United Steelworkers about racism. I agree with platypus over at The Daily Kos that this is a tremendously powerful and inspiring speech. Trumka is most powerful when he speaks about solidarity among workers, even of different races, and why racism does not serve the best interests of workers in America and why electing Barack Obama is so important to Labor.
WARNING: Don’t be surprised if you want to get up and go out and volunteer to canvass for Obama after watching this.
Transcript:
You see brothers and sisters, there’s not a single good reason for any worker — especially any union member — to vote against Barack Obama.
There’s only one really bad reason to vote against him: because he’s not white.
And I want to talk about that because I saw that for myself during the Pennsylvania primary.
I went back home to vote in Nemacolin and I ran into a woman I’d known for years. She was active in Democratic politics when I was still in grade school.
We got to talking and I asked if she’d made up her mind who she was supporting and she said: ‘Oh absolutely, I’m voting for Hillary, there’s no way I’d ever vote for Obama.’
Well, why’s that? ‘Because he’s a Muslim.’
I told her, ‘That’s not true — he’s as much a Christian as you and me, so what if he’s muslim.’
Then she shook her head and said, ‘He won’t wear an American flag pin.’
I don’t have one on and neither do you.
But, ‘C’mon, he wears one plenty of times. He just says it takes more than wearing a flag pin to be patriotic.’
‘Well, I just don’t trust him.’
Why is that?
Her voice dropped just a bit: ‘Because he’s black.’
I said, ‘Look around. Nemacolin’s a dying town. There’re no jobs here. Kids are moving away because there’s no future here. And here’s a man, Barack Obama, who’s going to fight for people like us and you won’t vote for him because of the color of his skin.’
Brothers and sisters, we can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of folks out there just like that woman.
A lot of them are good union people; they just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man. Well, those of us who know better can’t afford to look the other way.
I’m not one for quoting dead philosophers, but back in the 1700s, Edmund Burke said: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’ Well, there’s no evil that’s inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism — and it’s something we in the labor movement have a special responsibility to challenge.
It’s our special responsibility because we know, better than anyone else, how racism is used to divide working people.
We’ve seen how companies set worker against worker — how they throw whites a few extra crumbs off the table ndsh and how we all end up losing.
But we’ve seen something else, too. We’ve seen that when we cross that color line and stand together no one can keep us down.
That’s why the CIO was created. That’s why industrial unions were the first to stand up against lynching and segregation. People need to know that it was the Steel Workers Organizing Committee — this union — that was founded on the principal of organizing all workers without regard to race. That’s why the labor movement — imperfect as we are — is the most integrated institution in American life.
I don’t think we should be out there pointing fingers in peoples’ faces and calling them racist; instead we need to educate them that if they care about holding on to their jobs, their health care, their pensions, and their homes — if they care about creating good jobs with clean energy, child care, pay equity for women workers — there’s only going to be one candidate on the ballot this fall who’s on their side… only one candidate who’s going to stand up for their families… only one candidate who’s earned their votes… and his name is Barack Obama!
And come November we are going to elect him president.
And after he’s elected we are going to hit the ground running so that, years from now, we’re going to be able to tell our grandchildren that 2008 was the year this country finally turned its back on men like George Bush and Dick Cheney and John McCain
We’re going to be able to say that 2008 was the year we started ending the war in Iraq so we could use that money to create new jobs building wind generators, solar collectors, clean coal technology and retrofitting millions of buildings all across this country
We’re going to be able to look back and say that 2008 was the year the tide began to turn against the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O’Reillys, the Ann Coulters and the right wing hate machine.
What Just Happened?
If you are sitting around on this Monday morning like I am feeling dazed and confused after a weekend of wondering what just happened to the economy of the United States and with a foggy uncertainty about what this all of this talk about $700 billion and Credit Default Swaps means to us and the people closest to us, then take stroll over to The Daily Kos and read the article entitled “Three Times Is Enemy Action” and it will be explained to you. It begins this way:
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Enemy Action.”
— Auric GoldfingerJames Bond’s wealthy nemesis may have had an obsession with gold, but he judged, quite correctly, that if people keep putting your plans awry, that was likely their intent.
This is a long and in depth article so I will not attempt to rehash it here, but it is a history lesson, and I’m sure it’s one that hasn’t been taught in many schools in recent years. It concludes this way:
This week, the Bush administration announced the beginnings of a plan to salvage what remains of the financial markets. At first glance, it appears that the plan will consist mainly of creating a kind of “garbage pit,” a fund or group of funds — cousins of the Resolution Trust that was created during the S&L crisis — into which those people who have dabbled in bad debts can toss their problems. Only this time the cost to the taxpayers is at least $700 billion… and a big bite out of representative democracy.
The expansion of unregulated Savings and Loans in the 1980s brought on the collapse of that industry, a crippling of the economy, and left taxpayers holding the bag. Maybe that was only happenstance. Those pushing for the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act may not have known what they were doing.
The deregulation of the California electricity market, along with the protections provided to Enron through Phil Gramm’s lobbyist-written legislation brought blackouts, fiscal and political chaos, and left taxpayers holding the bag. But the people who engineered that event — people like Gramm and Greenspan — had already seen what happened with the S&Ls. They should have known better. Still, perhaps that was only coincidence.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis that has not only come so close to utterly destroying the markets, but has ruined the value of many people’s homes and left millions with mortgages they can’t pay, was also the outcome of the deregulation created by these men. The very predictable outcome. When taxpayers are left holding the bag for $1 trillion this time around, it’s hard to believe it’s any sort of accident.
This is enemy action. This is a bullet deliberately fired into the economy by men willing to exercise their ideology regardless of the cost to taxpayers. Men who have every expectation that they can plunder the system again and again, while the public picks up the tab. John McCain may not have had his finger directly on the trigger, but he was there. He assisted. These were his personal friends and philosophical comrades. He may not be the high priest, but he has been a loyal acolyte in the cult of deregulation.
It may come as a surprise to the champions of deregulation, but nobody likes regulation. The restrictions that were placed on banks, S&Ls, and other institutions in the 1930s weren’t put there because someone thought it would be fun. They were put in place because they addressed problems that had just been clearly and painfully revealed. They were put in place because they were necessary.
It’s bad enough if John McCain didn’t know that. It’s far worse if he did.
Please take the time to go over to dKos and read the whole thing though, because it makes clear what has happened to bring us to this point, and it also makes clear that one of the Presidential candidates may have played and enormously large role in the collapse of Wall Street, and that candidate is the one who looks like the guys pictured on the money.
Les Misbarack - “One More Day”
Sully is right, the McCain Campaign could NEVER pull this off.
Humor. Irony. Satire. Republican.
Which word doesn’t belong?
About Us
Sangemon
Nyack, NY
A 50-something, empty-nesting, lefty-blogging, guitar pickin’, sound mixer and private pilot with a passion for political debate, an affinity for smart people, and a love of Beech Bonanzas and Martin guitars.
Things I’m grateful for:
1 fabulous bride of 28 years
3 brilliant kids
3 adorable grandkids
A warm home
A fulfilling career
My far-flung extended family
My lifelong friends
______________________________
Stephen Fleischman
Los Angeles, CA
Stephen Fleischman’s career as a television writer-director-producer spanned more than three decades beginning in the early 1950’s. In 1959, he participated in the formation of the renowned Murrow-Friendly “CBS Reports” series. In 1983, Steve won the prestigious Columbia University-Dupont Television Journalism Award.
His memoir, “A Red in the House”, about his thirty years in network news, is now in print.
For additional information, see: www.read2greatbooks.comE-mail to: stevefl@ca.rr.com
