it would be funny if there weren’t so much at stake. hell, some of it’s funny anyhow, in a shake-your-head-while-you laugh kind of a way.
just when we thought the mccain campaign had exhausted its reserves of stupidity, they somehow manage to not tell joe the plumber he is expected at a rally in ohio. the candidate displayed his usual inability to think on his feet after he called for joe and called for joe and … realized joe had stood him up. that same day they publicly stood up the new america foundation and wired magazine. apparently john learned nothing from his david letterman cancellation fiasco.
is stupidity contagious? other right-wingers seem to be catching it. GOP campaign blogger, michael goldfarb, made a total ass out of himself on CNN. and even fox news — FOX NEWS!! — has caught the mccain-bashing bug:
and even arizona has become a battleground state. look at the ad That One is running there:
take a little time before election day to study up on voter unsuppression strategies — and don’t neglect to take this phone number with youto the polls: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. lawyers are standing by to help if you experience or witness any hassles at the polls.
and i believe he does. hell, even racists are openly supporting obama. but don’t take anything for granted. election rigging (also known as voter suppression) is turning out to be the big parallel narrative of this campaign season, and i would like our new president to address this promptly after inauguration. there shouldn’t be another national election without first implementing national election law standards, to the point where the NAACP sues the state of virginia to ensure that there will be enough booths in low-income areas. every state for itself is simply not working. and, as has been said and said, the electoral college is nothing more than a leftover from the days when there were fewer people in this whole country than now live in manhattan alone — and more than half of them (women, blacks, the poor) weren’t allowed to vote. early voting should be legal everywhere, not just in some states. why election day? why not election month?
and those touch-screen voting machines? get rid of them all. they may not exactly be rigged, but they clearly do not work properly, and our votes are too precious to be lost (or twisted) in this way.
helen philpot is over 80 years old, and she’s a blogger with something to say. check out this post from her, “what was i thinking when i called sarah palin a bitch“. you go, granny! and speaking of palin, there’s an eight-hour antipalin webathon starting today at 1pm eastern. it’s a fundraiser where they’ll be reading essays about the wannabe veep that have come in from all over the world.
another senior blogger, mary lyon, wrote an incredible response to some of john mccain’s scare tactics.
meteorologists forecasting the election? according to the weather channel, it’s practically foolproof. pray for rain in the red states, then go out and buy an umbrella.
mccain’s definitely got two personalities. after paying big bucks for an evil national robocalling campaign that tries to convince voters that obama is a socialist, mccain goes on television and admits that, in fact, he is not. wtf? he seems even more confused than he was at the last debate. (or maybe he’s just getting honest, since he also just admitted that yes, his health plan really, really sucks.) speaking of robocalls, another election reform i’d like to see is the nationwide outlawing of this practice. it’s already illegal in some states.
later today i’m going to update my obama has been endorsed by” page. which, among other things, will include the 76 american nobel prizewinners who are voting for him.
tomorrow morning i head out to philadelphia to knock on undecided doors. i’ll blog from there if i can.
i just fell in love with bertha lewis, the chief organizer of ACORN. listen to her for just a minute (well, a minute and a half) and see if you don’t fall in love with her too:
she makes an interesting point about voting for obama under the working families party rather than on the democratic line. i’m going to do this. yeah, yeah, i know it’s just a token gesture in this case, but i would love to see this country break out of the two-party two-step its been trapped in for so long. maybe we can get rid of the stupid electoral college while we’re at it, and standardize voting laws across all 50 states. yes, even in alaska, where a convicted felon can’t vote but CAN run for senate.
and in other news from the can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, it’s been noticed that john mccain is mentioned nowhere on the GOP home page. that’s right, the republican presidential candidate is so shameful his own party organizers want nothing to do with him.
well, i guess that cuts both ways, since mccain is now throwing his own supporters out of rallies if they look like “potential protestors” — yes, this includes people who have already voted for mccain. no wonder this moron is losing.
losing, you ask? what do you mean losing, we haven’t had the election yet?
glad you asked. obama is beating mccain by 60-40 in early voting. yes, that’s early voting as in VOTES ALREADY COUNTED. this is not a test, this is not a poll, this is reality. that’s about 19%, a bigger margin than any of the polls so far have shown.
can you say landslide? yes.
but don’t get comfortable just yet. there’s still a lot of hanky-panky going on, and the republicans have not stepped down their efforts to stop americans from voting. if they spent this much energy on policy and candidate selection, they wouldn’t have to go to such extremes, don’t you think?
this time, the democrats are not taking it laying down and, amazingly, in many cases the courts are backing us up. they must have grown a pair since 2004.
and holy shit, the governor of florida just decided, all on her own, to extend early voting hours in order to accomodate the huge mobs of voters flocking to the polls. the republicans are beside themselves over this one. fuck ‘em.
obama’s got a half hour on TV tonight. please watch and tell me all about it, as i haven’t found myself a TV room to squat in for this evening. you already know there ain’t no TV here.
yep, i just bought and paid for an ad that’s going to run in denver this week, and it didn’t even cost that much, just a hundred bucks. and, though this had nothing (well, maybe 5%) to do with my decision to buy this ad, at the end of it will be a tag screen that says “paid for by jackie sheeler”, as if i’m some kind of one-woman ObamaPAC.
i bought the ad through women against sarah palin, which has produced two devastating spots focusing on palin’s horrific opposition to choice even in cases of rape and incest. check out the family values spot (ads run just 30 seconds). it’s got sort of a surprise ending, and is quite devastating.
i have never been as involved and engaged in an election as i am in this one; i believe no election in my life has ever offered such clear choices, nor had the potential to make as vast a difference to the way that this country will be run (george fucking bush notwithstanding).
everywhere in this country, people are rising up and demanding that their voices be heard, like the call-center workers who walked off the job yesterday rather than record a slanderous, inaccurate message on behalf of the mccain campaign — even mccain’s republican peers are speaking out against his robocalling. last month, coalminers also walked off the job, shutting down the entire operation in protest after their employer sponsored an anti-obama visit from the NRA. independent artists are writing songs for and about obama (as well as songs against mccain). yesterday, the 109-year-old daughter of a slave put her vote in the mail for That One.
regular readers of this blog know that i spent the past weekend in a writing workshop with ellen bass, who is my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. during the course of it, i wrote a poem for john mccain, of all the unexpected things. and then ellen, at a bowery poetry club reading on sunday night, read a brand-new piece of hers called “cocktails for obama“.
here is that performance:
this is the piece that i wrote for mccain:
Straight-Talk Express
the centrifuge of your tiny mind has swiveled on its pivot and you rage
against the death of a decades-long dream. You’ve watched our desire
dwindle then shift: away from you, away, like a day-lily
folding itself closed against the coming dark. You have become dark,
a slug on the underside of rock, greeting daylight with a shiver
as you try and try to slither from its reach. No good.
Nothing’s any good now—the sickly neon word “defeat”
signals nightly from your dreams: it’s over now.
Gentlemen, please turn off your engines.
You never wake refreshed, not any more.
Slitting a grapefruit for breakfast, a tremulous hand
betrays you: blood on the linen napkin, blood on the thin
and brittle wife. She regrets marrying you and you,
wrinkling in a Gucci robe, regret everything.
There will be no bailout for you, John.
You are locked out of that white house now forever,
strangled at the end of your Alaskan bitch’s leash.
“My friends,” you tell us, “I am just like you. I will keep you safer.”
But already the auditorium is empty and the lights
have been turned down. Here I am, suspended at the midpoint
between pity and rage, a place where nothing like compassion
can survive. Would I want to feel that for you if I could? Summon
some catechismic reserve to watch your cracked old face with
a semblance of love?
I would like to say yes, but then I’d be a liar: just like you.
good morning! i’m off to day two of ellen bass’ workshop in a little while (the first day was most excellent) and only have a few minutes for blogging. here are some online tidbits that gave me much food for thought:
election polls don’t have to be local. for an idea of how the rest of the world views the present US presidential race, william bradley put together a comprehensive overview at huffington post.
speaking of overviews, one man’s blog rounded up all of the (many) epic fails of the mccain campaign. i mean, they have just gotten absolutely everything absolutely wrong. and now sarah palin comes straight out and says she doesn’t know if abortion clinic bombers are terrorists. no, sarah, of course they’re not, they’re just typical right-wing nutjobs doing their conservative duty. jesus christ. and that’s only a little piece of little sarah’s recent bad reports.
remember the annoying budweiser wassup ads? somebody put that slogan to fantastic creative use. watch this:
indie songwriter sally anthony created this video mashup and put it to her original music. can you say, mcSAME?
even though they’re absolutely awful, i want to give a shout out to the biden campaign press crew, who just started their own boyband on the road. you can tell they’re having a great time covering joe on the trail.
though the one thing that doesn’t seem to be changing is the outrageous racism fostered and practiced at palin campaign stops. for more mccain campaign muck, visit obama’s under the radar site, which aggregates all the worst of the crap state by state. there’s so much sleaze going on it just won’t fit on a page or two, obamians had to set up an entire new website to hold all the shit. sigh.
doesn’t anybody feel sorry for ashley todd, the (clearly) mentally disturbed mccain campaign worker who invented a fantastic story, a la susan smith, about how a big black guy punched her in the face and branded her with a B for Barack after seeing the mcsame bumper sticker on her car. too bad ashley, looking in the mirror, drew the B backwards? after pointed questioning from the police, she up and confessed to making up the whole thing. now she’s in custody. while i’m glad that the cops were able to discredit this very right-wingnut story, i don’t see how or why this girl belongs in jail. she clearly needs help, and i hope that someone makes sure she gets it.
remember that army brigade i wrote about here last week? the one that is deployed for active duty in the US?
well, the ACLU has just filed an expedited FOIA request with the government, demanding to know why it was deployed and what its objectives are. thank you, ACLU, for looking out for all of us.
in kansas city, “dumb nigger” is now apparently codified as a menu choice for customer type in a shoe store database, at least according to the store manager who was trying to explain how this came to be printed on the receipt of a customer who dared to return a pair of overpriced shoes. this is how dumb rednecks spend their time while behind our backs the dreaded “End of an Error” george bush prepares to use the army against US citizens.
who knew that 711, of all places, was running its own presidential polls? maybe many of you know, but i sure didn’t — ain’t many 711’s in NYC. anyway, they poll by offering a choice of two coffee cups: an obama blue and a mccain red. guess who’s winning?
and the endorsements for obama just keep rolling in. with good reason. the man sets people on FIRE. have you ever seen a more inspiring candidate than this:
mccain supporters dragging a flag across the ground after one of his whistle-stops (okay, maybe not a betrayal, but a huge measure disrespectful sloppiness) (or just stupidity? after all, they’re supporting mcpalin)
and then there’s mccain’s well-documented racism, not only against “gooks” but against his own black family
sigh.
feel like taking some action? go ahead and sign this petition telling john mccain to end the politics of hate. or sign up for the obama voter protection plan.
if you’re following the election at all, you’re sure to have heard about ACORN and the GOP’s allegations that voter registration fraud is equivalent to voter fraud.
not true. this video gives you the short story:
ACORN hires street canvassers to go out and register new voters, primarily in low-income/minority neighborhoods. unshockingly, some of these minimum-wage workers are slackers, and rather than knocking on doors they go and knock back a few beers with their friends, filling out the voter-registration sheets with phony names.
this is not registration fraud. none of the mickey mouses and colonel sanders that are “registered” this way are ever going to show up at the polls. this is just the stupid action of some lazy workers. it happens all the time in voter registration drives — the exact same thing happened when the republicans ran a voter registration drive in california a few years ago. the democrats didn’t try to block all the registrations based on these errors, and the GOP shouldn’t be trying to block the ACORN registrations now.
ACORN is obligated by law to turn in all the voter registration forms it receives, even clearly phony ones. why? this is to prevent voter registration fraud, which is often practiced as follows: registrars go into neighborhoods where they’d rather people didn’t vote, runs a voter registration drive and then dumps all the registrations in the trash. when those people show up on election day, they won’t be able to vote. and will they ever try to register again? it’s a toss-up. that’s voter registration fraud of the most grievous sort, and it has been routinely practiced by the republican party.
the republicans are quite well aware that bad registration forms are not a form of voter registration fraud. nonetheless, they brought a lawsuit in ohio, seeking to invalidate all of the registrations gathered by ACORN, which was shot down by the ohio supreme court.
basically, the campaign is accusing the RNC of colluding with local DOJ operatives to deprive US citizens of the right to vote. this is exactly what the nine attorneys improperly fired by alberto gonzales refused to do, and that refusal is what cost them their jobs.
after the ohio supreme court ruling, the ohio secretary of state received death threats and her website was hacked. acorn offices were ransacked and the organization received race-based insults and threats. if you’ve got a strong stomach, you can listen to recordings of some of the calls here.
other republican efforts to disenfranchise democratic voters in this election include:
buying lists of foreclosures in michigan in an attempt to disqualify former homeowners from voting. michigan supreme court forbade the use of these lists.
many early voters in virginia reported being unable to vote for obama, because the machines kept flipping back to mccain.
nevada latinos who registered as democrats at the DMV (the DMV!) routinely had their registration forms thrown away. only the democrats, mind you, republican registrations (few as they are) made it through.
and on and on.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PROTECT YOUR VOTE? glad you asked.
first, you can sign the ACLU petition urging the DOJ and special prosecutor to do all they can to stop the GOP’s attempts to disenfranchise voters. encourage your friends & family to do the same.
last, but not at all least, you can VIDEO YOUR VOTE. this is really important — take your cell phone or tinycam into the booth with you and document your vote.
