what’s in a vote?

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?

kids made this

yet extremes they are going to indeed. such as trying to purge 200,000 ohio voters, 50,000 in georgia and 10,000 in colorado. um, there are whole cities with fewer people in them than that. latino absentee ballots have been stolen in florida, and a fake board of election flyer in virginia tells people to vote on the WRONG DATE: after the election is over.

evil and creative, wouldn’t you say?

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.

georgia supreme court overturned the voter purges.

the indiana supreme court refused a GOP petition to shut down early voting.

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.

and there will be thousands of volunteer lawyers at the polls on election day. just looking out.

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.

what’s john mccain doing tonight, you ask? oh, he’s just worrying about the world series.

i’d like to leave you with some words of wisdom from one of my favorite writers, jane smiley:

If we look at our two candidates, the differences between them are stark. John McCain, who was raised by and accepts the authoritarian model, is evidently never at peace. He is hot-headed, erratic, and has been remarkably cruel. He claims to have principles, but his principles change every time he loses his cool. The more he is pushed, the more it becomes evident that he lives by his own selfish desires — for money, for power, for women. He’s is a classic avoider, who can’t even answer the simplest question — if something “unpleasant” comes up, he changes the subject. Barack Obama rarely changes the subject, because he is fully capable of looking at an issue and considering it. He seems to have been reared in a non-authoritarian household, by a loving mother and loving grandparents. He thinks that the world is a rational place that can be understood and modified. His own family seems happy and loving. Right wingers think he is shallow, but he isn’t shallow — he’s well-adjusted. And we’ve had two whole years to poke him and prod him and discover this. Obama has grown through campaigning because he has learned from it. McCain gets ever smaller and more weird as he campaigns because he doesn’t understand what is happening to him. When we choose between these two men, we are choosing between two worlds — the world of ignorance, fear, manipulation, and cruelty, and the world of rational investigation, weighing of options, and planning.