Election Skullduggery – Page 4

The Truth Is Out There

Published on October 20, 2008

While the big clunking bat of the Justice department and FBI are being aimed by a Republican administration at a legitimate voter-ed NGO that registers poor, minority (and consequently more likely Democrat) voters – 2 weeks before an election, in breach of political bias rules – it took Canada to actually arrest a Republican for vote fraud:

Ontario police arrest man in voter fraud case
By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 20, 2008

SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

Jacoby’s arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP

Law enforcement and the media are all over ACORN like a rash, with little or no reason other than having been told to do so, yet actual fraud by the party now in power is taking place in clear daylight all over the nation and it’s barely even reported; the news of this arrest was, hidden away in the LA Times Local section.

But hearteningly it’s spreading like wildfire across the interwebs and is top of the paper’s own ‘most viewed’ story list and if you google for YPM you’ll find a host of stories from all over the place about their voterigging activities.

YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.

Even in McCain’s home state? Fancy that. YPM’s voter suprresion efforts are widespread:

It all sounds familiar to Beverly Hill, a Democrat and the former election supervisor in Florida’s Alachua County. About 200 voters — mostly college students — were unwittingly registered as Republicans there in 2004 by YPM staffers using the same tactic, Hill said.

“It is just incredible that this can keep happening election after election,” she said.

Isn’t it just. Why, you’d almost think it was planned, wouldn’t you? Typically, even while wriggling on the hook the Republicans try and smear their accusers with the very crime they themselves are accused of:

In a written statement Sunday, the state Republican Party called the charges against Jacoby “politically motivated.” The party said the charges do not support accusations from voters and Democratic officials that YPM has been duping voters into joining the GOP.

The statement accused Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who announced the arrest, of “using her office to play politics.”

Bowen is a Democrat.

Comment of The Day

Published on October 18, 20082 Comments

The very, very honorable John McCain’s on the ground, under the media radar campaign of vicious robocalls and 3rd party funded racist scaremongering has succeeded.

It’s succeeded in siccing the ultra-right’s flying buttmonkeys of Weimar Republicanism on, of all things, a voter registration charity, ACORN.

ACORN has found itself not only investigated by the FBI and publicly accused of terrorism and anti-Americanism, but also has had its premises and staff attacked and threatened. Why? For trying to get people to exercise their constitutional right to do the very thing the country was established for, choose their own future by voting.

There’s your McCain campaign strategy in a nutshell. Attack the vote itself. Cast doubt in advance on the validity of the process of voting; focus on fraud, even though there isn’t any, thus potentially invalidating the actual election result in the mind of a sizeable proportion of the electorate even before it happens. Tell them it’s all a big conspiracy that the media is complicit in, hire dimestore fascist rabble-rousers like Palin to whip those people into a frenzy of expectant bile and better still tell them that those people – that one- are not real Americans, thus tapping into the primal fear of an immigrant-descended population, that they are not real Americans themselves.

Voila, McCain’s got the country between a rock and hard place if Obama wins. It’ll be like the preppy riots, but much bigger, much more downmarket and with more guns.

I say ‘if’ he wins; the McCain ‘clean hands’ backup plan (I think this is a fair inference to make, what with the bile and the whipping up and Palin and all the maverick, lone wolf imagery and that) appears to be the hope for the fortuitous appearance of a lone assassin. A hope which is being nudged ~~a little bit~~ quite a lot:

John McCain, final presidential debate:

“I’m proud of the people who come to our rallies.”

All of this preamble explains why I find this comment to a TPM post about reporters being attacked at Palin rallies to be either amazingly sweet and naive or conversely, amazingly heroic and rational. Or both. I’m not sure; but it is quintessentially American.

It is very important that we stay firm but calm. We need to follow Senator Obama’s example and stay cool but take action.

This assault, the vandalizing of the ACORN offices… the beyond ‘outrageous’ ground game/robocalls/mailers that McCain is using now may feed this ugly frenzy. People are believing lies and for most of them this is what is making them afraid and full of hate. We have to remember it is because they are believing ‘lies’. Lies that have been repeated over and over again until they get talked about like rumor and urban legend and seem to be true.
We can understand that they have been manipulated and are being used. We can understand that if we were believing what they were believing we might feel just like they do.

I think most of us here know that the answer is get out their and fight to win the election. As Senator Obama said when a crowd started booing McCain… we don’t need your boos… we need to VOTE. So, as ChronoSpark and many others on TPM are doing I would rather use my energy fighting to win than ‘booing’ about what they are doing!

Yes, Yes, Yes WE Can!

McCain may have some really nasty people on his side willing to do anything to win but Senator Obama has US!

Awww, bless – but I would reply, yes, very nice, Obama has ‘YOU!’. But do ‘YOU!’ have guns?

John McCain’s Scarlet Letter

Published on October 11, 2008

John McCain thinks ‘Arab’ is an insult…

I really do fail to see how McCain can still insist he’s not a racist demagogue when he keeps doing and saying racist demagoguey things. From Politico:

Crowd boos after McCain says Obama not ‘an Arab’By JONATHAN MARTIN & AMIE PARNES | 10/10/08 9:19 PM EDT

Fearing the raw and at times angry emotions of his supporters may damage his campaign, John McCain on Friday urged them to tone down their increasingly personal denunciations of Barack Obama, including one woman who said she had heard that the Democrat was “an Arab.”

Each time he tried to cool the crowd, he was rewarded with a round of boos.

“I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States,” McCain told a supporter at a town hall meeting in Minnesota who said he was “scared” of the prospect of an Obama presidency and of who the Democrat would appoint to the Supreme Court.

“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republicans crowd expressed their dismay at their nominee. Others yelled “liar,” and “terrorist,” referring to Barack Obama.

McCain passed his wireless microphone to one woman who said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s not he’s not uh—he’s an Arab. He’s not—” before McCain retook the microphone and replied:

“No, ma’am,” the Arizona senator assured. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab].”

More…

What he should have added was “…not that there’s anything wrong with that”. But he didn’t.

And since when has the the description ‘Arab’ been an accusation? Surely McCain must think there’s something wrong with being an Arab in the first place if he thinks it’s a deadly insult.

That won’t go down well with a number of his own party – or the Saudis… or the Iraqis or the Palestinians or the Kuwaitis, or anyone else for that matter. This isn’t just McCain demonstrating his own nasty brand of petty racism against Obama; this kind of ingrained bigotry has international, strategic implications.

Not only has this presidential candidate insulted a whole 1.2 million-strong ethnic group at home and untold millions abroad, by showing that he sees the mere description ‘Arab’ as a deadly insult – but by also clearly implying that Arabs are not decent family men and citizens, he’s just killed any possibility of a future McCain presidential middle-east peace deal. People tend not to want to negotiate with someone who demonstrates such open contempt for them.

But then again, did McCain ever want a middle-east peace deal in the first place? His selection of the dominionist and end-times believer and rabble rouser Sarah Palin as running mate emphatically says not (and also raises the spectre of a future religiously-motivated nuclear war).

So there’s a lot more to McCain’s public acts of petty racism and intolerance than is initially apparent. If he’s elected and his administration’s acts are motivated by that same ingrained bigotry, then McCain’s scarlet ‘a’ could stand for ‘apocalypse’.

The Election Is Well And Truly Godwinated

Published on October 7, 2008

Why are Palin and McCain attempting to exclude independent reporters from their rallies? You’d think they’d want attention, but no:

Press kept under a watchful eye

CLEARWATER — Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn’t permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters. When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, “Can I help you?” and turn the person around.

When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn’t allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday.
— Times staff writer Eileen Schulte

Why don’t they want attention at the rallies (other than to hide the pisspoor attendance at Palin’s)? Could they be keeping reporters away to hide the fact that they are rousing their supporters to violence?

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

To which it’s been reported Palin’s response was a faint smile; not even a murmur of protest. McCain did likewise when one of his audience screamed ‘terrorist’ in response to McCain’s rhetorical question. “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

It’s clear both are singing from the same extreme-right hymn sheet.

This gloves off, Klan regalia on strategy is the biggest McCain campaign gamble of all. They’re betting that one of the less inhibited flying buttmonkeys of wingnuttia might hear the message – outsider, dangerous, not one of us – and take a fatal shot at Obama. Should that happen, McCain himself would have clean hands.

He must know by now he can’t beat Obama any other way; it’s either eliminate the opponent, or a massive interference with the ballot.

So is he resorting to inciting assassination by silent acquiescence? McCain has a sociopathic desire to win at all costs and doesn’t care how he does it. He’ll do whatever it takes, it’s said. Does that include colluding in the removal of his opponent from the race ?

Exclusive Photo Essay – A Shotgun Wedding

Published on September 29, 2008

A nation is agog (or bored, take your pick) over the coming blessed nuptials between Bristol Palin, America’s Child Bride® and Levi whatsisname, America’s Redneck®.

It’s all been a bit hasty, but young Bristol’s rumoured to have already chosen the invitations :