Centerfield

...and the VA GOP chair was caught repeating, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama. Yep - it's getting way, way ugly as the desperation sets in.

Good thing the Secret Service's gotten pretty good....

I'm deeply worried about his safety. Lost in the news cycles were a couple of developments: the release of the DOJ attorney firings report which highlights a political component to the firings and the two memos regarding Bush's direct approval of torture, which is against both US and international law. There are of course other calumnies but these are serious, serious crimes. This whole campaign of McCain's and the GOP's role is taking on an increasingly desperate air. It's like the war of the Worlds where Major General Mann cries out, "Guns, tanks, bombs - they're like toys against them!" they can't seem to stop Obama. They've tried issues but the traditional GOP issues are no longer popular, they've tried outright character assassination and that's not working either.
I'm afraid that someone's going to try something horrible to change the outcome of the campaign so that they can keep hiding behind a complacent and political AG.
Sorry, my paranoia.
But then I lived through the Kennedy assasinations and all....

The bad news for them is, I don't see where they think they are going to get a "complacent and political AG." Even if McCain somehow wins.

And if the Democrats win, getting rid of Obama would merely mean a different Democrat nominates the new AG. And that the new AG comes in into a climate which would be very, very anti about anyone who tried to justify ignoring the law. In fact, it would probably make prosecutions for war crimes a whole lot more likely.

Not to say that some nut won't try something. Or that some fool isn't trying to (deniably) motivate one. After all, doing foolish, counterproductive things hasn't exactly been foreign to some folks this past few months....

It's hard to imagine hatred toward Obama being much worse than the hared toward Bush. It'll just be different people involved.

Can you expand on the slander involved with what's being reported about ACORN (I assume that's who you mean) though? How significant you find it is debatable, but the raw information I've heard so far seems pretty factual.

The hatred for Obama may be no more than that for Bush. We'd have to find someone who spends some time with both kinds of people to be sure. (I'm not willing to try and judged based just on a few comments captured out of context.)

On the other hand, what people actually do about their feelings may not be the same, even if the level of emotion is similar. For example, in some youth sub-cultures, the appropriate response if someone is rude is to punch them, in others it is to drape their front yard in TP. And in still others, knives or guns get brought into play. The emotion isn't that different, but its expressions certainly is -- at least in the view of an adult who isn't involved.

ACORN is only involved with voter registration.
What has happened in some isolated instances is that some of the people they hired to register voters instead made out fake voter registration cards and turned them in to ACORN.
ACORN in turn vets all of the registration cards they get. Apparently for at least the past year they have been notifying the local registrars about discrepencies in some of the registration cards AND highlighting or separating the suspicious cards from those that passed their preliminary check.
If anything, ACORN has been defrauded by some of their workers.
As for the registration cards they have to pass muster at the local registrars office and that weeds out the Mickeys and the Romos and the rest of the trash.

That's it. What the GOP is is trying to do since it can't win with it's approach to current issues is with a broad fusilsade of lies, to call this voter fraud even though there is no proof that there is any massive voter fraud at all.

Unless you count the voter COUNTING fraud by Diebold and other companies.

Good reply on the ACORN issue, Marcus. The only thing I'll add to it is that apparently ACORN itself is who brough the problem to the attention of the elections official in the affected areas. That's hardly the M.O. of a fraudulent outfit bent on mischief as the rightwing meme would have us believe. I'd say it's the M.O. of an organization that's deeply dedicated to the rule of law and working within the system to improve it for everyone's sake.

BTW Justin, the Republicans don't want high voter turnout, especially by the poor and minorities.

That's why they restricted the available number of voting machines in Ohio in 2004 in the poorer neighborhoods while my brother who lived in a GOP neighborhood had no waiting time. The GOP has gone as far as challenging the voter rights of soldiers who are serving overseas by caging their votes. There's a Kansas GOP leader who's part of this. They send mail to addresses of registered democrats and if they are undeliverable or ignored they challenge those voters.
They even cage our soldiers serving overseas.
The GOP mails letters in envelopes marked "Do not forward", to be returned to the sender to servicemen and women (some stationed overseas) to their US home addresses. The letters are then returned to the local GOP campaign as "undeliverable."

The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted from state headquarters to the RNC in Washington. The party then challenges the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted. One of the lists was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station.

Don't forget that in 2004 half a million to a absentee votes were NOT counted. Many of these challenged by the Republicans in their caging scheme. It's illegal by the way according tothe Voters rights Act

You want voter fraud, the GOP is full of voter fraud. Even against those who serve this nation.

But for example, CNN reported that thousands of registrations that ACORN did officially file were fraudulent. I know ACORN blames the people that actually did the footwork of gathering registrations, but surely they should be held accountable for anything they (ACORN, not the grunts) actually filed with officials, shouldn't they?

of course but that still does not make it voter fraud. It makes it fraud against ACORN which was ripped off by the people who filed the fake reg forms.

Latest article on that. Notes that GOP Governor Crist thinks it's much ado about nothing.
ACORN may be victim of its own workers in registration cases

My feeling is that this hullabaloo against ACORN is a tacit admission that McCain has lost.

From Kansas

Justice Department lawyer accused of partisanship resigns

McClatchy Newspapers earlier this year laid out allegations from former division employees that Schlozman was a leading player in a Republican strategy to use the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys' offices to enhance the party's election prospects. The strategy allegedly included drumming up fears of voter fraud to build support for voter-identification restrictions that would suppress the turnout of Democratic-leaning minorities.

Perhaps Schlozman's two most controversial decisions involved a Georgia voter-identification law and the Kansas City, Mo., indictments of four voter-registration workers for the liberal-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

How low can we go? Well this is at the floor! how can anyone view this as funny. Blacks nor whites and Others. How distasteful can YOU be. Just keep laughing. All you laghter wiss cease very, very soon Many of us will laugh all the way to the White House

How low can we go? Well this is at the floor! how can anyone view this as funny. Blacks nor whites and Others. How distasteful can YOU be. Just keep laughing. All you laghter wiss cease very, very soon Many of us will laugh all the way to the White House

Ophelia,
Just a reminder that the head of the California GOP literally blew his top when he saw all this. You have to pity the guy for having to live with the dregs-filled legacy of Nixon's "Southern Strategy".

Anyway, make sure that you and your registered to vote, have your friends make sure and watch out for more hijinx like "caging" and other methods used to deny people their right to vote. For more info check out the Obama website.

Why, yes, poor innocent misunderstood persecuted libelled non-partisan ACORN!

What a crock. ACORN is and always has been an agendized left-wing activist group dedicated to doing anything it can to promote its causes. Isolated incidents? My ass. The League of Women Voters (among others) registers many thousands of people with a reject/bad card rate of less than a tenth of a percent. ACORN routinely runs into tens of percents in all areas it works, with rates running higher in key states. All their worker's fault? Heh again--they've been doing the very same thing for decades now, with the same "problems." Some quality control and correction mechanism they have there--it actually gets worse over time, while other GOTV/registration efforts produce good registrations.

Yeah, I'm sure the Obama campaign paid them nearly a million bucks and attempted to conceal it because ACORN is a non-partisan group that just wants to produce clean non-partisan registrations. Heh. Sorry, I've seen them in action for too long.

They're as innocent as Manson. You don't come under investigation by a dozen or more states and the federal government for isolated incidents--it's widespread and systemic and ongoing over a course of many years. You can google back on this very blog to last election and find news of ACORN's frauds.

Convictions for voter fraud are very difficult to obtain. PREVENTING voter fraud is the key. But some don't want to prevent it. ACORN, which is largely funded by federal grants in the first place, deserves intensive investigation. If any of the federal grant programs I've been involved with were run like ACORN, they'd be shut down and people would be in jail.

Yes that's right, McCain doesn't have anything to offer except a bankrupt GOP ideology so use the STRAW MAN, the terrorist and the weird color of the presidential candidate.

The quality control is that they flag the bad ones.
By law they have to turn in whatever they are given. Period. No exceptions.
Obviously the GOP and democratic regstrarsa are too incompetent to figure out that Mickey Mouse does not live in the hood. Riiiiight.

LWV deals usually with middle class voters and usually have middle class volunteers.
They don't even pay people to go out and register voters.

ACORN deals specifically with poor people.
So some want to try and earn a few extra bucks on ACORN's dollar.

By the way Tully, I hope you have the REAL figures.
1.3 million registrations and by any tally so far in the news the figure is a mere 2% overall.

not your fictional tens of percents. What a crock

By the way, how's your vote caging?
Knock any soldiers off the voter rolls lately?

Your Kris Kobach must be awfully busy this month.

I hope he didn't cancel my cousin Chris's vote. He just got shipped from Kuwait to Iraq. Would suck if some Republican decided to challenge his vote because he didn't respond to a registered letter at his address. The major would be awfully pissed.

http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/pagenum/all/#page_start

Let's put a stake in your tens of percent Tully
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/truthaboutvoterfraud/

It's always been a partisan attack on ACORN because they pissed off Ashcroft who lost to Carnahan because a bunch of poor people finally got to vote.
Check the DOJ report onthe attorney firings that came out Monday.

If you think about the kind of organization that gets low-income young people (Democratic/Left leaning) and pays them low, hourly wages to spend time collecting forms---of any kind---a few of these kids will try to game the system. If you take the ACORN situation out of the election process, and think of it as collecting signatures outside the Cinema at the mall, you get a better idea of what this is all about. It can be made to sound bad, yes. And it is Left-leaning, yes. And the Obama campaign paid ACORN a bunch of money to register voters, KNOWING that most of the new voters would be Democratic, yes. And konwing that if even a few of these new registerees actually vote, it can make a difference.

But to turn it into a big scandal is like all of the other efforts that the Republicans are trying right now, desperate to win. It speaks poorly for the McCain campaign in general, and for the once-honorable John McCain, too.

It's registering vs. voting but the McCain camp wants you to believe that they are equivalent.

Republican Florida governor had this to say
''I think that there's probably less [fraud] than is being discussed. As we're coming into the closing days of any campaign, there are some who enjoy chaos,'' Crist told reporters.

when Gov. Crist was asked if he had any suspicions or evidence that ACORN was up to anything illegal or unethical, he gave a quick and brief reply: ``No.''

If, a decade from now, people like Gov. Crist are running the Republican Party, it will be a major party. If people like those managing the McCain campaign are running the GOP, it will likely have gone the way of the American Independent Party. I have no idea who the alternative to the Democrats will be in that case. But if won't be the Republicans any more. As a life-long Republican, I would deeply regret that. But I can see the writing on the wall.

I don't think you'll get much disagreement. Had the GOP stuck to it's original principles the political winds would be on their side and we would not be in the economic mess. The problem had its genesis in Nixon's Southern strategy, a win at any cost mentality that has since infected the party, and you can literally trace it from him through Atwater and then Rove. I think a number of Republican despair over the inculcation of win at any cost and in any manner into its political culture.

The question I have is if Obama is successful, can the Democratic Party learn from the GOP's mistakes? I sort of doubt it. and will they build a spine again or did 1994 make them too gunshy?
To me that was the proudest moment. Despite the dire political consequences they pushed for a tax hike that helped to balance the budget 6 years later. A lot of them paid a dear price for it.
Will they have the spine to make the tough decisions again or will they be looking over their shoulders now? Or has Obama created a political animal that can withstand not only the real consequences of what is done but also defend itself better than it did in 1994?