John Gault was/is/will remain the insane rambling of the noted sociopath, Ayn Rand. While touted by Libertarians as sooth and proof of deityhood of Rand, the very premise of the author is flawed beyond redemption. This fact does not stop her followers and their corporate-sponsors from inflicting the cult of the individual upon the rest of Americans.

 

Society is not a collection of individuals. The 'collections of individuals' concept precludes interaction. All other humans are, by necessity of that mindset, simply randomly self-motivated objects that poise obstacles for the only true being . . . Oneself.

 

Society is communal. It requires human interaction. Human interaction is founded in the ultimate communal force: language. The ability to form concepts is part and particle of language. Unfortunately for the idiots purveying this bull??it, the very ability to frame this bull??it betrays their insane ramblings.

I will never forgive our fascist overlords for turning something impolite and homo-erotic into the sullied and despicable by lying to the more ignorant and huddled of the masses.

 

In the late 1970s, tea-bagging was a sex act between to consenting (usually both males) adults. In the mid 2000s, video games and pro-wrestling turned tea-bagging into an insult over the defeated. Now the corporate media and ultra-right wing-nuts have flipped the Boston Tea Party (a populous uprising against corporate tax breaks created by royal stockholders for their own company East Indies ) into defending cartel profits by those with IQs under the 50th percentile.

 

In 1932 Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile coined the concept 'Fascism' to describe the fusion of the state and the corporate. Through the championed processes of deregulation and out-sourcing, America is experiencing a similar deconstruction of our democratic republic and its replacement by a corporate-sponsored oligarchy. I wholeheartedly suggest digging up a copy of Thom Hartmann's "Unequal Protection" for some light reading. The mercantilism practiced by the British during the American Colonial period and Thatcherism/Reaganism are truer representations of the current situation. Although the Blackwater/Xe bullshit gives me pause . . .

 

Unfortunately, the tactics presently being employed by the 'Tea-Baggers' being activated by Dick Army's Health Insurance Industry financed Astroturf campaign are directly mimicking early tactics recorded in William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".  

 

I find it deplorable that democracy's underpinning are being subverted by corporate-sponsored disruption campaigns. I find it deplorable that the very folk who might be helped most by a government program are being activated against their best interests by corporate-sponsored propaganda campaign. I find it deplorable that the country where Alexis de Tocqueville was astounded to find that lowliest of farmers could converse intelligently about government and American history has been reduced to this crap.

Arlen Specter, Ben Nelson, Kay Hagan, Michael Bennet, Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Mary Landrieu, Joseph Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Claire McCaskill and Mark Pryor . . .

ALL regularly vote with the DEM caucus LESS THAN 70% of the farging time.

If Congress really wanted to fix our country's financial system/economics of our nation . . . AND were still committed to spend $700 billion, they would give every U.S. Citizen one hundred thousand dollars AND SPEND THE OTHER $360 BILLION rebuilding the country's crumbling infrastructure. The nation's debt would be paid and Americans would own their own homes . . . The banks would be flush with We the People’s cash AND our roads, energy delivery systems and communications would be repaired . . . Even be TAY-ER-ER-IST proof. . . OR Congress could spend $200K on each and every Citizen and have $40 BILLION leftover to incarcerate Paulsen, Greenspan and the entire Bush Administration for the rest of their unnatural lives. CALL and tell Congress to act smart not fast to repair the problem. The problem is not our banks, it is our banking system. The problem is not banks lacking liquidity; it is the collapse of the middle-class. The Republican proposal is economical warfare designed to cripple Americans. Tell your Senators and your Congress-person to just say “NO!” to the fascist plutocrats in the Administration.

If Congress really wanted to fix our country's financial system/economics of our nation . . . AND were still committed to spend $700 billion, they would give every U.S. Citizen one (1) million dollars AND SPEND THE OTHER $360 rebuilding the country's crumbling infrastructure.  The nation's debt would be paid and Americans would own their own homes . . . The banks would be flush with We the People’s cash AND our roads, energy delivery systems and communications would be repaired . . . Even be TAY-ER-ER-IST proof. . .

Palin, the PRO-rapist, continues to work diligently to avoid prosecution of rapists of poor women by forcing their victims who can not afford justice to bear the cost of justice, literately . . . AND then forces the victims to incubate and birth the progeny of those selfsame rapists.

Seeing 

Okay boys and girls today's Talking Point is: Phil Graham, McInsane's lead financial advisor and BFF, wrote the law that destoryed the economy . . . And Graham believes that ecomony is fine, it is just that Americans whine. Go forth and spread the Talking Point Say it to at least five people today . . . AND oh yeah . . . God be with you.

BUT why in all hell was FAUX NEWS given the contract to provide the pool-feed coverage for DEMO-farging-CRATIC Party’s Convention (Pool-feed means that they provide all the camera and audio work for all networks. The major news networks rotate the opportunity to provide the camera work for all broadcast entities at each major political event).

Please take a moment to pause and reflect on the actions of each of our faithful servants and elected Representatives actions today: 149 DEMs discovered that they were in fact Democrats and cast 'no' votes to continuing to fund Bush43's Occupation of Iraq. 132 REPs showed their Defeatocrat stripes and cast 'present' votes to hide their bloodlust from the American people . . . until after election. 12 Congressfolk sat drooling in the room and avoided registering any vote . . . Perhaps there was a butterfly ballot or some such issue. The rest stood up and sang a chorus in support of Bush43 & Speaker Pelosi's unified front to endlessly flush human dignity and America's future wealth down the clusterfuck that is Iraq. Go to house.gov to see where your elected offical stood on this issue and make a phone call to their local and Washington DC offices expressing your thoughts and views on their execution of their duty and obligation to you and the folk in your District.

Now that Clinton has endorsed John McCain twice in one week, will the DNC strip her of her Super-delagate status like they did to Joe Lieberman? Inquiring minds wanta know . . .

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

This week the Associated Press would have you believe that Texas is reliving its Wild West days, complete with outlaw voter rolls that are packed with felons and the deceased. Peppered with urgent language (“The auditor's report warns that improvement is needed...”) and frantic headlines (“State's Voter Registration Rolls Need Policing”), the AP and local news outlets conjure images of wild-eyed ex-cons assaulting the integrity of Texas’ electoral system.

However, the real issue is not that .4% of Texas voting rolls are potentially ineligible to vote or even whether or not any of that .4% managed to vote (they did not, AP reports). Simply put, the real issue is list maintenance policies and procedures that allow for the removal of legitimate voters through hasty or poorly-executed purges.

Tuesday, the state auditor's report examining Texas' voter rolls for May's election was “widely distributed,” according to Kelley Shannon of the Associated Press. The report compared data with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Bureau of Vital Statistics.

“It found that 49,049, or 0.4 percent, of 12.37 million registered voters may have been ineligible, including 23,114 possible felons and 23,576 voters who may be deceased. There were duplicate records for 2,359 voters,” Shannon wrote.

“Auditors did not find any cases of ineligible voters casting ballots,” the AP report said.

“Although the Secretary of State's Office has processes to identify many ineligible voters and remove them from the State's voter registration list, improvements can be made,” the auditor's report said with decidedly less urgency than the news headlines and leads. The Secretary of State's Office has agreed with many of the recommendations “and said many of the issues in question have been resolved or are in the process of being corrected,” Shannon wrote.

Under the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), states are responsible for developing specific standards for implementing a list maintenance program that is transparent, consistent and non-discriminatory. A lack of clear and specific criteria for performing list maintenance programs has resulted in inconsistent standards within states for federal elections.

Shannon's report differed from accounts printed in the Houston Chronicle and local broadcast adaptations of the AP story, which ignored the complexity of maintaining voter rolls without removing legitimate voters. First, Shannon reported the .4% in question are not proven ineligible yet: “Agency spokesman Scott Haywood noted even though the auditor identified voters who are potentially ineligible, it does not mean they are actually ineligible.”

Further, “while it's important to remove ineligible voters from the state's computer system, 'it is equally important to make sure eligible voters are not removed unfairly,' Haywood said in a written statement.”

Although states are not mandated to notify voters of their removal from the official voter list for felony conviction or death, NVRA does actually require notice be given to those who will be removed because of a change of address. Voters may not be removed from the list because they have moved unless they have either requested removal in writing or failed to respond to a notice of removal AND not voted in two federal elections. Under the unamended law, “election officials who were notified by the U.S. Postal Service that a voter had moved could update the voter's records and contact the voter at the new address.

This lack of clarity in list maintenance regulations make state voter rolls vulnerable to both inadvertent and purposeful disenfranchisement of legitimate voters with the latter lending itself to partisan mischief. We first saw this fuzzy interpretation in 2000: “Overbroad database matching criteria of names with a felon database were used in Florida before the 2000 election and resulted in the denial of the rote to vote to thousands of Florida voters,” according to this Project Vote report.

To further illustrate the broad interpretations of list maintenance requirements, we can look at recent problems in Kentucky and Washington. In Kentucky, election officials concluded that voters whose names later appeared on the voter databases of near-by states, Tennessee and South Carolina, had implicitly requested removal from the Kentucky voter list.

In Washington, the Republican Secretary of State successfully lobbied the Legislature to pass a strict “No Match, No Vote” policy as part of a broad HAVA-implementation and election reform bill. The rigid list-matching rules required exact matches between voter registration, Social Security and Department of Motor Vehicle databases.

In both cases, Project Vote took action that helped end the practices. Notably, in Washington we led the coalition that helped the state adopt more flexible data-matching rules.

By passing legislation or regulations that encourage eligible voters to stay registered and by opening the process to public scrutiny, states can short-circuit behind-the-scenes attempts to manipulate the voter rolls for partisan advantage, avoid the disenfranchisement of eligible citizens, and begin to restore public confidence in election results.

As we embark on 2008, the mechanics of elections are gaining a higher profile in the media and in the minds of actors in electoral politics. Smart, well-managed list maintenance procedures are vital to maintaining accurate voter rolls and broad knowledge and understanding of them creates the kind of transparency that promotes trust. The recent new stories, on the other hand, promote hysteria and overshadow the facts, obscuring the real and pervasive issue of actual (not possible) eligible voters getting thrown off of voter rolls due to bad list maintenance policies. Though we are quick to acknowledge that we do not have deep expertise in Texas’ list maintenance procedures, any state should feel it has done its duty if its voter rolls show only a .4% error rate. Particularly a state with more than 12 million registered voters in its database.

Quick Links:

“Maintaining Current and Accurate Voting Lists.” Project Vote.

In Other News:

“LANSING — An independent group that angered some Michigan voters by sending voter registration forms to their pets or to wrong addresses apologized today for the mistakes.” Read more of this Associated Press report here.

“One of the issues left hanging as Congress is off on recess is the Holt bill to require voter-verifiable paper trails on all voting machines. Despite a robust number of co-sponsors, the bill remains mired in controversy, in part because of the opposition of sizable numbers of election officials who, after having sunk a bundle of money into touch-screen machines after the passage of the Help America Vote Act, are not inclined to change (and are also worried about deadlines and technical glitches).” Read more of this Nov. 26 Roll Call article here.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

I know why Corporations control their news content . . . News there is marketing, advertising, propoganda and entertainment for the huddling masses earning for employment. Dollars (and avoiding prosectution) makes sense. It does not excuse their practises BUT if you know their bias you can filter their output.

The one thing net-news has on their side is that:

Electrons are cheap and plentiful.

Why should net news horde them?

Wouldn't it be great to read the whole story? Wouldn't it be great to see the whole picture? News is more than bathroom break sized smathering of words . . .

It would be good to see an innovative news outlet check the non-front runners web posting and press releases before rushing to post/print/publish/air the Main-line Corporate Media's darings droppings.

What nastiness is happening in the world as Bush makes a dog and pony show outta Olmert and Abbas?

Will the EPA ever regain access to the decades of research they used to have in their libraries before Bush Co. bundled it up for grinding . . . uh . . . sorry . . . scanning and cataloging?

Where could we find such a paragon of jouralistic integrity? Inquiring minds wanta know . . .

I recognize the time and money and access constraints that net-izen news faces, but I can wish can't I?

Darkness dwells in the hearts beating in the collective breasts of mankind. We are told this repeatedly. Our daily existence is rife with the staccato strikes of messages wholly formed of fear and hate. We must dig deep into our memories to glance a glimmer of hope, to drink deep a draught of joy, to belly laugh at a moments' whimsy.

Our discourse has coarsened. Where words of peace should bound and bounce over the face of our planet, we find our souls mired in whispers of 'us' and 'them'. Rather than working with our neighbors to bring life to the land, we squabble of silvers of dirt which lay fallow under our distracted watch. Instead of recognizing that wealth is a plenty that must be shared with others for it to grow, a small fraction of us horde wealth and are forcing the greatness of what humans have accomplished over the last three centuries onto the garbage heap.

On the other side of scale, I have the bubling laughter of my two year old daughter as my wife and her wrestle about on the bed this morn. Messages of hate and fear gain no purchase in the heart filled with the unfettered joy a child's laugh.

Does this mean that I have lost all concern for damning drumbeat of the fascist plutocrats in the White House or the individuals here whose continuing tales of woe and misery litter the landscape of our minds? No, of course not But I an suggest that each one of us seek that which brings us happiness and joy and share a smathering of it here. It does not take a lot to turn the tide against the recessivists . . . The darkness in men's hearts can not exist in the sunshine of hope, laughter and joy.

Whatever happened to the concept of the Commons. There are things that belong to no man. There are things that belong to us all. The majority of our fore-fathers' were acutely aware of the need to join together for the support and defense of us all and were troubled by concentration of wealth and power into the hans of the few or the one.

While airspace can be held by the power granted in a deed, air belongs to us all.

While each of us can use and enjoy the water that runs next to or upon our land, we also must share what we can to slake the thrist of those around us.

In America, our vote is the life's blood of nation's being. We, the people, come together to decide what is the will of the people.

So important was the concept of Commons to our founding fathers that they chose to enshrine an industry in the Constitution to defend our nation. They did NOT choose arms manufacturing or financial institutions. They chose the press, the unfettered press.

Theodore Roosevelt recognized that there is dirt that must belong to us all.

FDR gave the heartland electricity and our nation jobs . . . to build the individual but to edify us all.

Where are the discussions of the Commons today . . . When we NEED them so much. The echoing silence is deafening. We all must go forth into the gap and lend our voices to breaking this silence.

Join with me.