Let's not misunderestimate the problem with this guy. We still have half the day to do it. GET OUT THE VOTE. Friends and family, acquaintances and strangers.
Put Bush 2.0 back in the box and secure the system, we have an important document to save from corruption. Awkward computer metaphor, but what the hell, it's true. EVERYBODY VOTE.
I posted a diary yesterday on Video The Vote, which I'm sure wasn't the first mention of the subject. However, questions came up in comments that I thought legal minds in our community could clarify for people considering volunteering to do this. In fact, it might be of general use to any citizen considering videotaping at polling places on Election Day to help prevent voter disenfranchisement.
Video The Vote is of course a site where you can sign up to be a volunteer videographer on Election Day. The concept sounds simple enough, use a video camera or camera phone to record what happens on Election Day and put it up on youtube, so no stupid shit happens anywhere. With the MSM having abdicated its role as the documenter of the truth, we citizens cannot trust it to do this for us any more, hence the idea.
Sorry if this diary is a duplicate, I searched and found nothing with this in the title, and I thought it might be relevant now. Consider signing up to be a volunteer videographer to help stop voter disenfranchisement in real time on election day, all you need is a video camera or camera phone.
This is a crazy idea, and I suggest it sheepishly, but it's a nuclear option that you could use for your own personal 72 hour GOTV effort. It could increase the number of people you get out to vote from you and one or two others to a significantly larger number like you and twenty others. So what's this crazy nuclear option?
Two words. Emotional blackmail.
I know, it's laughable and you should be laughing at it, but consider this. Pretty much everybody within your sphere of influence has made up their minds about the issues by now. Rather than try to convince them to vote Democratic by talking about the issues, you might have better success giving them a reason that is entirely personal and has nothing to do with the issues at all.
Not exactly sure what to think of this, but I think this is the first time I've heard a politician say peace is scary. Majority Whip Roy Blunt, in a 19th October release titled "Pelosi's House", is quoted thus:
"This list of the bills most likely to be championed by committee chairmen in a Pelosi-led House of Representatives would be great fodder for the latenight talk show hosts if it weren't true," House Majority Whip Roy Blunt said. "Instead, it's just plain scary. While Republicans fight the War on Terror, grow our robust economy, and crack down on illegal immigration, House Democrats plot to establish a Department of Peace, raise your taxes, and minimize penalties for crack dealers. The difference couldn't be starker."
What's the use of such a diary? It's for when you're on a well-deserved break from all the hard work you're doing to get Democrats elected all across this great nation.
It appears that several Kossacks have become abrasive and, in their fear of trolls, are lashing out at new users indiscrinately. I hope they realize that this runs the risk of discouraging participation by newcomers in this wonderful forum. Turning lurkers into commenters, and commenters into diarists, is the way forward as our number has swelled into the six figures and keeps exploding.
It was announced this morning that George W Bush won the Pees Prize, awarded to the person or entity that pees on the most people on a global scale in a given year, for the fifth time running. The last winner before him was bin Laden in 2001, who has since been in hiding but could come out peeing at any time, with only Bush standing in his way. The 2000 winner was the US Supreme Court, for peeing on American democracy and installing Bush on his porcelain throne.
Messages of congratulations poured in from admirers around the world all day, and Bush acknowledged them in a Rose Garden press conference this evening. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice and Karl Rove joined him to pee all over the press corps and a handpicked few of his adoring supporters, who he later referred to privately as "nutjobs". Tony Snow, when asked about that on Fox News, dismissed it laughingly as just the usual crap.
Like so many of us, I have been dismayed that national security has become a Republican strength not because they are in fact better at it but because Democrats have ceded this ground by default. I would love for folks who understand how and why this happened to explain it to folks like me, who just don't get the security mom formulation on what is essentially a question of peace and prosperity.
National security is achieved when we have peace, not when we are at war. Republicans have over decades proven that they have an itchy trigger finger, and that's great for war. But when Americans equate the Republican warrior stance to being better on national security, it appears that they apply the same logic as the population of a Neanderthal tribe. Peace is the desired state, prosperity its measure, not war and desparation.
"Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics don't know what religion is." - Mahatma Gandhi
I have found this quotation alternately crystal clear and absolutely opaque, depending on how smart or stupid I happen to think I am at a given moment. To be honest though, I have no idea what it means at all, do you? It seems to say religion has everything to do with politics without actually saying so, yet it sounds totally sage. What's up with that?
We here at dkos believe in the separation of church and state. That means we're among those who say religion has nothing to do with politics. At least, we think it shouldn't. But that, according to Gandhi, puts us among those who don't get what religion is. Which makes me uncomfortable because I suspect Bush is among those who do. He seems to really like this ambiguous cocktail of religion and politics. So what the @%#& is religion anyway?
On every issue until this weekend, Republicans were losing on the question "Had Enough?", and the margin was growing in favor of Democrats in every poll. The North Korean nuclear test brings the question "Feel Safer?" into play. Over the four weeks that remain until election day, we will see whether it provides a counterpoint to the "Had Enough?" question or reinforces it. Presented below are several threads of reasoning on how this could play out.
The Republican party has always been a bitch for the super-rich. That's their be-all and end-all, everything else they say they stand for is a smoke screen. Somehow, as Democrats paid less and less attention to Republican propaganda over the 40 years that they controlled Congress, the Republican party expanded its base (which is English for Al Qaeda, by the way) to include three constituencies.
Americans who felt strongly about national security, fiscal responsibility and traditional values were hoodwinked into believing Republicans stood for them. That's what allowed Republicans to mount winning campaigns at election time, but now the veil has been lifted and the party stands exposed for what it is, a bitch for the super-rich. Democrats must capitalize on this revelation of Republican duplicity.
This is an epitaph and an appeal. An epitaph for the Republican revolution and an appeal for the Democratic revolution. First the epitaph, paraphrasing Joe Klein:
The four pillars the Republican revolution was built on, from Reagan to BushCo:
Low taxes. This is the only one that's still intact, but it can't hold up shit on its own. National Security. War of choice in Iraq, NIE saying it made terrorism worse, it's gone. Fiscal responsibility. They've been spending like drunken sailors for years, that's out. Traditional values. Out the window with Foley, no way for it to return any time soon.
There have been very few diaries in the past four weeks on dkos about the Maher Arar case, one by dweb8231 on 21st Sep and another by ZaxTracks on 25th Sep. This is the story of an innocent man who suffered torture for a year in a Syrian prison, on the basis of nothing more than suspicion on the part of our government. We apparently decided that of the two countries he held citizenship in, Canada and Syria, Canada wasn't where he should be going. A detailed timeline compiled by CBC News lists dates and events.
I'm putting up this diary now on Maher Arar because Kossacks ought to be more outraged about this case. It is an extremely damaging instance of the Bush's administration's use of rendition in prosecuting the so-called War on Terror. Given the furore over the Foley scandal and the Has-turd coverup right now, I know you'll be wondering how the Arar case could be useful as an election issue. Honestly, I don't think I have a good answer for that, but it might help reinforce the larger drop in voter support for the Iraq debacle, as the NIE and Woodward's book become the CW being projected by the media.
Did you guys know that CNN International newsreaders have taken to calling it the "so-called war on terror" for the past 2 and a half hours at least? This is in Singapore, so no Tivo, no video to upload to youtube.
Okay, so this is what the Republicans were hoping this past week would have been about. Victories galore on hot button issues for their base to cheer about. A bill to get tough on torturing terrorism detainees. A Great Wall of Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out of America. And of course, hard-hitting ads and speeches attacking Democrats as cut-and-runners on Iraq.
Instead they got buried under a deluge of bad news, piling up one on top of the other so fast, they decided to not even have Cheney go on Meet the Press to accuse Democrats of "coddling the terrorists", which of course was the script before all of this shit hit the fan. So what went wrong, where did they lose the script, how did reality become something the Bush administration couldn't define for the rest of us to whine about?
