GOP Strategy: If You Can't Win It, Steal It

• Voter Purges Could Cause Florida-like Presidential Recounts | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet:

  "If the November vote is close, key swing states that have been illegally rejecting voters could become recount battlegrounds like Florida...."

• t r u t h o u t | GOP Attacks on American Voters Turn Desperate, Ugly and Dangerous:

  "The GOP assault on American voters has hit full stride as the economy and John McCain tank in synch."

• Why the GOP Is Nuts About ACORN | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet:

  "Attacks on ACORN appear to be part of a broader GOP strategy to shrink the number of Dem voters and sow doubts if the election turns out to be close...."

• Memo to GOP: Minority Homeowners Did Not Cause Wall St. Meltdown | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet:

  "ACORN has decidedly moved past the stage of being ignored and even the stage of being laughed at. ACORN is now being attacked. Next comes victory."

• Justice Watch: Justice Department Outsources Voting Rights Hotline

  "...[I]t appears the Department of Justice (DOJ) has contracted its Voting Rights Section’s 2008 U.S. Election Hotline to none other than defense contractor Lockheed Martin. For those of you not familiar with this service, the hotline was created for callers to determine registration status, report voter
  intimidation and suppression, and to ask general questions about voting procedures and eligibility.
  
  Should Lockheed Martin, which spends roughly $10 million dollars per year lobbying the federal government, and which currently lists as one of its vice-presidents a nominee for a hotly contested congressional race in New Jersey, have the final say over who can and cannot provide guidance to distressed voters on Election Day?
  
  With campaign contributions to over 50 candidates in this election cycle alone from Lockheed Martin, the question remains—where’s the justice in the DOJ?"

Technorati tags: GOP, ACORN, Vote fraud, voter registration, voter purge, blackbox voting, Democrats, Republicans

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2008

Direct from Project Censored:

• #1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”



• #2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law



• # 3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources



• # 4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements



• #5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq



• #6 Operation FALCON Raids



• #7 Behind Blackwater Inc.



• #8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India



• #9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure



• # 10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief



• # 11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan



• # 12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops



• # 13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants



• # 14 Impunity for US War Criminals



• # 15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”



• #16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11



• # 17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations



• # 18 Mexico’s Stolen Election



• # 19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda



• # 20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists



• # 21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payments



• # 22 North Invades Mexico



• # 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq



• # 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President



• # 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?

Also See:

• Top 25 Censored Stories: Archive | Project Censored

Technorati tags: Project Censored, Media, Censorship, Corporate Media, War, Iraq, U.S. Government, News

Commerce, Treasury Funds Helped Boost GOP Campaigns

More corruption, folks....

Marisa Taylor and Kevin G. Hall (McClatchy Newspapers) report:

"Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

Political appointees in the Treasury Department received at least 10 political briefings from July 2001 to August 2006, officials familiar with the meetings said. Their counterparts at the Commerce Department received at least four briefings — all in the election years of 2002, 2004 and 2006.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the White House's political briefings to at least 15 agencies, including to the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the State Department, violated a ban on the use of government resources for campaign activities...."

Thanks to Al B. for the heads up.

Technorati tags: U.S. Commerce Dept., U.S. Treasury Dept., GOP, Elections, Hatch Act, news, McClatchy Newspapers

Loving, Fighting, Sulking, Dancing, Betraying

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

PARIS

The French can be very, well, French when it comes to the personal lives of their leaders.

They take affairs, illegitimate children and tumultuous marriages in stride.

But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. They do not like the idea of Nicolas Sarkozy entertaining world leaders alone at the Élysée Palace. It is not comme il faut.

Maybe that’s why this country is so mesmerized with the question of whether the beautiful Cécilia Sarkozy, a former Schiaparelli model who was for years her husband’s influential political adviser, is going to serve as the chatelaine of the Élysée, or run off again with a lover.

No one seems sure if she will bolt, leaving the entertaining duties to Sarko’s mother, an elegant lawyer, or agree to play a limited role at the palace.

“We have a hard time imagining an intermittent first lady at the Élysée,” sniffed Le Temps, a daily newspaper, online.

Cécilia was missing in action during the final weeks of her husband’s campaign. “I don’t see myself as first lady,” the 49-year-old said. “That bores me.”

Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject.

Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.

Cécilia left Sarko for several months in 2005, moving to America to live with a French events organizer — reportedly a response to her husband’s affair with a French journalist.

When Paris Match published pictures of Cécilia with her lover in New York, Sarko became furious with his good friend, Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner. Soon, the editor was fired.

Mr. Lagardère stepped in again to kill a story in another publication he owns, Le Journal du Dimanche. On Sunday, the paper was going to reveal that Cécilia did not bother to vote.

On the night Sarko won the presidency, Parisians were watching Cécilia’s every move. She was not there when he won or when he made his acceptance speech, and some of her friends were saying that the marriage was over.

But her two pretty blonde daughters from a previous marriage apparently prevailed on her to show up later that night at a victory rally. She came dressed down in a gray sweater and white slacks, in what one friend said had originally been her “escape outfit,” and looked distracted as her husband spoke, plucking at her sweater.

At the post-rally party, Paris Match — now following the Sarko script — was given an exclusive on their happy reunion. They were in a hotel suite, the magazine said, behaving “like lovers.”

“And the new president, regaining for an instant the taste of rhythm that invaded him in his youth, took a step in dance,” the story said. “In front of all their friends reunited, he dances for a single person: Cécilia.”

When Paris isn’t fixated on Cécilia and Sarko, it’s buzzing about the town’s other power couple.

As Ségolène Royal tries to build on her strong showing to become the Socialist candidate for president in 2012, her relationship with the father of her four children and the head of her party, François Hollande, grows more byzantine.

She brazenly bounded past Mr. Hollande — who wanted to run himself — and now she wants to eclipse him totally. This competition — the opposite of Billary — certainly did not help her candidacy. “Every morning I would open the newspapers and ask myself which Socialist was going to attack me over what I was saying,” she told a party conference the other day.

Their relationship is the subject of a new book, “La Femme Fatale,” by two respected political reporters from Le Monde. The couple is suing to have some passages cut.

“Disappointed in her private life, she chose to go into battle without worrying anymore about François Hollande, but also with the assertion that she was more popular than him, and he hadn’t been able to renovate the Socialist Party despite hopes of party activists and elected officials,” Raphaëlle Bacqué, a co-author, told a journalist, noting that the fact that Sego and Mr. Hollande were at each other’s throats, while keeping their status a mystery, had “serious political consequences. They should have been unbeatable. ... him at the head of the party, her a candidate. But instead we saw two teams in endless competition.”

The book quotes an interview in which Mr. Hollande was asked where he would live if Sego won. “At my house!” he replied.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, France, Nicolas Sarkozy, Segolene Royal, Elections, news, commentary, op ed

La Campagne, C'est moi

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

LILLE, France

It’s hard not to be drawn to a presidential candidate with a name like a Bond girl, a smile like an angel, a figure that looks great in a bikini at 53, a campaign style like Joan of Arc, and a buffet for the press corps brimming with crustless fromage sandwiches, icy chocolate profiteroles, raspberry parfaits, red Bordeaux, espresso and little almond gâteaux. (When in France, let us eat cake.)

Ségolène Royal brought back the sizzle to socialism, raising the ire of Stephen Colbert’s right-wing TV host, who warned that “socialism is always a threat but never more so than when it looks like this.”

At first, Ségolène seemed like the ideal candidate for a country that knew it needed change but didn’t really want change, because she looked like change but wasn’t really going to change anything. But the infatuation dampened, like a spring romance.

I entered the Ségosphere, as her supporters call it, Thursday evening in Lille, for the last big rally — and perhaps last hurrah — of her “serene revolution,” as it’s dubbed.

The unmarried mother of four and daughter of a misogynistic army colonel entered the factorylike hall to a militant techno beat, gliding through the cheering crowd of 20,000 with a radiant smile and bright red jacket. Supporters, including many young ethnic Arab men and older women in head scarves up front, strained to touch and pat her.

On stage, she channeled a divine aura, levitating her arms like a Blessed Virgin statue, presenting herself as a glowing beacon against the forces of darkness, a k a Nicolas Sarkozy. In the Ségosphere, the right-wing front-runner is a brute, Rudy Giuliani without the restraint, while she is a healer. She consciously casts herself as Marianne, the symbol of France — playing “La Marseillaise” at rallies — but comes across more like Marianne Williamson, the New Age spirituality guru, going for the chakra vote.

“What I want, it’s for everybody to unleash this energy they feel within themselves,” she said, “but this energy that is sometimes curbed, curbed by so many blockages, curbed by so many negative speeches, curbed by so many shadows. ... It is not the dark side that I want to awake. It is the side of light, it is the side of hope, it is the part of joy, it is the part of smile, it is the part of France that loves itself as it is.”

Even though her strategy of playing the woman card fell flat, she kept it up in her last week. In Lille, she said she knew some wondered: “Is it really reasonable to choose a woman? Is France going to dare? I want to say: Dare. Dare! You won’t regret it.”

Ségo is bolder than the cautious Hillary, but stumbles into mistakes more often; unlike Hillary, she has not done her homework on foreign policy. Ségo blends a fierce will and feminine style more deftly than Hillary, but is also seen as somewhat cold, porcelain under her porcelain skin, rather than seductive, like Bill Clinton.

Ségo showed verve and grit in her self-professed role as a “gazelle” darting past the sexist old Socialist elephants — not to mention the father of her children, François Hollande, the head of her party, who wanted to run himself. Though Mr. Hollande supports Ségo, she does not seem as dependent as Hillary on getting her man to push people around for her.

France is chauvinistic — women got the vote in 1944 and compose only a small percentage of the National Assembly — but the country seems less neurotic than America about the idea of a woman as president. The trouble with Ségo’s campaign is not her gender. The trouble is that her only vision for France is herself. Hence, her nickname: Egolene.

A Sarko adviser called Ségo “a very pretty gadget” who looked modern but had no real plan to move France out of malaise and into the future.

When Ségo lost her temper at Sarko during Wednesday’s debate, on the issue of disabled children’s going to regular schools, it was denounced as contrived and inaccurate. She wanted to seem assertive and goad her abrasive and volatile rival into boiling over. Instead, he pushed the gender card back, telling her to “calm down” and stereotyping Serene Ségo as too moody and changeable to run a country that likes big, powerful leaders.

“She is not in a good mood this morning; it must be the polls,” he said Friday, after she warned that he was “a dangerous choice,” with “the same neoconservative ideology” as W., someone who could cause the country to erupt.

In a contest between what one Parisian calls “le fou” and “la fausse,” the crazy and the false, France may say oui to le fou.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, France, Elections, Segolene Royal, Nicolas Sarkozy, news, commentary, op ed

Who Am I? Why won't I reveal my identity?

The current political climate is one that relies on personal smear tactics and media manipulations to win elections. In the midst of all this sleaze, a candidate's message is lost. It's not necessarily that views are not being expressed, it is that they are not being heard above the sleaze fray.

Another unfortunate fact of our current political process, ever since JFK and Chamelot, is that the amount of "charisma" a candidate exhibits can be the deciding factor over whether or not he is eventually elected. How else did we end up with Arnold "I'll be back" as Governor of California? Or Sonny Bono as a mayor? Or, frankly, Ronald Reagan as a president?

Because I don't believe candidates should be elected on the basis of their good looks or charm--or lack thereof--both of which serve to distract from their message, I choose to keep myself invisible for the time being. The only way I can be judged is by the value of my words and the quality of my beliefs. And that is how it should be.

Politics should be about real, not manufactured, issues: solving the kinds of real problems that are preventing this country from being the great democracy it should be. Rather, certain political factions want to distract you from those very real problems by manipulating you into paying attention to the unimportant, manufactured ones. Since 9/11, "fear" has been their most effective tactic to distract you from what is really going on. Frankly, things have gotten so bad, who can believe anything one hears from government officials anymore? They have lied to us so often, cried 'wolf' so many times, we have learned to ignore them. God forbid there should be a REAL terror attack in this country. No one, at this point, would take the warnings -- if given -- seriously.

In an effort to change the political climate, I will become more vocal as the election approaches. I will withhold my identity for as long as possible, in order to keep the focus on the issues and off political superficialities. In the meantime, a clue: I'm no different than you. I am frustrated by what has (and has not) been happening in Washington and by our government's inability to solve our problems and be responsive to our needs. We need: Universal Health Care. Quality education for all. Environmental protection. Protection of our privacy and civil rights. A fair tax code. A foreign policy that promotes peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world instead of illegal wars in the name of peace. And on and on...

I invite you to tell me YOUR needs. Tell me what YOU think. Give me YOUR ideas. What are YOUR priorites? Health Care? The War in Iraq? Post your comments. I WILL read and consider every one. Together we will create a campaign of the people, for the people and by the people...which is what our government is supposed to be all about. POST YOUR COMMENTS. AND STAY TUNED...

The Unknown Candidate: Who am I?

The Unknown Candidate: Who am I?

Are you tired of politicians spouting political agendas that have no bearing--or worse, a negative bearing--on your life? So am I.
I dream of something better. Read on...

Depressed Over the Last Election...?

Become Republican.

Sick of compassion, common sense, science, tolerance? Don't worry, there's another way: Kiss your conscience goodby and switch to the winner....Become Republican! Watch the video--It's guaranteed to give you more than a few chuckles.

And we can all use more than a few good chuckles right about about now: Watch.

Thanks to TheFrown.com

Illegitimate Election 2004

Lest we forget...Lest we remedy our voting system...it will happen again.

Watch the video from VelvetRevolutiion.us