Category: Politics & Elections

Reputedly a true story via FiveThirtyEight.com:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

America gets more like Rock Ridge every day.

Citing a Republican former Department of Justice lawyer, ABC concludes the voter fraud charges are meaningless.

But McCain’s voter fraud worries – about Acorn or anyone else – are unsupported by the facts, said experts on election fraud, who recall similar concerns being raised in several previous elections, despite a near-total absence of cases.

“There’s no evidence that any of these invalid registrations lead to any invalid votes,” said David Becker, project director of the “Make Voting Work” initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Becker should know: he was a lawyer for the Bush administration until 2005, in the Justice Department’s voting rights section, which was part of the administration’s aggressive anti-vote-fraud effort.

“The Justice Department really made prosecution of voter fraud of this sort a big priority in the first half of this decade, and they really didn’t come up with anything,” he said.

ABC News

Other Republicans have made similar remarks — Florida Governor Crist among them.

In NewMexiKen’s opinion, trying to take away a person’s vote is about as low as politicians can go.

It appears the McCain campaign didn’t vet Joe the Plumber any more than they did Sarah the Hockey Mom.

• It appears he’s not a licensed plumber
• It appears he owed Ohio back income taxes
• It appears he is related to Charles Keating’s son-in-law Robert Wurzelbacher, a prominent Republican donor, who served 40 months in federal prison for his role in the Keating 5 scandal

Update: Last item found to be incorrect. Same name, no relation.

The same as Bush, only older.

“How does any decent person remain a Republican with this kind of crap?”

Andrew Sullivan is referring to an envelope from the Virginia Republican Party. He has a photo of the offending matter.

Kenneth —

I just finished the last debate before the election.

Now the outcome of this campaign is up to you. I need your help to get our message out — and to get out the vote.

I wouldn’t ask for your support if this campaign didn’t urgently need it.

Your donation of $5 or more today is essential to our unprecedented get out the vote operation in these final days.

The most dangerous thing you can do right now is nothing. Your support and hard work are exactly what we need between now and Election Day.

While he didn’t mention the middle class, John McCain chose to repeat the false, negative attacks that make up 100% of his advertising these days.

The truth is that his choices say more about his campaign than they do about me.

But John McCain and his allies are not going to stop fighting — or attacking — until the very end.

We’re doing this a different way. Tonight I talked about the real problems ordinary people face during this economic crisis and concrete ways that I will create jobs, cut health care costs, build a new energy policy, and get our economy moving.

But time is running out. Our strength and our success in these last 20 days depends on you:

https://donate.barackobama.com/finaldebate

Thank you for all you do,

Barack

Here’s the exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber referenced so much in tonight’s debate.

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

From Tim Dickinson’s terrific profile of McCain in Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone has an interview with Senator Obama. Nothing new, but a good look at his personality in the context of issues if you’re interested.

Barack Obama and the Democrats are stealing the election. Massive voter fraud is being carried out, even as we speak, by their henchmen, known by the innocuous sounding Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now, or Acorn. Clever bastards.

The only problem? Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of “Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states” as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it’s true. None of it.

. . .

You’ll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That’s true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

What you won’t hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won’t be voting this November. You needn’t worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.

If it quacks like a duck, in this case, it’s likely another Republican Acorn voter fraud lie. They haul it out every two years.

Brad Friedman – guardian.co.uk. There’s more.

Via Andrew Sullivan, two women in Anchorage talk sense about Palin. 5:13 minute video.

After seeing this a correspondent wrote:

We’re so used to seeing complete idiots doing these “man on the street” interviews…it’s completely disconcerting to see these women.

I want to be friends with them.

A1: She wants to help people remember what they looked like before her policies render them extinct.

A2: She likes sticking it to the bears.

A3. She couldn’t find a wolf-cub pin.

Climate Progress, with a photo and how you can order a pin just like Sarah’s. Only $14.99 plus $3.50 shipping.

It’s official. At least for the kids! The Scholastic Presidential Election Poll results are in: Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama won with 57 percent of the vote, to 39 percent for Republican nominee Senator John McCain.

The poll was open to kids from grades 1 to 12 in Scholastic News and Junior Scholastic magazines. Almost 250,000 (a quarter of a million) kids voted by paper ballot or online at www.scholastic.com/news. The poll closed on October 10.

Since 1940, the results of the student vote have mirrored the outcome of the general election all but twice: In 1948, kids voted for Thomas E. Dewey over Harry S. Truman. In 1960, more students voted for Richard M. Nixon than for John F. Kennedy.

Scholastic.com

At another panel at the Time Warner Summit, TechPresident co-founder Andrew Rasiej, talking with his fellow panelists about the recent coverage given to the Bradley Effect, made a prediction. “What we’re going to see is the Obama Effect,” he said: Obama over-performing because of people who secretly wanted to vote for him, but were afraid to say so.

CJR

The list of conservative conspiracy theories is long and ever-growing. Conservatism, as currently constructed, is utterly dependent on the existence of nefarious, dark forces working secretly against Real Americans. ACORN is the bogeyman of the moment.

Functional Ambivalent explains — In Which We Intrude On the Conservative Pity Party By Injecting a Little Reality.

FiveThirtyEight.com takes a look at the Bradley Effect.¹

With that said, the evidence is pretty strong that the Bradley Effect in fact used to exist in the 1980s and probably through some point in the 1990s. …

The evidence is perhaps equally strong, however, that the Bradley Effect does not exist any longer.

It’s a good, brief look at racism and polling.

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¹ The Bradley effect: Telling pollsters you voted for an African-American candidate when you did not in order to disguise racial bias. Named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who lost the California gubernatorial election in 1982 when some polls, including exit polls, showed him winning handily.