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Will the GOP steal America's 2012 election?

The Republican Party could steal the 2012 US Presidential election with relative ease.

Six basic factors make this year's theft a possibility:
    1. The power of corporate money, now vastly enhanced by the US Supreme Court's Citizens' United decisions;

    2. The Electoral College, which narrows the number of votes needed to be moved to swing a presidential election;

    3. The systematic disenfranchisement of---according to the Brennan Center---ten million or more citizens, most of whom would otherwise be likely to vote Democratic. More than a million voters have also been purged from the rolls in Ohio, almost 20% of the total vote count in 2008;

    4. The accelerating use of electronic voting machines, which make election theft a relatively simple task for those who control them, including their owners and operators, who are predominantly Republican; 

    5. The GOP control of nine of the governorships in the dozen swing states that will decide the outcome of the 2012 campaign; and, 

Reverend Moon: Cult leader, CIA asset, and Bush family friend is dead

The death of Reverend Sun Myung Moon hopefully ends one of the strangest chapters in U.S. security industrial complex history. The self-proclaimed "Messiah" who owned dozens of businesses including Kahr Arms, and who once claimed to have presided over Jesus' wedding posthumously in order to get the Christian savior into heaven, was ultimately a front in the United States for friends in the CIA like George Herbert Walker Bush.

Moon founded the Washington Times newspaper in 1982 and the Washington Post went out of its way to avoid any mention of the "the dark side of the Moon" upon his death Monday, September 3, 2012 at age 92. When George W. Bush faltered in New Hampshire in early 2000, it was Moon's shadowy cultish right-wing network that came to its rescue in South Carolina. Moon's forces helped turn a certain primary defeat into a double-digit victory by spreading Moonies, his zombie-like followers, throughout the state. As the Washington Post reported, "An array of conservative groups have come to reinforce Bush's message with phone banks, radio ads, and mailings of their own."

Julian Assange, International Intrigue and What’s Going On With Ecuador

Today we talk of geo-politics and the freedom of information. But what is happening today technically (i.e. politically) began on 12 December 2008, though some say September of that year, but it took four years for the shock waves to reach Europe and America.

The issue relates to Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and the Republic of Ecuador. Mind you, it was assumed in the entire American continent, Australia, and Europe that the world was the same as ten years ago. But the world does not work that way anymore.

In Italy, no one was told of the fight growing between Brazil and the United Nations, badly managed by Christine Lagarde who heads the International Monetary Fund, whereby Italy was officially relegated from the eighth largest to the ninth largest economy in the world. It was overtaken by Brazil. So at the next G8, Italy will not be invited, but Brazil will. So we had the decision to abolish the G8 and G10 becoming the new standard.

Re-examining Lucasville: Essay 3 - A Tragedy?

A Tragedy?
When people use the word “tragedy,” they ordinarily mean something completely bad and sad, like the mass killings in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Almost as many human beings were killed during the eleven-day uprising in Lucasville (ten) as in the Aurora movie theater (twelve). But does the word “tragedy” adequately describe what happened at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility?

I think the correct answer is, Yes, but in two different ways. One of the meanings the dictionary gives for “tragedy” is “a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair,” a “calamity,” a “disaster.” The dictionary gives an example: “the tragedy of the President’s assassination.”

And certainly the Lucasville Uprising was such a tragedy. The ten persons murdered were unarmed and outnumbered. They never had a chance.

Tell Secretary of State Husted: Restore Ohio's early voting hours

Following unprecedented Black voter turnout in Ohio during the 2008 presidential election, Republicans there have been looking for ways to diminish the Black community’s electoral power.

Now, under the leadership of Secretary of State Jon Husted, they’ve turned to eliminating the opportunity to cast absentee ballots on weekends leading up to Election Day. This is a clear attempt to limit Black voters’ and other urban dwellers’ access to the polls.

Join us in telling Husted to bring back weekend early voting hours so that all Ohioans have the opportunity to vote.

That's why I signed a petition to OH Secretary of State John Husted.

Will you sign this petition? Click here:

Sign on here

The Romney’s fast lane to climate disruption

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney presented his energy plan for the nation on August 23rd to a crowd of supporters in Hobbs, New Mexico. My reading of Romney's 18-page speech and other public documents and reports raise a number of concerns about his positions on energy policy.

The overriding goal of Romney's energy plan is to initiate and press hard for policies that will enhance the power of the already powerful and too-big-to-fail oil, gas, and coal companies as the best way to achieve "energy independence.” The idea of winning independence of foreign oil is a hackneyed notion offered up by presidential candidates and incumbents every four years going back to the early 1970s. Michael Grunwald makes this point in his new book, The New New Deal:

"Ever since 1973, when Richard Nixon vowed to end oil imports by the decade's end, every president had made we-can-do-it promises about energy independence. 'I happen to believe that we can do it,' said Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had proclaimed this crusade 'the more equivalent of war.' Even George W. Bush had pledged 'to move beyond a petroleum-based economy" (p. 38).

Yes We Camp

In Tampa, heavy rain and intense sun and heat were the two main weather patterns. Sometimes we sought shelter in the shade and sometimes in tents and under tarps. One night a dozen or more of the folk of Romneyville gave up on trying to sleep in a 6 hour car wash and shared a huge concrete bed with homeless folk under an overpass. We’re gone but most of them are probably still there.

The intense heat and sun was good for drying out our rain-soaked clothes as we wore them on our bodies, or after we’ve tied them to a rusting fence or scattered them on the ground.

DSCN1855

The rain took away my body and hair odor as I got drenched yelling at cops during a march : “the police are not the problem, per se; the problem is big money which is buying our government; this is a movement based on love.” At least two cops responded, “we know.”

The Breton Fisherman's Prayer

The Arctic ice is melting at a record pace this summer - just one more measurable phenomenon indicating that extraordinary change in the global ecosystem is in progress. As the ice melts, and the vast polar reflecting surface diminishes, the planet absorbs more and more of the sun’s energy and . . . grows warmer. More ice melts.

"Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small."

The Arctic ice is melting at a record pace this summer - just one more measurable phenomenon indicating that extraordinary change in the global ecosystem is in progress. As the ice melts, and the vast polar reflecting surface diminishes, the planet absorbs more and more of the sun's energy and ... grows warmer. More ice melts.

So what?

Sitting at my desk in Chicago, I was tempted to opt out of caring about this - trend Republican, you might say. Put it on the back, ahem, burner. It takes a leap of consciousness to align my own well-being with the fate of the Arctic ice, the ocean, the Inuits, the polar bears.

Obamobedience

Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine spoke prior to Obama's speech on Wednesday in Charlottesville, Va. He had praise for anyone signing up to go to war in Afghanistan. "We can still put our positive thumbprint on that nation," he said, to wild cheers. Imagine the competition among the world's nations to get our thumbprint next! Imagine what it costs to get our assprint.

"So, who are you voting for?" an Obama follower asked me prior to the event. I was holding posters with 12 friends and handing out hundreds of flyers that looked like Obama material until you read them. (PDF).

The posters objected to the tripling of weapons sales to foreign dictators last year, Obama's willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare, the kill list, imprisonment without trial, warrantless spying, corporate trade agreements, the continued so-called "Bush" tax cuts, the war on Afghanistan, the drone wars, the increased military budget, the murder of Tariq Aziz and of Abdulrahman al Awlaki, the weak auto efficiency standards in the news that day, the refusal to prosecute torturers, Obama's sabotaging of agreements to counter global warming, etc.

Murdoch's Journal pushes tragic Fukushima flim-flam

With every atomic reactor disaster comes the inevitable whitewash.

And Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has just painted a tragic new coat over the radioactive wasteland of atomic flim-flam.

Its "Panic at Fukushima" speaks volumes to a nuclear power industry now crumbling at the core.  It fits an historic pattern:

When yet another radioactive leak emits from the local nuke---no matter how serious---the official response is hard-wired to include the phrase "no danger to the public." 

When serious structural cracks surface at reactors like Ohio's Davis-Besse or Crystal River, Florida,  safety concerns are invariably dismissed with well-funded contempt.  

As with fatally flawed steam generators at California's San Onofre, if it can make an extra buck, the industry will run these reactors into the ground, safety-be-damned.  Protected by federal taxpayer insurance and the bankruptcy laws, they know even a catastrophic disaster need not trouble their bottom line.    

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