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Ten ways the McCain/Palin GOP is now stealing the Ohio vote

The McCain/Palin GOP is already in the process of stealing the Ohio vote, as was done in 2004. Among those at the center of the GOP strategy is Bush Family computer operative Michael Connell, who programmed the key vote counting mechanisms that were used to give George W. Bush his second term.

Except for John Kennedy in 1960, no candidate since 1856 (James Buchanan) has won the White House without carrying the Buckeye State. No Republican has ever done it.

On October 27, 2004, we published "Twelve Ways Bush is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote" at www.FreePress.org. Despite four years of denial by the Democratic Party and the corporate media, all methods mentioned in that article (plus many more) were used in the theft that gave George W. Bush his second term.

John McCain: Morally, mentally, and emotionally unfit

Madison, WI (OpEdNews) – September 5, 2008 – The Republican Party is about to nominate the most unqualified candidate for the Presidency in our history, with the possible exception of George W. Bush. Over his entire lifespan, he has repeatedly shown that he is out of touch with reality, impulsive and reckless in his judgment, and intellectually lazy and lacking in curiosity.

You already know that he thinks you have to make $5,000,000 a year in income to be rich. How out of touch with reality is that? You already know he can’t remember how many houses he and his wife own. How truly bizarre is that? He suggested that his wife should enter the “Miss Buffalo Chip” contest, a lewd affair that includes a topless competition. Did he have any idea what he was talking about? Did he even care?

Beyond the Conventions

With varying degrees of confidence or even complacency, many people have assumed that the jig is almost up for the horrendous political era that began when George W. Bush became president. Always dubious, the assumption is now on very shaky ground.

The Bush-Cheney regime may be on its last legs, but a new incarnation of right-wing populism is shadowing the near horizon.

Much as modern capitalism is always driven to promote new products in the marketplace, the corporate-fundamentalist partnership must reinvent and remarket itself. We’re now seeing the rollout of a hybrid product under the McCain-Palin brand.

After watching Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech and the laudatory responses from many TV journalists, I remembered wandering around the floor of the Democratic convention in Denver. At the base, the two major parties are even more different than the speeches are apt to indicate.

Under the roof of the Democratic Party, notwithstanding its shades of corporatism and militarism and numerous other grave faults, there’s a lot of longstanding and ongoing involvement from key progressive constituencies --

Questioning Palin

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VFP lights the way

Minneapolis – With the Republican Convention following hard on their annual meeting in this city, Veterans For Peace adopted two resolutions last week effectively firing signal flares into the path of whoever wins this November’s election, regardless of party.

The first was a resolution on Afghanistan, submitted by VFP president, Elliott Adams, which is likely to become a guidepost for a peace movement now almost exclusively concentrating on Iraq. 

Some 400 members and supporters from every part of the country unanimously endorsed a statement recognizing that when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan “…the only threats to our nation existing there were non-indigenous groups whom we ourselves had fostered and fed,” and that “our wanton use of force and violence against the people of Afghanistan has inflamed world opinion against the United States and has diminished our nation’s ability to work toward world peace and our own security by non-violent means.”

The bi-race card

As a news reporter for many years in the racially diverse and sensitive states of  New Jersey and Ohio, one's racial composition was sometimes a practical matter in story composition.   Race would turn up in topics such as entertainment, crime, school/government policy, and politics and always required accuracy and careful consideration.

"Negro" and "colored" were no longer acceptable usages for African-American references in this '80s-'90s timeframe, nor was "mulatto" acceptable usage to describe people - like 1980 Miss America winner Vanessa Williams - who were half-black and half-white.   

Williams and others of "mixed" racial background were referred to as such, followed by a descriptive phrase of the recipe.  "Bi-racial" came into wider usage during this time, mostly to describe people who were equal parts white and black, and usually because the subject had parents who were clearly one of each.

If one's racial heritage was something other than black and white, the more likely referance was "mixed." 

But "mixed" could also be used to describe people of more than than two racial backgrounds, and proportions other than 50/50. 

From “Dominion” to domination: the duplicity and complicity of Matthew Scully

In 2002, arch-conservative Matthew Scully wrote a book called, Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and The Call to Mercy, that was universally and uncritically acclaimed by the animal advocacy movement. Because this movement is overwhelmingly single-issue in its focus, and in most cases doesn’t care about a person’s views or politics except how they relate to animals, no one had a problem with the fact that Scully was a senior speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He wrote some of the key fear-peddling diatribes that got Bush elected and he was recently re-enlisted to help Bush sell the Iraq war “surge” to the American people.

Logical consequences

Call it creative self-destruction, maybe.

How surreal it’s been this week to watch the Republicans reap a small portion of the divine comeuppance due them, first from a hurricane, then from a pregnant teen-ager. Surely more of the same is on its way, but no one wins, because what is lying in a shambles around the McCain campaign is a harvest of suffering.

The bad ideas of the Republican right, or rather the consequences of those ideas — from pre-emptive war to abstinence-only sex education to the merger of church and state to let’s-drown-government-in-the-bathtub — started taking over the Republican National Convention, bursting the levees of managed news and disciplined hypocrisy. Suddenly eight years of extreme cynicism began generating (it’s a miracle) . . . bad press.

Palin and gay rights: the straight dope

 In the immediate aftermath of the announcement of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, the Arizona senator's campaign had success in portraying the anti-choice social conservative as friendly to the gay community.

Republican Senator John McCain has selected Sarah Palin, Alaska's governor and a little-known conservative with a slim record on gay and AIDS issues, to be his running mate in the 2008 presidential race.

"She's fairly socially conservative, she's fairly anti-choice," said Jeffrey A. Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska (ACLU).

Palin became governor in 2006 after serving as a councilwoman and then mayor of a small Alaskan town. She made an unsuccessful run at becoming Alaska's lieutenant governor in 2002. Palin has confronted a single piece of gay rights legislation in that time.

In 2005, Alaska's highest court ruled, in a case brought in 1999 on behalf of nine couples, that the state could not deny benefits to the domestic partners of state government employees. The court ordered the state to implement that ruling in late 2006.

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