Where we are now
Because of the paranoia of influencing the vote with exit poll numbers, CNN and other networks are being vewy vewy caweful with that wascally wabbit, not a peep — so we don’t have much info yet. There are many voting problems reported, especially in OH, VA and CO and, surprisingly, Utah … inclement weather in the Pacific Northwest … and the ID question has made a snarl of many polling spots. The exit polling that is leaking out indicates that this is NOT a local election, but national — and that corruption in Washington is the primary focus of voters reporting so far. CNN says that security, economy and the war are the next concerns, in that order … but there’s no way to tell how security [which polls show no longer goes automatically to the Red] or economy [the Red's have tax fears, but the Blue's have minimum wage] will cut. Likely, with 58% still against Staying The Course, the war polls Blue. The pundits aren’t trusting exit polls, however … so who knows.
Here in the Pea Patch there’s been a dramatic turn out … can’t say if that’s Blue or Red. In a little precinct where two hundred people voting a mid-term is a minor miracle, I was #200 at 10 am. I had my ballot and my sharpie and I was relatively carefree until I had to feed it into the jaws of a Diebold counter. We shall see.
Anyhow — without a clue about the numbers that has us on pins and needles … here are the good reads — including Molly Ivins, Keith Olbermann, Jesse Jackson, the scathing New York Times editorial from yesterday.
Keep hope and take another deep breath — it’s going to be a long night.
[And remember -- 15 in the House, 6 in the Senate ... that's our wish list.]
Jude
The Difference Two Years Made
NYT Editorial
November 5, 2006
On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory.
Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.
That is why things are different this year.
To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House - and for the most part, the Senate - during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.
Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power.
They methodically shut the opposition - and even the more moderate members of their own party - out of any role in the legislative process.
Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.
The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.
That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.
For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.
An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.
After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.
In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.
This election is indeed about George W. Bush - and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.
Campaign ‘06—Goodbye and Good Riddance
Molly Ivins
Tuesday, November 7, 2006 by Truthdig
Right to the end, this insane conversation between reality and Not Reality. The president of the United States STILL says we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; STILL says we are creating democracy; STILL says we’re preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and making Israel more secure; and, shoddiest of all, STILL not allowing that our fallen have died in vain.
The vice president, meanwhile, has announced that, all things considered in Iraq, “if you look at the general, overall situation, [the Iraqi government is] doing remarkably well.” And now he’s gone off to hunt in South Dakota, thus demonstrating a perfectly balanced sense of reality. South Dakota is so sparsely populated, it’s really hard to hit another hunter.
Meanwhile, in case you hadn’t noticed, Iraq is in a state of full collapse. And Afghanistan is not far from it. Baghdad is worse off for water, sewer, electricity and infrastructure than it was before the war. The R’s have taken care of the whole problem with the brilliance we have come to expect from them—they have decided to abolish the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (which has exposed bribery, contracts to cronies, shoddy work, the loss of billions of dollars, the failure to track hundreds of thousands of weapons shipped there, and more). You must admit this is big, bold and brainy. This is Karl Rove problem-solving at its best.
This campaign has been like getting stuck in Alice’s Wonderland for three months. “There is no use trying,” Alice said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” replied the White Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Every time you turn around, you run into the Jabberwocky or the Frumious Bandersnatch—Richard Perle in penitence—or some other equally fantastic sight. The great Skywriter in the Sky has positively run amok with irony and has been splashing it all over the campaign like Jackson Pollock. Fortunately, it is not my duty to lend dignity to the proceedings. I do make it a rule to skip talk of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll—but when Mark Foley turns out to be the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you know you just have to sit down like a tired dog and scratch for a while.
While this perfectly insane dialogue has been taking place, Congress stands before us so hopelessly corrupt that the stench has washed all over the country. Perhaps my least favorite excuse for cheating is “Everybody does it.” NO, everybody DOESN’T do it. Nor does the system make you do it, or alcohol or drugs or Jack Abramoff. I do not want to hear one more excuse—apologize and go.
On the other hand, I am really going to miss the stories this Congress provided. Remember Terri Schiavo? I mean, you wake up one morning and there it is, kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator. And you listen to these people who hold high elective office having this debate—as though they know, as though they have any idea, as though they have any right. And then there are some of the troops, like Randy “Duke” Cunningham, semi-owner of the houseboat The Duke-Stir. Some days you couldn’t wait to get up to find out who’d been indicted. I miss watching Katherine Harris from Florida wear less and less blue eye shadow as she went through her Senate race.
Well, it’s been rank—racist, sleazy, lying and full of insinuating scare tactics. Thank God it’s over.
The Politics of Hope
Todd Huffman
Tuesday, November 7, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
At its most basic, politics is about hope.
Power, greed, narrow interests, and, too uncommonly, large ideas – yes, politics is about these things as well. Politics is the means that serve so many different ends, every now and again including the common good.
Yet even while few yellow brick political roads end at cities agleam with emeralds and good men, the journey down none of them begins until the first step and each thereafter is launched by hope. Hope is the journey, you see, though so few anymore venture to take it.
Too many in this country today are instead indifferent to politics. Tyrannized by their overscheduled lives, distracted by money and possessions, celebrity and sport, or preoccupied with simply keeping their heads and those of their children above water, too many Americans live believing the state of the world does not concern them.
Others, more and more still, have been overwhelmed into indifference by the very state of the world. Quite forgivable, that, given these past five years. It is quite natural to vacillate between the determination to act, and the desire to retreat into the comforts of fun, family and friends.
But indifference is a nonetheless a conscious act, whether a temporary neglect or a permanent abandonment of hope. It requires one hanging up their ideals, putting away their enthusiasms, quieting their questioning spirit, and closing the lid on their indignations. It says of the present world, “It’s not for me to understand.” It says, “I cannot change the way things are,” even as one’s private concerns, one’s happiness, and one’s life course will every day be affected by the way things are.
Hope is the refusal of being indifferent. As author and founder of the Small Planet Institute Frances Moore Lappé once wrote, “Hope is not for wimps; it is for the strong-hearted who can recognize how bad things are and yet not be deterred, not be paralyzed.” Hope is living one step ahead of reality, imagining things as different from as they are now, believing in spite of the odds.
Hope is conceived from the union of imagination and indignation. It is the child of expectation and desire. It gives life to the idea that every present is incomplete, and gives the lie to the belief that the way things are is the best and most natural outcome of all that has gone on before.
Dominant beliefs, held most strongly by those whose turn in power and those they lead, are typically at pains to suggest they are no more alterable by human hands than are the orbits of the earth. Hope is thus dismissed as naïveté, equated with ignorance of the “facts” and with denial of “reality”. It is ridiculed as the drug of the powerless, and laughed off as the high of the truly hopeless.
But the past informs us that the dominant beliefs of one age themselves are often ridiculed in the next. History often proceeds by a process of reversal: momentum going in one direction is replaced by momentum in the opposite, each shift in momentum brought about by collective imagination and indignation. While history provides us many lessons, one endures: successful change comes from hope, not from indifference.
As Americans we live in a democracy, and indifference is fatal to its survival. The powerful, they haven’t stopped hoping: in fact, what they’re hoping most for is your indifference.
When we don’t participate, when might we do it? And if we don’t do it at all, what are we saying? What have we decided? To stay right where we are.
While sometimes naïve, others uninformed, hope is at least a noble journey, though that is not to say the right path is always taken. Who knows if there is even a “right” path? That is the beauty of democracy: when citizens actively participate, the question of who and what is “right” gets sorted out over time. We have only to hope.
And to vote.
We Know What Voters Want. Can the System Record it Fairly?
Jesse Jackson
Tuesday, November 7, 2006 by the Chicago Sun-Times
The negative ads are now an unrelenting barrage. The smarmy push polls, the dishonest “nonpartisan” robo calls, and the calls from volunteers keep the phones ringing. The political mail that fills mailboxes will keep coming for days after the election.
Every congressional and Senate race has its own local twist. Personal character and corruption make huge differences. But despite this, we already know what this race has been about. First, voters are looking for change. Incumbents in both parties have the advantage of money, of gerrymandered districts, of machinery. But challengers have the advantage of representing a change.
Second, stunningly, voters across the country have turned against the war in Iraq. Democratic challengers started out talking about veterans benefits and body armor. But they are ending the race tying their opponents to Bush and his “stay the course” policy in Iraq. Even Republican incumbents are distancing themselves from Bush’s fiasco.Third, voters aren’t happy with the economy. Profits are up, unemployment is down, gas prices have been coming down (for a bit) — but most voters aren’t happy in any case. Republican candidates keep waving the red flag of taxes, taxes, taxes — but voters are looking for good jobs, for help from soaring health care, energy and college costs.
Incomes are stagnant and costs are rising.
Finally, voters are disgusted with Washington, with scandals and corruption and the power of big corporate lobbies. Corruption is costing voters directly — in higher drug prices, in growing energy dependence on the Middle East, in rising college costs. Even Republican incumbents are running as if they had delivered alternative energy to America.
Pundits say Democrats have no agenda, but that isn’t true. Congressional Democrats are unified around a basic bread-and-butter agenda: Raise the minimum wage, cut drug prices, cut interest on student loans, roll back subsidies for Big Oil and invest in alternative energy, revoke the tax breaks for moving jobs abroad. If Democrats take control of the House, that agenda will pass with overwhelming majorities, including large numbers of Republicans. If Republicans retain control, the measures won’t even come to a vote.
Another story will emerge after the elections — just how broken our election system is. The president champions democracy abroad but does nothing to strengthen it at home. States are passing new restrictions on voting — requiring official forms of identification, purging voter lists, intimidating new citizens and poor citizens.
Republicans have developed systematic ways of suppressing the minority vote. The press, which knows better, covers their claim that they are concerned about
ineligible voters when they are concerned about too many minority votes.The press is weaker and more partisan. So there really isn’t anyone authoritative to police the campaigns. The Republican National Committee pays an intermediary to do the infamous “Call me, Harold” racist ad in the Tennessee Senate race. The head of the RNC, Ken Mehlman, says he has no control over the contractor. The GOP candidate, Bob Corker, who benefits from the racial slur, can act outraged and call for the ad to be taken down. The ad’s developer, Terry Nelson, gets fired by Wal-Mart, but remains on John McCain’s payroll.
The systemic inequities of the broken system get worse. Money talks louder than ever. Many of the electronic voting machines — easily skewed as computer scientists have shown — still have no verifiable paper record. In too many states, minorities are disenfranchised disproportionately as those charged with crimes who have paid their debt to society remain barred from voting.
Scientific gerrymandering makes it harder and harder for the public to make its will known. In 2004, only 10 congressional seats were won by a margin of fewer than 5 percentage points. Many were uncontested; most were landslides. It is a stark statement of how unhappy people are that some 60 districts this year have close races (less than a 10 percent difference).
Voters are looking for a real change, but our broken system makes it harder and harder for elections to register their wishes. If Democrats take over control, they will be handed a mandate for reforming a system that is broken. But not much will happen without an independent citizens movement of great strength.
Where are the Checks and Balances?
Keith Olbermann
Tuesday, November 7, 2006 by MSNBC Interactive
We are, as every generation, inseparable from our own time.
Thus is our perspective, inevitably that of the explorer looking into the wrong end of the telescope.
But even accounting for our myopia, it’s hard to imagine there have been many elections more important than this one, certainly not in non-presidential years.
And so we look at the verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein yesterday, and, with the very phrase “October, or November, Surprise” now a part of our vernacular, and the chest-thumping coming from so many of the Republican campaigners today, each of us must wonder about the convenience of the timing of his conviction and sentencing.
But let us give history and coincidence the benefit of the doubt—let’s say it’s just “happened” that way—and for a moment not look into the wrong end of the telescope.
Let’s perceive instead the bigger picture:
Saddam Hussein, found guilty in an Iraqi court.
Who can argue against that?
He is officially, what the world always knew he was: a war criminal.
Mr. Bush, was this imprimatur, worth the cost of 2,832 American lives, and thousands more American lives yet to be lost?
Is the conviction of Saddam Hussein the reason you went to war in Iraq?
Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist?
Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the connection between Iraq and al-Qaida that did not exist?
Or did you go to war in Iraq to break the bonds of tyranny there, while installing the mechanisms of tyranny here?
Or did you go to war in Iraq because you felt the need to wreak vengeance against somebody, anybody?
Or did you go to war in Iraq to contain a rogue state which, months earlier, your own administration had declared had been fully contained by sanctions?
Or did you go to war in Iraq to keep gas prices down?
How startling it was, sir, to hear you introduce oil to your stump speeches over the weekend.
Not four years removed from the most dismissive, the most condescending, the most ridiculing denials of the very hint at, as Mr. Rumsfeld put it, this “nonsense.”
There you were, campaigning in Colorado, in Nebraska, in Florida, in Kansas — suddenly turning this ‘unpatriotic idea’ into a platform plank.
“You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources,” you told us. “And then you can imagine them saying, ‘We’re going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following.’”
Having frightened us, having bullied us, having lied to us, having ignored and rewritten the Constitution under our noses, having stayed the course, having denied you’ve stayed the course, having belittled us about “timelines” but instead extolled “benchmarks,” you’ve now resorted, sir, to this?
We must stay in Iraq to save the $2 gallon of gas?
Mr. President, there is no other conclusion we can draw as we go to the polls tomorrow.
Sir, you have been making this up as you went along.
This country was founded to prevent anybody from making it up as they went along.
Those vaunted Founding Fathers of ours have been so quoted up, that they appear as marble statues: like the chiseled guards of China, or the faces on Mount Rushmore. But in fact they were practical people and the thing they obviously feared most was a government of men and not laws.
They provided the checks and balances for a reason.
No one man could run the government the way he saw fit — unless he, at the least, took into consideration what those he governed saw.
A House of Representatives would be the people’s eyes.
A Senate would be the corrective force on that House.
An executive would do the work, and hold the Constitution to his chest like his child.
A Supreme Court would oversee it all.
Checks and balances.
Where did that go, Mr. Bush?
And what price did we pay because we have let it go?
Saddam Hussein will get out of Iraq the same way 2,832 Americans have and thousands more.
He’ll get out faster than we will.
And if nothing changes tomorrow, you, sir, will be out of the White House long before the rest of us can say we are out of Iraq.
And whose fault is this?
Not truly yours. You took advantage of those of us who were afraid, and those of us who believed unity and nation took precedence over all else.
But we let you take that advantage.
And so we let you go to war in Iraq to oust Saddam or find non-existant weapons or avenge 9/11 or fight terrorists who only got there after we did or as cover to change the fabric of our Constitution or for lower prices at The Texaco or…?
There are still a few hours left before the polls open, sir. There are many rationalizations still untried.
And whatever your motives of the moment, we the people have, in true good faith and with the genuine patriotism of self-sacrifice (of which you have shown you know nothing), we have let you go on making it up as you went along.
Unchecked and unbalanced. Vote.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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