Long Time Coming

Burns and Allen conceded! Democrats control the House and the Senate. We finally have a system with checks on the executive branch!


Forget about impeachment, I just want my rights back. Let's start by renewing Habeas Corpus.

We've waited a long time for this.

The Red State Blues

It was a bittersweet victory for progressives in Idaho. We took control of the House, and it appears we may have control of the Senate as well, but Idaho's Democratic candidates did not fare so well.

In the 1st Congressional District we had a very strong contender in Larry Grant. His contender, Bill Sali is one of the most conservative members of the Idaho legislature. During an argument on the floor this year Idaho House Speaker Bruce Newcomb of Burley, a Republican, was quoted saying, "That idiot (Sali) is just an absolute idiot. He doesn’t have one ounce of empathy in his whole fricking body. And you can put that in the paper."

Sali won last night by 10,000+ votes.

U.S. House - District 1 - 452 of 470 Precincts Reporting
 Name                 Party    Votes   Pct
 Sali, Bill           GOP    111,669 50.04
 Grant, Larry         Dem     99,687 44.67
 Olson, Dave          Ind      6,592  2.95
 Hedden-Nicely, Andy  UNT      2,823  1.27
 Smith, Paul          CST      2,379  1.07

U.S. House - District 2 - 428 of 482 Precincts Reporting
 Name                 Party    Votes   Pct
 Simpson, Mike        GOP    115,410 62.76
 Hansen, Jim          Dem     61,629 33.51
 Forth, Cameron       Ind      4,568  2.48
 Hedrick, Travis      CST      2,298  1.25

And we had a good shot at the Governorship as well and lost that too. All told the race was much closer than usual in this very red state.

Governor - 880 of 952 Precincts Reporting
 Name                 Party    Votes   Pct
 Otter, C.L. Butch    GOP    218,750 53.19
 Brady, Jerry         Dem    179,365 43.61
 Richardson, Marvin   CST      6,585  1.60
 Dunlap, Ted          Lib      6,582  1.60

There were small victories. State Representative District 17B, the district I worked heavily in 2 years ago to win for Sean Spence and ended up loosing by 7 votes, Sue Chew won easily for the Democrats. We picked up several House seats around Boise.

And we are progressive in one key important backward way. We don't have electronic voting machines! We even have hundreds of people manually checking the ballots for hanging chads! How hip is that?

In fact, many things about Idaho remained constant:

• We hate gays. HJR2 added even more wording around marriage to a code that already forbid gay marriage in Idaho. Some day our children will look back at laws like this with the same disgust we view slavery, suffrage and racism.


• We hate taxes. Proposition 1 failed, which attempted to direct fund exclusively to public education. Funding education!? My word! What a waste of our tax dollars educating our youth!


• We hate outsiders. A campaign funded by a wealthy New York lawyer to rewrite takings laws and negate zoning failed to pass (this is the one good thing in this list).


• We're stupid. Idaho voters gave their support through an advisory vote for Jim Risch's move to transfer property taxes to sales taxes. This results of course, for everyone who isn't a millionaire vast increases in taxes. But with some careful wording Idaho voters were too stupid to realize that "property tax relief" only applied to Potlatch and Simplot.

To wrap-up, Idahoans confirmed that they are homophobic, taxophobic, xenophobic and downright stupid. But alas, hope springs from the most unlikely of fountains. From the New York Times this morning:

New York Plans to Make Gender Personal Choice
Article Tools Sponsored By
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: November 7, 2006

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.
More (after advert splash)

Here's the loophole my gay and lesbian friends. (I know, I know, it requires one of you reverse gender. So it's a little complicated, sorry about that.)

But wouldn't it be worth it to apply for a marriage license in Idaho?

After all, you would legally be a man and a woman. Married in what our newly-elected Governor triumphantly labeled this morning, "The reddest of the Red States."

Steal Back Your Vote

Republicans began today with a 5% advantage or 4.5 million votes thanks to a series of moves (described below) which allowed them to purge poor, black, latino and jewish voters from the registries.

There is something you can do about it, and today: VOTE. And don't let them hand you a provisional ballot. Go home, get ID and a utility bill and demand a real ballot.

As Greg Palast points out, "you can’t win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. If you can’t get the 55% you need for regime change, then you’re just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don’t deserve to take charge."

For specific advice on How to Steal Back Your Vote, go to
gregpalast.com/steal-back-your-vote

HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION
Published by Greg Palast November 6th, 2006 in Articles
by Greg Palast for The Guardian (UK), Monday November 6, 2006

Here’s how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I’m not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won’t be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they’ll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We’ve found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here’s how they’ll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind

On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year’s Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act — strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can’t be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won’t feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School’s Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush’s Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don’t worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that’s the point. It’s not the number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example, California’s Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, “verified” them and got almost every single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain victims of the “Jose Crow” treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican’s candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ — partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game

A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic (i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration data.

Sounds benign, but it’s not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are “protecting the integrity of the vote.”

I’ve heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them “caging lists” — and it wasn’t about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters — a very Democratic demographic — to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a “provisional” ballot — which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted — 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn’t punch (its chad got “hung”), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it “spoilage.” I call it, “inaugurating Republicans.” Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will “spoil” this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or “blank” are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That’s where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don’t respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don’t go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that’s why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let’s Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for “improper ID.”

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes “spoiled” by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let’s not forget to include the one million “provisional” ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there’s one more group of votes that won’t be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That’s morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up — all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled — and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you… steal back your vote.

It’s true you can’t win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime’s sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can’t get 55%, then you’re just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don’t deserve to win back America.

For specific advice on How to Steal Back Your Vote, go to
gregpalast.com/steal-back-your-vote

Restoring Justice

This is a powerful video on Common Ground, a grassroots collective working with the residents of New Orleans to rebuild their communities. As I wrote earlier, this spring I will be returning again to Louisiana to volunteer. I invite you to join me.

My plan is to arrive with everything necessary to rebuild several homes from demolition to drywall. I'll need tools, supplies and motivated individuals. Join me and Common Ground to make true positive change.

Common Ground: Solidarity not Charity
Common Ground Collective, 22 min.

download or view on google video

'Weener Wrap-Up

Halloween. Two costumes, three nights, six parties. The highlight reel:

Caesar Salad prepped for the H3 Halloween Ball


Decorating pumpkins. Some use finger paint, some use knives...


Real men use power tools


Carving Party Ignited, sawzaw creation lower right


Stand back landlubbers, Mer-Man is ready to hit the town

The City that Care Forgot

Last March I went down to New Orleans to assist with the rebuilding as a volunteer. It was gratifying and frustrating at the same time. The city is truly destroyed. It was outrageous then and even more so now over a year later.

Now Greg Palast has uncovered that it is not because New Orleaners aren't able to rebuild, but instead because it is not in the best interest of wealthy speculators and those in power to let it happen.

Private security firms like Blackwater run fenced RV parks for evacuated residents (often against their will) miles from the City. The only way in or out of these prisons is one bus, that only goes to Wal-Mart. Here Palast explains, residents are trapped:

They may only have a crappy little FEMA trailer, or they may be stuck somewhere else but if they come in (to New Orleans) they loose what they've been given. They're basically being paid. Like for example, the little tiny stipend, like $2,000 from FEMA. You go back to your place you don't get it. You don't get that rental subsidy, so what happens is that you are basically being paid to stay out of the city if you're poor.

You are being paid to stay out of the City.

But I want to emphasize, it's not just the poor, everyone's been hit. This is a city that is 2/3rds demolished, and they haven't taken out the debris yet...

There's is this idea that New Orleaners are saying, "Gimme a handout, gimme a handout."

Every New Orleanen I spoke with: white, black, rich, poor said, "We don't want a handout. Would Mr. Bush please get his foot off our neck and let us rebuild."

All we expect of the federal government is to fix the levees, so that we don't drown again. Tell us, see what the Bush administration has done is they have not made it clear where you will be allowed to rebuild. Some people are rebuilding houses not knowing if they are going to be told, "Sorry you can't move in."

So tell us what the rules are so we can move back in. Fix the levees so we don't drown while we're rebuilding. And then get out of our way. They're not asking for some big handout. Rahim and his group (Common Ground Collective) are building units with the local people. I met people who are doing it themselves, you saw Mr. Irving and his home... basically the federal government is taking every bureaucratic step to keep people from doing it themselves. Cause that's what they want to do.

New Orleans: Big Easy to Big Empty
Greg Palast, 25 minutes with 30 min. interview following

download or view on google video

I am going to return this spring and volunteer again, only this time not with ACORN whose St. Louis staff's non-existent work ethic frustrated me but with those locals who have returned and are working to rebuild New Orleans, the Common Ground Collective
.

I'll be putting together a crew to head down there this spring. We'll bring our own tools, find our own lodging and work like dogs. But there's many hours in a day, and I can sleep when I'm dead. Most of Common Ground's work right now is in Algiers and that means we'll only be a couple blocks away from crawdads and Abitas on the porch at the Old Point Bar.

Defiling the Beautiful Game

In September, I resumed playing football (or soccer as us Yanks are forced to call it) with a co-ed club after a long hiatus. I didn't realize how much I missed it.

Kicking the ball around is such childish fun. It's as if I'm back playing with my Tonka trucks in the sandbox. Last week was by all measures bad, but five minutes of chasing a ball around and stopping a shot with my genitals still couldn't wipe the smile of delight from my face.

Our first game is this Sunday and I'm a little worried. The one problem with having played so much competitive ball in my past is invariably I get too tied up in the competition and in it I loose the simple joy of playing. I'm hoping the fact that it is a co-ed league will keep it light. Apparently the guys on any one team can only score two goals total each game. This should present a fun challenge.

The only true negative in all this is that we'll be playing the bastardized version of the game known as "indoor soccer." The boards remove so much beauty.

Along the same lines, I just saw the blokes at Top Gear had a second Car Football Challenge and as always it's brilliant entertainment. Not quite as amusing as car darts or driving Minis off ski jumps but it sure looks like one heck of a good time. If I ever come into money this is what we'll do at parties my friends.