The Most Important Thing You Do Tomorrow...

Besides being able to wake up, the most important thing tomorrow is to vote. The powers that be are trying to do everything and anything to suppress your right as an American to choose who will represent you in government.



So if you are in a swing state, remember to stay in line if the lines get long. They may try to test our will but they cannot break our spirit.

Obama Camp Provides Useful Tips To Protect Your Vote

This five minute short is a fantastic way to learn about Republican strategies that help to suppress the vote and how to get around them. Making sure your vote counts is not only important for the integrity of the system, but also that you ensure your voice is heard tomorrow. We are working towards a new kind of politics in America where hate and bigotry do not play a role but for now we must fight against the evil with full knowledge of how the old racist and dare I say, classist system works.

Republicans In Virginia Think You're Stupid

It is undeniable that Senator Barack Obama holds a large lead over Senator John McCain, but that isn't stopping the Grand Old Party and their compatriots from trying to take the election by nefarious means. Voter suppression efforts are going on across the nation in order to stop the massive influx of new voters from casting their ballots. The problem though is that in many instances, the courts are throwing out many Republican challenges, such as those in Montana, Ohio and Georgia. With their legal maneuvers failing nearly everywhere their lawyers go, anti-Democratic voting efforts are using the most basic and simplistic attacks to trick voters.

From Raising Kaine:

Unfortunately, we are going to have to be constantly vigilent about crap like this.

A phony State Board of Elections flier advising Republicans to vote on Nov. 4 and Democrats on Nov. 5 is being circulated in several Hampton Roads localities, according to state election officials.

In fact, Election Day for voters of all political stripes remains Nov. 4.

It's disgusting, obviously, and possibly illegal (the state police are looking into the matter). Anyway, the bottom line is this: stay diligent, and...

GET TO THE POLLS ON NOVEMBER 4!!!

Yes, November 4th, it is a Tuesday and like every other year, we are voting on the first Tuesday of November. If you are lucky enough to live in a state that allows early voting then do it, especially in swing states expecting unprecedented turnout numbers. Seriously though, are there people out there that would still believe this crap? Particularly this year, we are expecting as many hurdles thrown our way as possible. Everyone voting for Obama and aware of the implications for our racially-tainted nation should know his opponents will be doing whatever they can to keep people from voting. Something like this is should be considered child's play.

How The Republicans Will Try To Stop You From Voting

There have been and will be plenty of conspiracy theories on both fringes of the political landscape concerning the election and the candidates running. However, there are identifiable facts that show the right is actively trying to suppress voter turnout to magnify the power of the limited conservative base. There are plenty of ways that the GOP has gone at this in the past and this year is no exception. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast wrote an article in Rolling Stone to lay out the despicable truth.

From Rolling Stone:

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.

But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

The article goes into far more depth about how the process is undertaken. Already we can see the fallacious claims of voter fraud by ACORN and the pathetic attempts to connect it to Barack Obama. While the story of GOP operative Mark Jacoby has tempered the political attacks, it by no means suggests that the right's tactics of voter suppression has stopped behind the scenes. In Montana the GOP tried purging voters in heavy Democratic areas. In Ohio they tried stopping the early voting system. In Michigan the GOP tried to invalidate the registrations of people who had their homes foreclosed on. There are many more stories like this across the country, especially in states with large minority populations.

As Weyrich stated, it is best to knock off as many voters to enable a GOP victory. That is why we must fight each and every attack of theirs on our collective democracy. At the same time we must turn out as many voters as possible so that the majority of America can decide who our next President and not just the plurality of those who escaped the purging of voter rolls.

Worried About Your Vote Counting? Then Make Sure It Does!

Let's face facts people. Voting in America isn't the easiest thing to do. Some countries compel you to vote, others take holidays and some (including our very own state of Oregon) have it done by mail. Yet for the most part, voting has and is a struggle for us, yet many people remain apathetic. Tell me this, if it really didn't matter, then why have so many people fought and died for the right to choose their leaders? We're not asking you to solve the world's problems, just go out and make sure you are registered and ready to go on November 4th.

Hundreds Of Thousands Of Voters Being Purged From The Rolls....Right Now!

Every election cycle every state and county within them purge their rolls for duplicate voter registrations. It is a perfectly normal operation in order to prevent the off-chance that someone tries to commit voter fraud, though very rare in the grand scheme of things. However, when state authorities take it on themselves to go beyond the law and purge as many people as they can, then we run into problems. Apparently, they are going on across the country and naturally, the traditional media isn't reporting it. With our help in pushing them, perhaps they'll start talking like the brave independent reporters such as Greg Palast and those at Alternet.

From DailyKos:

"Kansas, Michigan and Louisiana are purging their voter lists.

http://www.alternet.org/...

Colorado dumped ONE FIFTH of all voter registrations -- the largest in history

Florida is refusing to accept 85,000 new registrants -- overwhelmingly blacks.

New Mexico: purged half of the democrats in Mora county (Hispanics) and 600.000 mailers were returned

Ohio & Nevada are scrubbing tens of 1000s of voters who lost their homes to foreclosures
(Kerry lost by a mere 10-votes per district in Ohio)

http://www.gregpalast.com/...

We have got to get this information out. To all of the folks distracted by the she-devil, get your head out of Palin's ass and help us alert the media and everyone we know.

Can you digg it? This story must get out, right now it's about 60 diggs short of making the page:
http://digg.com/...

People, if you know what digg is, then go digg this important article. If you don't, click the link and sign up. Digg gets important stories out into the world wide web without the consent of a major news editor's permission. This is an incredibly important story and with wide publication people will realize that they have to secure their place at the ballot box. It is an incredibly sad reality but one we must fight to change.

So what does that all mean? Well after you digg it, make sure you haven't been purged (especially so if you are a minority) and tell everyone you know to do the same. This year is too important for electioneering bureaucrats to be able to corrupt the system. Instead of being cynical about it, we must be proactive. Enough is enough!

Hans von Spakovsky: Another Reason I Cannot Wait For Bush's Term To Be Over

The atrocities George Bush has committed against our country in the last seven years and seven months is wide-ranging in scope and breadth. The stolen elections, signing statements, wars, battered economy, corruption, shredded Constitution....it goes on and on. One topic though that has irked me since 2001 are his choices to run certain offices in his Administration. Even with record low approval ratings, he always has the talent of picking the worst possible person for whatever job has an opening. Even now, with less than five months to go in his term, he appointed Hans von Spakovsky to the Civil Rights Commission, a man that has no respect for anyone's rights.

From TPM:

It looks like Hans von Spakovsky, an old TPM favorite, is back in business. The former Justice Department official, whose nomination to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was thwarted when Democrats objected to his long record of support for restrictions on voting rights, has been hired as a "consultant and temporary full-time employee" at the ostensibly bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) the agency confirmed to TPMmuckraker.

If Spakovsky's history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission's mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times Charlie Savage brought to light last year.

Among Spakovsky's duties will be overseeing the USCCR's report on the Justice Department's monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Monitoring the 2008 U.S. elections....not that I am surprised, but it is still outrageous for Hans to be in a position to instill confidence in our electoral process. The man thrives on thwarting the will of the public and their votes, not ensuring that they count. Five more months.....and we can start to believe in our President to appoint people to government positions that actually help to make government more respondent to the people. I wish it were January 20th already.

U.S. Atty-Gate, All About Suppressing Dem Vote

You can see the examples of it with each U.S. Attorney that was fired by Gonzales' Justice Department. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow discussed the matter yesterday: