Author: michael o. allen

  • Follow all instructions when you vote

    My friend Tamara recently alerted me to this diary over at DailyKos. The diarist is sounding the alarm over a potential source of confusion with the voting systems in North Carolina. The gist of it is that, under North Carolina law, voting a straight party ticket doesn’t register any vote for president or vice president.…

  • Gen. Powell endorses Sen. Obama

    ‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Oct. 19, 2008: Guests — Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell (Ret.), Chuck Todd, David Brooks, Jon Meacham, Andrea Mitchell, Joe Scarborough MR. TOM BROKAW: Our issues this Sunday: He served as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state and was once called the man most likely to become…

  • Meet in St. Louis

    Day’s Campaigning Shows an Inverted Political Plane By MICHAEL POWELL and MICHAEL COOPER ST. LOUIS — There was the feel of a political world turned upside down on Saturday as Senator John McCain found himself defending North Carolina and Virginia, while SenatorBarack Obama was greeted by huge crowds in Missouri, which Republicans had also considered…

  • Tribune endorsement

    FROM THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE EDITORIAL BOARD Barack Obama for president 2:33 PM CDT, October 17, 2008 Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama campaigns in Roanoke, Va. today. (Getty photo by Joe Raedle / October 17, 2008) However this election turns out, it will dramatically advance America’s slow progress toward equality and inclusion. It took Abraham Lincoln’s…

  • NYT Editorial-The Acorn Story

    In Wednesday night’s debate, John McCain warned that a group called Acorn is “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.” Viewers may have been wondering what Mr. McCain was talking about. So were we. Acorn is a nonprofit group that…

  • Read blogs, not newspapers

    Certainly blogs are the way to go if you want the real story behind the sudden discovery by the United States Justice Department and the FBI that the community organizing group, ACORN, may have perpetrated voter registration fraud. Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo really covered the hell out of the U.S. attorney firings story last.…

  • Conyers’ letter

    House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr., (D-Michigan), wrote a letter to AG Michael Mukasey and FBI Director John Mueller on Thursday to let them know that he’s watching their disgraceful investigation of the community organizing group ACORN. Here’s a link to the letter: conyers081016 Excerpts: It is with shock and disappointment that I read…

  • From Deborah’s blog to God’s . . .

    My Facebook friend Deborah White (her blog is called Deborah’s US Liberal Politics Blog) has followed the campaigns, watched all the debates, done the research, and come up with Five Reasons Why McCain Will Lose the ’08 Election, Thursday October 16, 2008 Barack Obama decisively won all three presidential debates because of his many thoughtful…

  • Bamboozling ACORN

    Just in case anyone had any doubt that George W. Bush’s highly politicized Justice Department is up to its old tricks in the raids and investigation of ACORN’s voter registration efforts, TalkingPointsMemo posted a video of a similar initiative back in 2006. The scumbag du jour was Bradley Schlozman, a thug with a history of…

  • ‘Joe the Liar’

    (Photo: Jim Young/Reuters) Wurzelbacher speaking to Sen. Barack Obama about taxes while the candidate campaigned near Toledo, Ohio, last week. And so “Joe the Plumber” dies a swift, ignominious death. In so doing, he enters the pantheon of fictitious Republican agitprop–such as Reagan’s apocryphal Cadillac-driving welfare queens–that have no basis in reality. “Joe the Plumber,”…