Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.
The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.
As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.
The attached video from the Daily Show is a hilarious must watch, but also annoying to see how we in Central Virginia are represented to the rest of the country by this woman. FYI- Jon Stewart attended William and Mary so he knows Central Virginia quite well himself. This woman hasn’t been paying attention and she’s living in the past just like the man she’s working for. Central Virginia, what she refers to as “Real Virginia” is changing and changing fast and she either didn’t get the memo or chooses to ignore it.
Pretending we are not trending blue must be getting harder and harder to say with a straight face no matter how much your paid, what with standing room only at Democratic events, a Dem Gov, a Dem Senator, and Mark Warner expected to win in a landslide Nov 4th. to round out the trifecta.
The icing on the cake was Obama’s visit to Richmond today, filling the Coliseum with 7,000 more outside as an overflow crowd. The city was frozen with gridlock and in my 15 years here I have never seen such electricity. Filled with “Real Virginians”, all locals,a real busy day in Richmond Virginia,the Capital of Virginia. Everybody looked pretty real to me, and really really blue……
Among the photographs taken by the photog Platon of hundreds of men and women who volunteered to serve in the military and were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan was this striking one of Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. Gen. Colin Powell mentioned the photograph in denouncing the religious bias of people who were accusing Sen. Barack Obama of being a muslim.
This issue has bothered me all year long and everyone has acted disgracefully on the subject, even my candidate, Sen. Barack Obama.
“He’s a muslim,” people have said about him.
Obama, who has taken on all questions and issues with elan, somehow could not figure out how to handle this issue.
His response has basically been: “Who are you calling a muslim? I am a christian!”
The accusation of course rests on the premise that all muslims are terrorists, which is a disgraceful lie unbecoming of our great nation.
Americans who use someone’s supposed religion as a wedge issue should be ashamed of themselves. This is what I expected to hear from Obama. He has handled all other questions that have come his way this election season so expertly that I was mystified why the answer to this one eluded him, why he could not find the grace to not only beat back this slander but welcome muslims into his ever widening tent.
Leave it to Gen. Colin Powell in his endorsement statement to restore my faith in our nation. Gen. Powell found just the right words. First, he saidhe was troubled that Republicans (and some Democrats) have been spreading rumors that Obama is a Muslim.
Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.”
This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards—Purple Heart, Bronze Star—showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.
Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.
It was a tremendously clarifying statement and an affirmation of our diverse and pluralistic society, which has been the envy of the world. We largely don’t engage in ethnic cleansing despite our multitudes of peoples. We strive to build a tolerant society. Gen. Powell told us that even, especially, in the pursuit of the highest office in the land, we must remember the nation that we aspire to be.
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE, part I
Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast “provisional” ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.
STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE, PART II
This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year’s race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP’s nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. “I don’t think the Democrats get it,” says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. “All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”
Be Careful how you vote! This article and the one below it highlights the subtle, not so subtle, and beyond annoying rules, regs, and procedures that Robert Kennedy Jr. believes are part of a Voter Deterrence Strategy that could tip this election to a false victory.
At the very least we have the setup of a tight election begging to be contested,resulting in a recount that will make the 2000 Florida “Hanging Chad” train wreck look like a teaser.
Make no mistake, all this punditry predicting that this election is as good as over is not a good thing. As a woman of a certain age who has disected the predicted and actual outcome of every election since 1972 all this outcome predicting is endangering the race and risks influencing the voter turnout.
Truth is to win, the winner and his team in the field, need to stay hungry right up to the last day of the campaign. Float the idea it is a done deal and last minute field campaign workers lose their hungry edge and start the party early. Float the the idea it is a done deal for your candidate and some are less inclined to vote ” no matter what” b/c the idea is floated it isn’t quite so urgent.
In an election with the potential to be as close as this one, this could be decisive. Journalists need to remember they should report the news not create or influence it. Click on the article below to read more on this important subject. And Don’t forget to Vote-no matter what!
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. You have to vote for president and THEN you can vote a straight party ticket for the remaining races.
This is a well-known problem. It even has its own Snopes page. The problem causes North Carolina to have the highest under-vote for president in the country, and the law that creates this situation ought to be repealed.
Ballot instructions in North Carolina alert the voter to the straight-party-ticket issue. The problem is that too few people take the time to read the instructions. (Which also brings up another of my tips: Take your time.)
So let this be a lesson to you no matter where you vote. Take your time. Read the instructions and follow them. Otherwise, you could end up throwing your vote away.
Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.
https://michaeloallen.com/ 