MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Trump: “More Profiling, Please”

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Donald TrumpIt is no longer a rumor that Bill Clinton talked to Donald Trump in the weeks before he ran for president.

For the people who believe that, Trump gives them ammunition daily. It’s like Trump calls the HRC campaign headquarters each day to get his talking points about how to further kneecap himself. Or, maybe BC is the ventriloquist that makes the Trump dummy spout nonsense to make himself unpalatable to the general election electorate.

How else would you explain Trump on Sunday calling for profiling Muslims?

See a video of his call-in to CBS’s Face-the-Nation here:

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Now, why would a former president whose wife was a certain candidate for POTUS be advising another man to get in the race for the same office? Some conspiracy minded people have gone so far as to say that BC planted Trump in the Republican nomination contest to destabilize the GOP and smooth the way for his wife becoming POTUS.

Republicans may believe in profiling but they don’t believe in stating it so baldly as Trump is prone to do on this and on so many other issues that the GOP prefer to hint at, dog whistle, if you will. Trump, God bless him, just prefers to say what he believes.

June 20, 2016
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Suppressing the vote

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Protect This Election By Andrew Gumbel

This article appeared in the November 10, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Not so long ago, when Karl Rove was still dreaming of a permanent Republican majority based on his “50 percent plus one” model for fighting and winning elections, 2008 was shaping up as possibly the dirtiest election season yet.

The plan was straightforward: to use every legislative and executive lever available to the GOP to suppress the votes of minorities, students, the poor, the transient and the elderly; and to denounce any attempt by the other side to level the playing field as a monstrous exercise in systemic voter fraud.

A lot of pieces of that plan are still in place and could still pose a threat to the integrity of the November 4 elections if any one of them–a crucial Senate race, say, if not also the race for the presidency–turns out to be remotely close.

Continue . . .

October 25, 2008
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Steal back your vote

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Theft of the 2008 Election

Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president? by ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST

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.”

Continue . . .

October 21, 2008
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Now this is more like it!

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Obama spokesperson Bill Burton today released the following statement:

“We will take no lectures from John McCain who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern Presidential campaign history. His discredited ads with disgusting lies are running all over the country today. He runs a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose an election. Politico’s Johnathan Martin explains why. Money quote:

McCain seems to have made a choice that many politicians succumb to but that he had always promised to avoid — he appears ready to do whatever it takes to win, even it if soils his reputation.

“We recognize it’s not going to be 2000 again,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, alluding to the media’s swooning coverage of McCain’s ill-fated crusade against then-Gov. George W. Bush and the GOP establishment. “But he lost then. We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

Rogers, who hung tough with McCain through the dark days of the primary and has lived through every high and low of this turbulent and unpredictable race, argues that they tried to run a high-ground campaign and sought to keep the candidate in front of the media in the fashion he enjoys. His point: No one paid any attention.

“We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain. So now you’ve got to be forward-leaning in everything,” he said.

I don’t fault McCain for being negative — even nasty — if he thinks it’s what he needs to do to win. But there’s an ethical way to go negative and an unethical way to go negative. It’s not clear yet which works better, but it’s clear which one McCain has chosen.

Cross-posted from Facebook.

September 13, 2008
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