Chris Boese's Weblog

GOP Herbert Hoovers in the House are to blame

Link: Lawmakers quickly point fingers after bailout fails - CNN.com.

It boggles the mind, to hear the post-mortems on the near-catestrophic failure of a bank bailout plan in the US House of Representatives today (on the eve of the day that people may start a quarterly exodus from hedge funds, Sept 30).

By far, the MOST boggling aspect of this historic 228-205 vote where Republicans voted against the measure 2-1, against their leadership (and their lamest of lame duck presidents), is the DUMB ASS explanation/rationalization given below (I had to highlight it in bold, because it is SO frakking dumb).

I mean, if they want to make up excuses, couldn't they even make up a real excuse, like the fact that they are prepared to sacrifice the national economy for their own pathetic re-elections? If the country basically disappears into bread lines, what exactly are you being re-elected to govern, anyway? A sad empty shell?

But no, they weigh in essentially thus: "Nancy Pelosi gave a speech we didn't like right before the vote, and it hurt our scorched-earth Republican feelings because it didn't honor our non-reality-based Bushie-constructed delusional universe the way the cable news commentators always do." (I'm paraphrasing)

So in a fit of pique over a SPEECH, the GOP bailed on the country?!

Hey, I didn't vote for these dingle-dorfs. Seems to me that sacrificing the national economy because the House Majority Leader reminded you that you drove the country down the toilet in eight years of corrupt GOP rule will go down in history as one of THE most remarkably childish excuses ever given outside of a day care center.

And they think giving that reason for a vote will help them get re-elected? Only in talk radio-land, I suppose.

Like I said, it boggles the mind. Except that it brings into my memory Rep. Newt Gingrich's hold-my-breath-till-I-turn-blue standoff with then-President Clinton. Gringrich was the first scorched-earth Republican to make a major push on the old scorched-earth tactics, before Rep. Tom DeLay cornered K Street and turned it into an art form.

Problem is, you can only scorch the earth so many times before you reach the point where you have little left to scorch, especially if the entire national economy goes in the toilet, following the decimation of the national military and National Guard, the Constitution, the Justice Dept, the CIA, oh the list just goes on and on. Then where does that leave you?

Link: Lawmakers quickly point fingers after bailout fails - CNN.com.

Lawmakers quickly point fingers after bailout fails

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill immediately blamed each other for the failure of a $700 billion bailout package in the House on Monday.

Republican leaders speak to reporters on Monday after the bailout bill failed to pass.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said there would be no revote on the bill on Monday because members had left the Capitol.

It was unclear in what form the congressional leadership would bring the bill back to the House floor.

The stock market immediately dipped hundreds of points after it became apparent that the bill would fail. The Dow closed down 777 points at the end of trading Monday.

The package, which was backed by both the Democratic and Republican congressional leadership as well as President Bush, failed in the House by a vote of 228-205.

A majority of Democrats voted for the bill. A majority of Republicans voted against it. The Republican vote was more than 2-1 against the bill.

After the vote, President Bush was "disappointed" that the House failed to pass the bailout, saying, "We put forward a plan that was big because we got a big problem."

[...]

While thanking Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for negotiating on the bill, Pelosi said on the House floor that the Democrats had insisted that the bill "protect the American people and Main Street from the meltdown on Wall Street."

Pelosi also said the cost of the bailout "is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush administration's failed economic policies -- policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision and no discipline in the system."

After the vote, Boehner said, "Americans are angry, and so are my colleagues. They don't want to have to vote for a bill like this, and I understand that." 

"I think that we need to renew our efforts to find a solution that Congress can support. I do believe that we could have gotten there today had it not been for this partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House," he said.

But Democrats dismissed the Republican complaints, saying the Republican leadership failed to convince their members to support the bill.

"They lost 2-1 on their own side, voting against their president, their presidential candidate and against every leader in their own party," one Democratic source said.

[...]

Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who was a key negotiator of the bill, said Republican leaders were blaming Pelosi because they were embarrassed that they failed to get a majority of the Republicans to vote for the bill. 

"There's a terrible crisis affecting the American economy. We have come together on a bill to alleviate the crisis," Frank said. "And because somebody hurt their feelings they decide to punish the country? I mean, I would not have imputed that degree of pettiness and hypersensitivity."

[...]

   

Gov. Palin and Katie Couric get real and adorable on Saturday Night Live

Yeow! Hysterical...

Link: Saturday Night Live - Couric / Palin Open - Video - NBC.com.

National Election: Something sobering to think about before we get ready to vote again

An older article from 2006, but extremely relevant now. Here's hoping legions of bipartisan poll watchers are out in force to police this distributed effort that had to be coordinated at an extremely granular level. One granular, distributed effort must be met by an equal and opposite granular Army of Watchers!

Link: Was the 2004 Election Stolen? : Rolling Stone.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM

[...]

Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

[...]

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

[...]

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36)

[...]

The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

[...]

Go back and read the whole article! It will blow your mind!

Link: Was the 2004 Election Stolen? : Rolling Stone.

Watching in Wasilla - My brother makes it into the NYTimes

Link: Watching in Wasilla - The New York Times > U.S. > Slide Show > Slide 5 of 10.

My brother was working the Sarah Palin speech in a Wasilla bar, Tailgaters... along with representatives of all the media of the Western World. (He's the guy in silhouette in the window, see the video camera?)

Residents of tiny Wasilla weren't the only ones who watched Governor Palin's speech. According to Nielsen Media Research, about 37 million viewers tuned in on Wednesday.

Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

He also contributed to this AP video while shooting that day (just documenting this for family posterity).

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080904.wvalaskareac_palin0904/VideoStory/VideoLineup/News

Told you they'd be playing Heart, Barracuda!

RNC rolls with the 80s tonight! LOL. Wonder if Sarah had input into the music? The string of songs playing as the balloons fell sounded like the soundtrack we played on high school basketball bus trips!

More disturbing, I think, is that McCain did something with that speech that I can't quite put my finger on, until I get the transcript, but I know one thing: he was not talking to the Republican base, and said plenty of things that should either make that base nervous, or angry.

One thing for certain, he took shots at standard operating procedure politics of KARL ROVE et. al., of DeLay, of K Street, of Abramoff. He sounded more like the man who is married to the bio that played in the film about his wife, who by most rights, should be a Democrat, but that she is extremely rich, and married to John McCain. Cindy McCain was definitely intriguing, but I didn't understand how she wasn't allowed to be interesting ALONE, but always had to link her back to her Daddy, like a woman can't be that interesting by herself, without invoking Daddy.

But McCain, who were you talking to tonight? Not the Dems, but who was your audience? And was it lip service? Will Rove and the puppetmasters still call the real policy shots behind the scenes? Are the power-brokers still in power, and using you as a front man?

That's the doubt that should keep Dems fighting for Obama, because while McCain is certainly interesting, we have NO CLEAR TRUST that the evil fascist authoritarian police-staters have been exorcised from the deep bowels of Washington, where they have taken root.

The dark side of the RNC carnival in St. Paul, Minnesota

Link: St. Paul Mayor and Media Mum on Journalism Crackdown | CommonDreams.org. (from Huffington Post)

Dark news coming out of St. Paul regarding a coordinated harassment of the press covering events in and around the Republican National Convention.

I have to say, this is some of the most disturbing news I've heard in a long time, because what I read between the lines is that FEDERAL SURVEILLANCE of journalistic entities is being made in the name of the Patriot Act (the implications: convention-credentialed journalists = potential terrorists?! Pray tell, then, how did they get security clearance and credentials for the convention floor?!).

The dissemination of locations and movements of members is being shared with these so-called "Fusion Centers" of Posse Comitatus- and Insurrection Act-violating Secret Service, military and mercenary paramilitary groups (Blackwater?), police entities, and further, some unidentified "Others" that I can only think of as the "Brown Shirts" of the 2000s. The fact that this is happening at all, let alone that it now appears that journalists and citizen journalists are being targeted for wiretapping and other surveillance, should disturb all Americans.

I make this claim of surveillance because of the obvious coordination and home-targeting in the sweeps and raids. The St. Paul "enforcers" obviously knew where they were going and what they were after, in their "Department of Pre-Crime" and "non-crime" actions.

Even darker are the implications for the legions of citizen journalists (I Witness Video was one of the first groups targeted) and bloggers, who will undoubtedly be reporting on the way they were treated, and other observers who just happened to be swept up in a pincer move that left the crowd being "herded" with no way to obey the police orders, because the crowd could not move in the direction the police wanted them to go (a dead-end).

The police orders seem designed to force people to be at odds with police directions, for the sole purpose of giving them a reason to be arrested.

For further eyewitness accounts, be sure to catch Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now podcast for Tuesday, Sept 3. It is quite sobering.

It feels like little more than a new Fascist Information State. It makes the prospect of the GOP winning the presidency and continuing the policies of the Bushies who created this encroaching totalitarianism a nightmare worthy of becoming an expatriot.

Read the bits below, and you tell me if it doesn't send a massive chill up your spine.

Published on Wednesday, September 3, 2008 by The Huffington Post

St. Paul Mayor and Media Mum on Journalism Crackdown

by Timothy Karr 

In St. Paul this week, a new generation of media makers is under assault by the city's mayor and law enforcement officers.

These local officials think freedom of the press is a privilege that extends only to their closest allies in mainstream media. 

For the rest of us, it's a crime.

While reports of brutal police arrests and home invasions are still coming in, by Tuesday night the picture became clear. Dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers had been arrested in an orchestrated round up of independents covering the Republican National Convention.

Targeting the New Press

The list of those detained ranges from the well-known (Democracy Now's Amy Goodman) and well-established (Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke) -- to the bootstrapping bloggers and video makers who are covering local protests for TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness and other outlets. 

Police -- with firearms drawn -- raided a meeting of the video journalists and arrested independent media, bloggers and videomakers. Journalists covering protests have been pointed out by authorities, blasted with tear gas and pepper spray, and brutalized while in custody.

Democracy Now's Goodman reports that a U.S. Secret Service agent ripped her press credentials from her neck the moment she identified herself to him as a member of the media. Her producers emerged yesterday from their jail cells bloodied and scarred, reporting unusually harsh treatment at the hands of local and federal authorities.

Mayor Coleman's Silence

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman hasn't responded to repeated phone and e-mail requests for comments on the targeting of journalists. Instead he praised the work of Police Chief John Harrington and painted those arrested as a small band of outsiders and vandals intent upon committing felonies against the good people of his city.

In less than a day, more than 35,000 people have signed a letter from Free Press (my employer) to Mayor Coleman condemning the arrests and demanding that he and local prosecutors immediately "free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them."

But when Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald pressed Harrington and Coleman to respond to widespread reports of journalist arrests, Harrington claimed ignorance while Coleman stood silent at his side.

Police spokesman Don Walsh intervened only to say that "arrest have been made" and that all those arrested were involved in criminal activities and not "simply non-participants."

[...]

The Star Tribune itself is owned by out-of-towners from Avista Capital Partner, a New York City private equity firm specializing in energy, healthcare and media investments.

Other than a brief story about Goodman's arrest, the paper has failed to report on the apparent targeting of independent reporters, even though groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have sounded the alarm.

Sweeping Real Journalism Under the Carpet

Here we have every indication of an orchestrated assault by federal and local law enforcement agencies to stifle independent sources of information. As shocking as this conduct is, more disturbing is the fact that the mayor's office and the local daily seem so unconcerned.

[...]

As a powerful news organization, the Star Tribune should know better, and should be sticking up for a free press, regardless of what form it takes.

But this week, the democratic spirit of journalism can be witnessed not in the "Strib's" newsroom, but among the rough-hewn videos and blogs of those who are covering the convention from the ground up.