If you can't beat 'em, cheat 'em...

There's winning, and there's winning at any cost, including integrity and a respect for the rights of your fellow citizens.

You might be surprised that there is no actual "right to vote" in the U.S. Constitution.  The ability of a person to cast a vote in this country is regarded as a core value equal to freedom or religion, freedom of speech, etc., but it's not that simple in practice.  Only a handful of items in the Constitutional relate to your actual right to vote.

Several Amendments to the Constitution prohibit the denial of voting based on race, gender, or the use of poll taxes.  However, the 10th Amendment states that any power not given to the Federal government in the Constitution belongs to the states.

This last point is the key - as long as a state is not directly violating the Constitution, they have a lot of latitude in how they manage your ability to vote.
Voting locations & hours, paper versus touchscreen, receipt or no receipt, who handles the machines and the voting records - all up to the states. This also includes setting the terms for absentee voting, early voting and provisional voting.

The other key issue, which has become a battleground in courts, is the ability to states to define guidelines for what ID one must present in order to vote.

There are several states where the outcome is a toss-up, and in the ones with Republicans in control at the state level, all sorts of games are being played to steer the outcome Republican.

There isn't just one state or one issue to talk about, so see for yourself. Go to news.google.com and search on "voter access issues" (I'll make this a link later).

These are cynical games being played with your rights by people who can't offer candidates who can win cleanly and convincingly on merit.

Remember who's behind this, and vote accordingly when the time comes to keep them or replace them.

Truth as another storm-related casualty

As the recovery from Sandy began to wear on the nerves of the most affected in NJ, a story started making the rounds on the Fox News / Brietbart circuit saying that power-repair crews from Alabama were being turned away for not being union members or agreeing to affiliate with the unions up here.

Just in time for the upcoming election, this fired up a wave of resentment online for unions and everything union-related. Of course, a story like this would be salt in the wounds for the thousands sitting in the cold and dark, wondering if these crews would have made the difference between the lights being off and on for them. Journalists would make sure to fact-check a story like this to make sure that people weren't outraged without reason, and to prevent an unjustified backlash against the crews already at work restoring power.

But then I said this story was being pushed by Fox News, didn't I?

As you can guess by now, the reality is that no crews were turned away by anyone in NJ, and that the power utilities and unions here welcome any and all assistance in a crisis without preconditions.

The incident at the heart of this was a crew from Alabama being given paperwork that led them to believe they had to join or declare affinity with the electrical workers union in NJ before being allowed to help on site. The crew from Decatur traveled as far as Virginia before stopping to get clarification on the documents, and whether they would be allowed to work if they did not agree to union membership/affiliation. During that time other crews had responded at their intended destination in NJ, so they attempted to look for work in other areas. After being stalled in Virginia most of the day Thursday, they decided to return home. All that time, other crews from Alabama and utilities from across the country were showing up in the storm-damaged areas and helping to restore power.

Late Friday at a press conference, a representative of the Decatur crew's company said the documents triggering the confusion had actually come from Electric Cities of Alabama, a coalition of the state's municipally owned utilities.

To recap:

• This was a story about one crew having logistical problems, not a blanket policy affecting all helpers. 
• They never made it to NJ, and were never turned away by anyone. 
• The papers leading to the confusion came from other electric utilities in Alabama, not unions in NJ. 

A representative of the utility held a press conference to confirm all of these points, and the video is here for all to see.

Even Fox put out a quiet correction stating that other Alabama crews are at work in in New Jersey, but the original story was still being being spread.

The reality is that there have been crews from all over, union AND non-union, working hard around the clock to get everyone back. This is difficult, often dangerous work being done by professionals - they deserve our thanks, and not to be held up as scapegoats for rumor-based political attacks.

MediaMatters has a good recap a good recap of the story behind the story, but if you don't consider them credible, take a look at the WAFF story, straight from Alabama.

The bar is set really low...

I had posted an entry the other week asking why people would vote for Mitt Romney - not why they didn't want to re-elect President Obama, but why they considered Romney to be the better option.

Only one person responded, and his case made for Romney was basically that Romney appeared presidential in the last debate.  No actual policy specifics or comparisons.  Just a gut impression.

Then I came across this video yesterday, in which an interviewer asks supporters at a recent Romney rally in Ohio what they like about him.  No leading questions, no "gotcha" tricks.  Just an open mike and some pretty scary ignorance on display.

"Romney has a plan to fix the economy".  Except that the person has no idea what "the plan" is, so how does he even believe that there is a plan, or why he's in favor of it?

"He's a Muslim.  And an atheist."  That's an either-or proposition, lady.

Take a few minutes, watch the video, and be sobered that these people in a critical swing state are motivated voters, even though they are proving that they have no actual idea what they are voting for besides a name and the fact that the name's not "Obama".

It's also worth noting that these are the ideal target voters for politicians unable to run on substance, and that these politicians are overwhelmingly conservative.  It also explains why GOP politicians in conservative states like Texas are trying to eliminate critical thinking skills from their public school curriculum. 

But hey, if you feel that the people in the video are cherry-picked examples of ignorance, and that there are meaningful, fact-based reasons to support Romney as the best choice this Tuesday, please comment below and explain why.

Same disaster, different values...

Two items from the news this morning to think about next Tuesday.  In New Jersey, Chris Christie was praising President Obama for his fast, proactive support with Federal assistance for the states being affected.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has gone curiously silent about the fact that just over a year ago in the GOP debates, he pledged to dismantle FEMA, leave disaster relief to the states with block grants, and that disaster response itself should be privatized.  His words, not anyone else's.

So when next Tuesday rolls around, remember which candidate delivered the up-front support that earned praise from his opponents, and which one believes that it's better to have for-profit companies enrich themselves through your misfortune.

Stay safe everyone.

http://www.politicususa.com/frankenstorm-arrives-romney-ryan-silent-plan-cut-fema-disaster-relief.html

A Trifecta of Wrong...

So abortion as a campaign issue is back in the news, with the debate comments of Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock lighting up the boards of the Democratic attack and Republican damage control machines.

Much has been written and broadcast since then, and it amazes me how so many people you would otherwise consider sensible find ways to do mental gymnastics and justify supporting Mourdock his allies over this.

Time to cut to the chase.  There is a lot of wrong in what's going on - three distinct levels of wrong - a trifecta of wrong, in fact.

It's wrong for politicians to base policies that impact the entire public on their personal interpretation of a religion.  Faith informs values, and values inform policies, but the public is a diverse body representing many faiths and perspectives.  There's a disturbing number of politicians and political aspirants who see the privilege of holding office as a platform to serve their faith first, and the constituents second.  When you hear candidates talk about "returning to our roots as a Christian nation", or policy needing to be "grounded in Biblical values", watch out.  These are people who see their own personal future in the afterlife being at stake if they don't use their position to advance the faith.  If it's a choice between their eternal fate or the interests & priorities of anyone else, it's not even a contest.  Even worse, too many of these people are horribly misinformed about biology, and in their religious zeal they have no motivation to learn about facts that may conflict with their faith-based certainty.

It's wrong for people to frame the idea of being "pro life" in terms of a fertilized egg having full Constitutional rights.  A girl or woman has rights, too, but in the views of Richard Mourdock or Paul Ryan, they lose some fundamental rights when they become pregnant.  Basically, they lose the right to control their own bodies, becoming little more than an incubator until the developing fetus can survive on its own.  You can't authentically be "pro life" when your position makes the health and well-being of some people less important than others.  In the case of rape victims, no one but the victim can truly understand what her experience is like.  Taking away her right to choose what happens with her body isn't treating a zygote like a person, it's taking a victim and then making her even more of one by declaring her less than a person.  The pro-life crowd doesn't concern itself with making sure the woman has adequate mental and physical health care - that's all on her.  If the pregnancy doesn't result in a healthy birth, then the woman is under a cloud of suspicion for potentially doing something deliberate to cause that.  You're just an incubator existing for the sake of someone else for 9 months, and once that child is born, truly alive by even a pro-choice view, then the final irony is that the pro-life crowd doesn't concern itself with what happens to that life.

The third great wrong is the ease with which politicians barter away the rights of women for political expediency.  "His comments were wrong, but he sincerely apologized so we can still support him".

Please.

Akin, Mourdock and the others like them were caught expressing what they truly believe, forgetting to apply the filter of political correctness first.  I believe Mourdock is sincere when he says that rape is a horrible crime and that it is the life expressed as a pregnancy that is a gift from God.  None of that changes the fact that his policy would be to deny rape victims the choice of control over their bodies once they are pregnant - the rapist has more control over his body for the next nine months than the victim has over hers.

Then you have Mitt Romney distancing himself from the comments, but refusing to withdraw his endorsement of Mourdock or even ask that the Mourdock ads featuring that endorsement be pulled.  That's because at this point they don't want to forfeit a potential GOP senate seat, and would rather have him and his reprehensible views than work with a pro-life Democrat instead.  This is selling out women to be less than full citizens for political advantage, and they're hoping to just survive until election day without things getting worse.

Three different levels of wrong, and a fourth, really, when you consider that the first three aren't enough to make more women stop voting for the GOP this year.

Why is anyone actually FOR Mitt Romney?

Politics time.  Hang in there, only a few more weeks to go.

The title is something I've been asking Romney supporters for the past few months, and in all honesty I've yet to get a good answer.  Not even "wow, you've convinced me!" good, but answers that aren't simply regurgitated Obama-bashing.

So here's the question, one more time - instead of explaining why you don't want Obama, explain why someone should want to vote for Romney.

I'd want an election that's a race between two choices that are so good I'd have a hard time deciding.  Who wouldn't?  We don't have that this year, no matter how much you may dislike Obama.

In Mitt Romney, you have a man who was raised in a privileged, elite bubble, in a world where the risks and rules that impact 99% of us never applied to him.  He was raised to be ambitious, and that's not a bad quality for anyone to possess, but he never picked up the humility and ability to couple that ambition with a genuine concern for the welfare of others that his father, George Romney, possessed and was admired for.

The younger Romney got into college because of his father's connections and when he graduated he landed at Bain through connections as well.  Nothing wrong with that, but nothing earned by merit, either.

Then at Bain, Romney was asked to take charge of a new subdivision, Bain Capital, which was only accepted after guarantees that his position and compensation would not be at risk regardless of the outcome.  That's a safety net your average entrepreneur doesn't have, and he never had to understand what it meant to have his livelihood on the line.

Then the new unit was failing, and if he treated it the way he wanted to treat GM and Chrysler three years ago, he'd have let the company go bankrupt.  That would have been a severe personal and professional setback to someone with his ambition, so he orchestrated a bailout through the FDIC.  The company didn't recover at that point, and the proper free-market response would have been to liquidate the remaining $10 million in bailout funds to the creditors and move on.  His job was still safe, but his reputation was not, so Romney gave out the millions in remaining cash in bonuses to his management team.  There was nothing left for the creditors, so they had no choice but to extend more credit and hope to earn it back over time.  This move saved Bain Capital, and over time it made Romney a virtual quarter-billionaire.  However, his accounting gimmicks cost the U.S. taxpayers $10 million in bailout financing that was never recovered.  His gain came at our loss, and it makes him all the more a hypocrite for attacking bailouts, stimulus spending, or the U.S. government losing money invested in startups like Solyndra.

This isn't opinion or a spin job from the media.  The source is in the SEC filings from Bain itself, and Romney doesn't deny it - he just doesn't talk about it, for obvious reasons.

Romney is also highly astute at working the rules of finance and taxation to get every advantage that he can to maximize his wealth.  There's nothing wrong with that either, but his carried interest deals and creative use of offshore & foreign accounts represent a man used to a world where there are different rules if you have enough wealth to leverage them.  He knows exactly how far he pushed the edge with these games, which is why he would take any criticism, even from within the GOP, rather than disclose his tax returns as his father did.

It doesn't matter what the income tax rate is for the 1% when most of the 1% get their annual revenues through capital gains and carried interest, and not "income" in the traditional sense.  In fact, under the Romney/Ryan plan, Romney would be paying a rate closer to 2%.  He'll say that's fair since corporate taxes are already paid, but corporate taxes are paid after the same games, which is why a company like GE can earn billions and pay zero annual income tax.  This is not about whether any of this is legal - it is - but it represents different rules for the wealthy versus the middle class, and that Romney seeks to maintain that uneven playing field.

So Romney moves on from Bain to "save" the Salt Lake Olympics, a high point on his resume.  Except, he did it primarily by registering as a lobbyist, and working business connections and politicians to get over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding.  "Mission accomplished", but when Romney says he knows fiscal policy in part because he rescued the Olympics and balanced that budget, he leaves out that he "balanced it" with a billion dollars of your money that wasn't repaid.

Then he decides that on the heels of his Olympic success it's time to get into politics while his brand is strong.  He runs for Senate against Ted Kennedy in the blue state of Massachusetts, and morphs from a conservative to a pro-choice centrist, and loses.  He runs for governor and wins, claiming that he can lead because he drove progress as a Republican in a state where 87% of the legislature was Democratic.  Except that he issued 844 vetoes, and 707 of those were overridden by the Democrats.  Not exactly the record a bipartisan uniter would be promoting.

Romney had aspirations beyond the state level, so he was "one and done" before he'd have to much of a record to defend, and just to be safe, allowed his senior staff to purchase their government computers and erase their hard drives.  The data on those drives were the property of the citizens, not Romney, but he chose to be contemptuous of that ownership and leave as little a record as possible to be scrutinized.

So now the man runs for the presidency.  In the 2008 campaign he was taken out fairly early in favor of McCain.  He retooled and repackaged, and came back in 2011 positioning himself as a lifelong conservative in a primary driven by pandering to the Tea Party.  This time around he had the good fortune to be running against one of the weakest fields in decades, and even with the Bachmann, Perry and Herman Cain to run against, he could never get more than 25% of the vote in any of the early races.  He may have survived by attrition and looking like the most reasonable choice (and he was by comparison), but the point needs to be restated - 3 out of 4 Republican voters wanted someone else in almost every early primary.

But he hung in, let the weakest competition implode on their own, and obliterated the last couple with attack ads.  Romney didn't win the nomination because the GOP wanted him - he won because they couldn't produce a candidate who wasn't worse.

The campaign moves ahead, and we discover that his argument is that you have to vote for him if you don't want Obama, and since you shouldn't want Obama, you should vote for him.  The thinking must have been that he would never have to specifically define what a vote for Romney would be for, as long as you were content with voting for what it would be against.

But voters aren't that stupid, and after Bush 43 even the Republicans want to know what they'd be getting with a Romney presidency.  So what do you get?

His tax plan doesn't pass the math test, and you can ignore the "six studies that support them" that Romney pulls out in defense.  Most of those are blog posts or opinion pieces, one was paid for by his campaign, and all of them undermine the Romney assertion that the middle class wouldn't get hit in one way or another.  You can't get something for nothing, and the numbers don't add up even in the most optimistic scenarios.  When you ask him to get specific, he says he'll sit down with Congress to define the specifics together.  That's just another way of saying "I don't have specifics, and I'm punting to Congress so when they don't either, it won't be on me".

When you ask Paul Ryan, he says "I don't want to bore you with the details" or "We don't have the time".  We have the time and the patience for something this important, Mr. Ryan.  All you have to do is put the details on your website and we'll do the reading from there.  But...nothing.  There is no plan that adds up, and that's why you're not going to see the details.

His pledge during the Tea Party Primaries was to "Repeal Obamacare on day one", but most Americans like certain provisions in Obamacare, like putting dependents up to age 26 on their parent's plans, keeping insurance companies from denying pre-existing conditions, and so on.  So the pledge morphed into "Repeal and replace Obamacare", and when pressed for details, he'd leave in many of the perks, but none of the mechanisms to pay for them.  You don't get something for nothing, and the businessman isn't presenting a business case with workable numbers.

He wants to "protect and preserve Medicare", but behind those words is the "how".  He's for the Ryan plan to give out vouchers  - it'll improve the control of costs, but that's because when your costs go over your voucher, it's all on you, unlike today.  In a Romney/Ryan world you can get sick only up to a certain cost point, and then you can ask for charity or go to the ER.

On social issues he stays quiet, or plays word games when forced to take a stand.  He "wouldn't propose any legislation restricting abortion", but he hasn't promised not to sign any bills that are proposed by others (wink).  He won't reverse Obama's proto-DREAM act for immigrant children, but still believes in self-deportation - making life so miserable that you'd have to leave, even when your kids are born here and know no other life.  He'd defund Planned Parenthood even though no government money pays for abortions due to the Hyde Amendment, and 97% of the health care services they provide are related to wellness, screening and family planning that have nothing to do with abortion.

Romney was against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act when it was proposed, and promising not to reverse it is not the same as supporting it when it wasn't yet the law.  He wouldn't have needed "binders full of women" to be presented to him if his transition team included women in the first place, and the number of women in senior roles actually went down over his term as governor - not up, not even - down.

Foreign policy?  Romney couldn't go on a friendly tour through Europe & Israel this summer without provoking one embarrassment in each of the countries he visited.  In Israel his pandering was so shameless it delighted Netanyahu, but gave sensible people pause.  America should stand by its close allies, but it should never be led by them, and there he was telling another nation that they could set our policy for us.

I can go on but I think I've said enough.  If anyone asks I'll be glad to provide unbiased references for any of the points above.  This isn't spin, it's a collection of facts.

If you don't like Obama that's fine - I wish he did a better job too, but I also think he did a good job given the circumstances and a childishly hostile Congress.  On the other hand, the country is objectively in better shape now than it was four years ago.  "Better" doesn't mean that things are good, but they are not as bad as they were, and they continue to improve, not worsen.

Romney has not offered specific policies that can be independently assessed and shown to make more sense than Obama's.  He's making bold promises to make things much better than they are now, but refuses to tell you how he'd make them happen in any way that's realistic.  Any independent analysis of the details he does share shows that he's not just going back to the approaches of George W. Bush, but in some ways is doubling down on them.

We saw how that worked out from 2001-2004, and gave him an extra four years that did nothing but make things worse.  There is no reason for any sane, sensible, thinking person to take what is known about the Romney approach and not see that this is going backwards to what failed.

So I'll end this with a challenge.  Show me, educate me, enlighten me, without empty rhetoric and Fox News sound bites, that there is something objectively better in a Romney/Ryan administration than we'd have by staying with the progress we've experienced for real since 2009.  I'm ready and waiting.