October 2004

There were 75 posts published in October 2004 (this is page 2 of 13).

Election Funny Business

According to a recent national survey by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, Bush has a slight lead over Kerry in an unweighted poll. But if you weigh the minority vote to the turnout shown in the 2000 exit polls, Kerry has over a 3% lead. This, among other factors, has lead a number of people in the left blogoshere to level charges that the Republicans are engaged in a campaign to suppress minority voting.
“Come on,” you may be thinking. “This is 2004. America abandoned those kind of practices decades ago.”
Have we?

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan – possibly in violation of US law – to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”.
It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.
An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: “The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day.”

So what are national Bush/Cheney campaign people doing with Jacksonville voter lists?
The one good thing about this election–in contrast to 2000–is that there’s going to be a boatload of people monitoring the polls during the election, not just after the fact. It’s going to be more difficult for the vote suppressors to get away with doing their dirty work.

The Gap

President Bush offers an interesting criticism of Senator Kerry: Kerry is guilty of promising to spend more than he can pay for:

During this campaign he’s proposed $2.2 trillion of new spending. Now, that is a trillion with a “T.” That’s a lot even for a senator from Massachusetts. (Laughter.)
So they said, how are you going to pay for it? And he said, oh, we’re just going to tax the rich. Now, you’ve heard that before. Be wary when you hear, oh, we’re just going to tax the rich. My opponent has promised $2.2 trillion, but when you run up the top two brackets, you only raise between $600 billion and $800 billion. There is a gap between that which he promised and that which he can deliver. And guess who usually fills that gap.
AUDIENCE: We do!

Honestly, isn’t President Bush the last person who should be calling someone else out on a gap between what they promise and what they can pay for?

Fighting Against The U.S.

Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay offered the following:

“LaRouche is a con felon and all I can tell you is that Mr. Morrison has supported and campaigned with LaRouche followers and Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters against the U.S. in Iraq,” said DeLay.

What are the odds that Mr. DeLay has actually visited Daily Kos? Pretty low I’d say. Perhaps I missed something, but the only fund raising I’ve seen on the web site is for Democratic candidates and Democratic-leaning organizations. Are these the “fighters against the U.S. in Iraq” that DeLay speaks of?
I haven’t donated any money at the site, but I do have a user account. Am I thereby supporting America’s enemies?

Pre-Election Leaks

Vice President Dick Cheney, once again demonstrating that image management is more important than reality to the administration, had this to say regarding Iraq on Monday:

I think it has been a remarkable success story to date, when you look at what has been accomplished overall. I think the President deserves great credit for it.

This kind of stuff would be laughable except that there are so many Americans willing to lap up whatever this bunch dishes out.
Unfortunately for Bush, apparently not everyone in the government is buying the success story, as Josh Marshall points out. Because people keep revealing dirty laundry to the press:

Who over there [at the Pentagon] is trying to stick it to the president?
Look at two big news stories on Tuesday, the Washington Post report that the White House plans to ask for some $70 billion more in Iraq spending just a week or two after the election and this USA Today piece reporting that the Pentagon is planning to add roughly 20,000 more troops to the force in Iraq in anticipation of the elections in January.
Just on the basis of logical inference, I’m gonna bet those leaks didn’t come from Scott McClellan.

And don’t forget the leak about the CIA’s 9/11 report, which allegedly names names in the administration.
Clearly there are inside people who haven’t been happy with things that have happened the past four years. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we see unnamed government sources offer a few additional news scoops in the next six days.

Trusting Juries

President Bush has been out about the country stumping for “medical liability reform.” The rationale behind this being that juries can’t be trusted to award reasonable verdicts for damages and thus the federal government must step in with arbitrary caps.
Yesterday on C-SPAN I saw Elizabeth Edwards make an excellent point regarding this. She pointed out that as governor of Texas, Bush never questioned the judgment of juries when they sentenced people to be executed. Although a number of governors have recently grappled with the known imperfections in our criminal justice system, Bush had no qualms whatsoever with Texas’ assembly-line style execution process.
So when it comes to a trivial matter like life or death, George W. Bush has no problem with the wisdom of our jury system. But when corporate or insurance company profits are on the line, juries clearly can’t be trusted to get things right.
Priorities, priorities.