GOUVERNEUR, NY – The computerized voting machines used by many voters in the 23rd district had a computer virus – tainting the results, not just from those machines known to have been infected, but casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines.

So, after three candidates spent a gazillion dollars tearing each other to pieces and their battle was played out on the national stage by every pundit in the land, the computers may have eaten the votes.  

I hate it when that happens.

Hoffman conceded to Democrat Bill Owens on election night when the reported results had him trailing by more than 5,000 votes, and Owens was quickly sworn in as a member of the House of Representives. Recently, though, Hoffman “unconceded” (odd as that may be) when it turned out that he was behind by only about 3,000 votes with the absentee ballots outstanding.

As of earlier today, Politico declared Hoffman out of the running again, as the counted results showed he could not possibly win. But who knows now what lies inside the “infected” machines?

This should serve as a warning to candidates in close elections: never, ever concede until the votes are actually counted!

Cross-posted from The Purple Center

The bottom-line (as far as I’m concerned) is that this really is not a big deal. I understand the interest and argument posited by Doug and John, but I think that the answers to their questions are simple.

Did the President bow a little bit lower than was appropriate? It certainly looks like it.

Was he declaring his — and by default our — allegiance to the Emperor of Japan? Absolutely not.

The President bowed to a foreign dignitary, as Presidents do, and he simply limbo’d too low.

As Justin said:

I hope you don’t unsubscribe because of a couple posts rubbed you the wrong way. After all, that’s sort of the point of this site.

That is indeed the point of this site. Where else would you go for reasoned debate (usually) and civil discourse (most of the time)?

=)

Seniors: One super-voting bloc politicians mess with at their peril

For months now, it’s been clear that the road to “deficit neutral” health care reform is a bumpy, maybe even dangerous, one for seniors. Ironically, in their zeal to extend health insurance to the roughly 40 million people who don’t have any, President Obama and many Democrats in Congress appear ready to make deep cuts in Medicare, a program that is on the short list of the signal domestic accomplishments of the Democratic Party over the past 80 years, alongside Social Security, labor rights, and civil rights. What the 45 million seniors and people with disabilities who depend on Medicare are going to think about this remains unclear, although it’s hard to see why they would embrace it with resignation.

A new report from the non-partisan Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid, has now confirmed the $500 billion in cuts in the House health care bill that passed a week ago will reduce Medicare benefits and run a real risk of limiting seniors’ access to care. From the Washington Post:

A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health-care system — would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.

The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.

Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but “so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings” than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.

More generally, the report questions whether the country’s network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.

In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, “exacerbating existing access problems” in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

[snip]

In its most recent analysis of the House bill, the CBO noted that Medicare spending per beneficiary would have to grow at roughly half the rate it has over the past two decades to meet the measure’s savings targets, a dramatic reduction that many budget and health policy experts consider unrealistic. [Emphasis added.]

Whatever bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid takes to the Senate floor this week will also have to rely on hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts to pay for it.

Most of the public debate about health care reform has focused on the issue of a public option and the overall cost, with the Medicare cuts usually mentioned only in passing. It wasn’t long ago that more liberal Democrats were the fiercest defenders of of Medicare and Medicaid, as in 2007 when President Bush proposed cuts that were a fraction of those now approved by House Democrats. No more. Democrats want to pass a bill, so they are largely mum on this topic and talk only about generating “efficiencies” and tackling “abuses” in Medicare.

And the Republicans? Some Republicans may take it up as a talking point now and then, but the GOP’s deep-seated objection to “entitlements” like Medicare and Medicaid eliminate them from serious contention as a defender of seniors in this case.

What about the supposed “seniors’ lobby,” AARP? It has thrown its support behind the House bill in a deal that will bring more customers to its lucrative insurance business.

So seniors are on their own. But here’s the thing about that. Seniors — and near-seniors — are handily the most reliable group of voters. They may have to hobble on their canes to get to the polling place, but they do vote.

As early as last July, it was already noteworthy in many polls that opposition to health care reform was higher among seniors. That’s still true — but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Assuming a bill that cuts $400-500 billion from Medicare is signed into law, the issue will no longer be hypothetical, or muddled by a constantly changing and confusing array of proposals, or hidden behind high-minded rhetoric and clever spin. When it becomes clear to seniors that their health insurance benefits actually have been reduced and that it’s going to even harder to find a doctor who accepts Medicare patients (a growing number of physicians have already opted out of Medicare),anyone who voted for it is going to have a hard time convincing constituents over 60 that it’s a good deal.

Anyway, it’s not just about politics. What’s so “progressive” about slashing health care benefits for tens of millions of older Americans — a large majority of whom have low to moderate incomes — to subsidize benefits for younger Americans, many of whom don’t want insurance now and will resent being obligated to take on premium payments? Beats me.

Cross-posted from The Purple Center.

“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family. In fact, the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for McCain aides’ disparaging comments about her in the wake of the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunder-headed — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insists, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

(…)

All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

In “Going Rogue,” Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks, “hockey Mom” ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics — “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes, “to the extent that most Americans did.” And she argues that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”

Yet, Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate and Ms. Palin’s own surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot (she writes that it felt “like a natural progression”) underscore just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge

Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, calls the tome, “one of the most substantive policy books I’ve read.”

Frankly, I didn’t know Rush had read much more than Dr. Seuss before getting around to this book.

In what can only be called an Epic Win, President Obama has turned his back on Superman!

USA rules!

With this daring breach of protocol (at the risk of a super-wedgie) Obama has done what no American President has ever done – disrespected Superman.

I think we can all agree that this is truly a great day to be an American!

For the past 24 hours, a lot of eyebrows have been raised around the world about this photo of the President of the United States bowing low — very low — before the Emperor of Japan, one Mr. Akihito, and his lovely wife, the Empress Michiko. Akihito is the son of the guy known as Hirohito who led Japan during its risky escapade in attacking China, the United States and most of the Pacific world — and kept on leading it long after.

Knocked for a loop by the near-90-degree bend-over, the White House claimed that it was just a matter of “protocol” – routine stuff, you know, just to be polite.

Having been raised in a household where we all thought the President of the United States doesn’t bow down to anyone, I wondered enough to try to find out if I might have missed when this “protocol” arrived. Here are a couple of samples of what I found.

Here is President Ronald Reagan and the then-aging Emperor Hirohito greeting each other — just like any other two guys on equal footing might — with a hearty handshake (although Hirohito does look as if he’s throwing in a little instinctive bow).

(Hat tip for photo: Bostonmaggie)

Lest you think that some of this protocol stuff might have changed for U.S. Presidents since RR left the White House — or that Hirohito’s son, Akihito, has laid down some new requirements of obeisance in exchange for expanding Japan’s imports from America (fat chance!), here is Akihito and his Empress just hanging out last July in Hawaii with a couple of folks who rank way, way down the diplomatic food chain from Divine Emperors, Hawaii Governor Linda and Admiral Timothy J. Keating, Commander of U.S. Pacific Command. Looks like hearty handshakes all around.

Omigosh, I hope the Governor and the Admiral didn’t embarrass us with some protocol faux pas!

(Cross-posted from The Purple Center in solidarity with Doug Mataconis)

UPDATE 2:ABC’s Jake Tapper has a source who tells him that a bit of a bow was OK but not so deep or jarring as Obama’s bow. Says Nixon got it right.

You’ll never see what happened last Tuesday looking through a two-party microscope! Nope. You need an independent historyscope to get this one!

I had the pleasure of hearing independent strategist Jackie Salit give her analysis of the November elections on Sunday night on her regular national conference call which is attended by around 150 activists around the country every six weeks.

Jackie is a long-time independent activist based in New York City, the president of the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (aka IndependentVoting.org), the executive editor of the Neo-Independent Magazine, and the campaign manager of Mike Bloomberg’s Independence Party campaign. She’s someone I follow very closely — and so should you if you care about independent politics.

A statement released by the campaign via email on Wednesday after the election said: This year, the IP delivered 13% of the total votes cast – the largest percentage ever by a minor party for a cross-endorsed mayoral candidate.

The Hankster (my blog) and Donklephant (where I am a guest blogger), in addition to The Independent View (NYC IP activist Michael Drucker’s blog) and the NY Daily News’ Brawl for the Hall blog seemed to be the only media outlets that even referenced this astounding result from the election. And then today, I caught Maine’s independent mayoral candidate Alex Hammers’ post on The Moderate Voice “Independents are a Sleeping Giant“, and a note by Robert Steele on his Public Intelligence Blog.

In the CUIP conference call, Jackie emphasized that, far from being the “margin of victory” for Bloomberg’s win as an independent in NYC, the vote on the IP line was the foundation of the campaign. At a time when the votes of both major parties Dems and Repubs went down, the 15 year old grassroots Independence Party doubled its vote.

It is indeed wonderous that no other media picked this up.

But if your framework is a bipartisan — indeed partisan — system, you don’t pay a lot of attention to the margins, no pun intended! You don’t see what’s happening on the horizon. You’re not looking to the future — you’re looking to the past and how pollsters have been able to parse the vote based on prior elections. Polls are supposed to be predictive. They’re interesting, and we all follow them. But predictive?

You’d have to have a 6-billion-person polling operation to figure that one out. And still, you’d get it wrong because what the NYC mayoral race points to is the power that independents have as an organized force. It’s something like what the unions used to call “strength in numbers” when we still sang Solidarity Forever and meant solidarity forever for everyone.

Old-fashioned as it may be, independents in NYC have banded together, we have talked with each other, we have made endless phone calls night after night year after year, we have fought back against a stupid and vicious state party chair, we have constituted 5 county committees under state law that are directed by a collective 94-person executive committee, and have inched our way forward into NYC politics as players.

We just led New Yorkers to elect our first independent mayor.

In my book this is something that ordinary people can be proud of. And that ordinary people — nonpartisans — all over the country can learn from and emulate.

And indeed they are. Take Joelle Riddle in Durango CO, a former chairwoman of the La Plata County Democratic Party who won her post in 2006 with party support and decided to go independent in August, would have to run as a write-in candidate after inadvertently missing a deadline to change her registration.

“I seek to remedy this burden that falls unequally on small political parties and independent or unaffiliated candidates, unfairly discriminating against them and not affording them the same privileges as the major political parties,” she wrote in a statement announcing her decision Tuesday.

Partisan politics isn’t the future of our country, but the search for an independent alternative might be.

You/we independents can do it. If we’re organized.

-NH

Vice President Joe Biden has been up to all sorts of good stuff lately… but mostly making phone calls and eating. Whether it’s snacking on picnic lunches with the veterans, hosting an extravagant dinner with His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew of Constantinope, or wolfing down chili dogs with Governor Granholm of Michigan, the VP has a well-documented trail of bread crumbs behind him. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been getting work done, though. His Middle Class Task Force has worried about H1N1 a little and held more meetings to figure out why middle class voters are still unhappy. (Is it really rocket science? I always thought it was pretty obvious… *cough*jobs*cough*). He’s also said some funny things lately… but then again, isn’t he always?

In any event, one of the most talked about aspects of the House’s passage of the health care bill on Saturday was the last minute addition of a rather significant concession. Namely, a number of pro-life Democrats and a few moderate Republicans have been worried about Tea Party rhetoric about “ObamaCare Funding Abortion!” and the like, and so they demanded the inclusion of an amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich) that reads simply:

(a) IN GENERAL.–No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act (or any amendment made by this Act) may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of pregnancy or incest.

Because the Democrats did not have enough votes to pass the bill without this small cadre of pro-lifers, the amendment was begrudgingly accepted, and we got our health care bill. Only now, of course, the people who fall into the public option safety net (i.e. the poor) will not be covered for elective abortions, as they would otherwise be in about 2/3s or private insurance plans and in some state Medicaid programs (though Medicaid federally is governed by a similar amendment, some states have bypassed that). Meaning, those most unable to care for an unwanted child and most likely to fall into that position will have to go out of pocket if they desire the procedure. And many fear that private insurers, now competing with the public option, will also have incentive to drop coverage of abortion.

Now presumably the people insured through the public option are currently uninsured, so one could argue that, as far as abortion is concerned, this is just the status quo. It is unclear how all of this would iron out in practice, as it is unclear whether the amendment even survives the Senate. Pro-choice progressives are livid, and with good reason. It’s bad law, if you ask me. Abortion is a legal medical procedure, and whether or not it is covered should be decided on a contextual, ideally case-by-case basis, a question to be settled between individual doctors, patients, and insurance boards (or whoever ultimately administers the public option), rather than a dozen or so Blue Dog Democrats in 2009. It should, in short, be decided on medical rather than political grounds. Liberals are right to cry foul in that regard.

But here’s the irony: the central argument against the public option in the first place is precisely what is being illustrated by the Stupak amendment. Namely, people will lose coverage (as will happen if private insurers drop abortion coverage, and in the case of those who go from private insurance or Medicaid in certain cases to the public option) and freedom of choice. You put medical decisions in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians rather than doctors and patients.

As William Salaten explains:

Welcome to socialism.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the House and Senate bills. They don’t nationalize medicine or set up a single-payer system. As socialism goes, they’re modest. But they do mandate, standardize, and subsidize health insurance. They mix public with private. And when you do that, you invite public-sector problems into matters that used to be nobody’s business.

One of these problems is that people don’t like their tax money being used for procedures that offend them. You may think that’s stupid. You may point out that your tax money is used for wars you don’t like. But you don’t have two or three dozen swing votes in the House. Pro-life Democrats do. They don’t have the clout to ban abortion, but they have the clout to keep tax money from paying for it.

Until health care reform came along, this wasn’t your problem. It was a problem for women who depended on public programs like Medicaid. But you wanted a better world. You wanted health insurance for everyone, and you wanted the government to help pay for it. Congratulations. You’ve brought the tax moralists into your life.

That goes both ways of course. It’s amazing to me that the same people who have been mewling about the loss of freedom that will occur under this health care plan are suddenly a-okay with taking away that freedom in the case of medical procedures that happens to offend them. And it’s not just abortion—those same social conservatives have pushed for the inclusion of language that may cover Christian Science prayer treatments. So, as has often been the case with Republican defenders-of-the-markets, freedom of choice is fine and dandy as long as it is, according to their morals, the right choice.

But liberals too need to understand that, when you put decisions like what kind of medical care is insured under the purview of a central, political authority, you will get central, political decisions. I have a number of hardcore progressives who comment at my blog, and one of the things that always leaves me befuddled is what often seems to be the central underpinning of their political worldview: namely, to centralize authority and instill regulations because people cannot be trusted. The inherent contradiction, of course, is the people who will be creating, manning, and administering said central authority are, of course, people too, prone to the same mistakes, errors in judgments, and corruptions as anyone else (only with more incentive to do so, because they have more power to parlay with). Or, to put that another way, the sort of Democrats who believe everything would be working just fine if the government were only staffed by 100% progressive liberals with everybody’s best interests at heart (good luck with that guys). The “representative democracy is great when everybody agrees with me” approach to governance. In this case, Democrats love the idea of a government-run health care program, because it never seems to occur to them that this same government-run health care program will also be run by conservatives—who make, on average, about half of government, and probably always will. So literally the first decision made by the new liberal health care paradigm is a social conservative one. News flash: that’s not a problem with social conservatism, it’s a problem with the mechanism that allows social conservatives to push their agenda on private citizens in an area they were previously kept out of because it was a market issue.

Salaten is right. The most fundamental criticism of government-run health care is perfectly illustrated in this case. Liberals have (or soon will) the central government-run health care system they wanted, and suddenly cry foul when that system takes a freedom away from individuals who had it in the market. And conservatives want to keep government out of health care—but by the way, now that we’re in it, can we outlaw abortion?

I’m against the amendment, and more-or-less for this health care reform, but in my view, both sides are getting what they deserve on this one.

Too bad it’s the public option patients who will suffer for it.

This article has multiple issues.

No kidding.

Let’s start at the beginning:

Is corporatocracy a far-left conspiracy theory or is it that government of the people, for the people and by the people perishing from the earth?

It’s hard to say – literally, corporatocracy is a hard word to write and say.

It occurs to me that a certain segment of the population has a large bullhorn and is gearing up for a civil war.

Their fears are justified. But is the enemy who they think it is?

I think the answer lies in the “multiple issues” that need to be worked out in the corporatocracy section of Wikipedia.

Now, if we can figure out how to say it, maybe we can talk about it.

142,817 VOTES FOR BLOOMBERG ON COLUMN C DELIVERS MARGIN TO CITY’S FIRST INDEPENDENT MAYOR

New York, NY-The Independence Party vote for Mike Bloomberg yesterday broke numerous records and re-enforced its ongoing mandate for independent governance and non-partisan reform.

Unofficial returns released by the Board of Elections put the IP total on Column “C” at 142,817 votes, nearly 26% of Bloomberg’s total and 13% of all votes cast. This means that 1 in 4 Bloomberg voters chose to vote on the Independence Party line.

The vote for the mayor on the Independence Party line was an increase of 91% over its total four years ago, when it drew nearly 75,000 votes on its crucial Column “C”.

Jacqueline Salit, who has run all three IP campaigns for Bloomberg stated:

“The Independence Party’s 143,000 votes grows out of the strength of our grassroots organization, the popularity of political independence as a new option and a longstanding partnership with our independent mayor, Mike Bloomberg. This record breaking vote makes plain our growth and our role in the emerging shift in New York City politics. We’re a new kind of minor party with an agenda for non-partisan reform. We have a broad and diverse base of support. We gave Mike his margin in a close race. And we made history by electing the city’s first independent mayor.”

In three consecutive elections, under varying circumstances, the Independence Party has made its mark on the NYC mayoral. In 2001, its 59,091 votes gave Bloomberg his margin over Democrat Mark Green, who lost by 35,000 votes. In 2005, the IP vote for Bloomberg grew by 26%, making it the only political party to demonstrate growth at the polls that year. This year, the IP delivered 13% of the total  votes cast- the largest percentage ever-by a minor party for a cross-endorsed mayoral candidate.

For the last 20 years, other minor parties polled between 32,551 (the Working Families Party vote for Mark Green in 2001) and 62,469 (the Liberal Party vote for Rudy Giuliani in 1993).

Cross-posted on The Hankster

Hello, Donklephanters! I’ve been on the stump over the past number of weeks for NYC independent mayoral candidate Mike Bloomberg and the word on the street is that Column C (the Independence Party line) is the vote for nonpartisan grassroots people’s power.

In print news, note  that the majority of voters in the Garden State, from north to south, are independent and will play the decisive role in Tuesday’s Gov election there.

Elsewhere in New York, independent candidates, parties and voters are the name of the game…

And in Last Word(s) — I hope you’ll take a peek at the left/right Dem/Repub dialogue that permeates the print media and the blogosphere. As a long-time activist with the independent (non-Dem) left, I’m always happy to see progressives take on the right wingers as in Radical? Not! (By Eugene Debs, New Majority) below.

-NH

NJ Gov Race

• Bergen County a key factor in governor’s race (By Cynthia Burton, Philadelphia Inquirer) Democrats outnumber Republicans there, 169,000 to 111,200. But the biggest voting group, as it is everywhere else in the state, consists of unaffiliated voters, who number 250,300. Unaffiliated voters have recently been voting with the Democrats.
• Election not a big draw to Gloucester County voters (By Jessica Landolfi, NJ News-Star Ledger, Trenton Times) Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1 with 70,744 registered Democrats, 35,637 Republicans and 82,607 unaffiliated.

NY Races

• Poll: NYC Mayor Bloomberg up by double digits in home stretch (From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser)
• Thompson Endorsed by Cuomo (By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, NY Times)
• Hoffman and Owens in a Tie for New York Special Election (CQ Politics/PollTracker)
• A GOP Civil War in Upstate New York (By KATE PICKERT, Time) But then, the race in the 23rd is no longer about local issues. It’s about a Republican Party with little current power inside the Beltway searching for a way out of the wilderness. And it’s about conservative Republicans sending a message — the future of the party is the conservative base. (It’s also, incidentally, about money; according to the Federal Election Commission, more than $650,000 has flowed to the candidates from independent groups just since Oct. 24.) “The 23rd has as little significance as Gettysburg. It’s just where the Armies met,” says Bob Gorman, managing editor of the Times and my old boss. “Everybody was looking for a fight and that’s where they found each other.”
• ACORN: Vann, go (By DAVID SEIFMAN, NY Post)
• Court of Appeals won’t hear Bethlehem WFP case (by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, Albany Times Union/Local Politics)

Last Word(s)

• Radical? Not! (By Eugene Debs, New Majority)
• Our Heritage:  Newt Gingrich weighs in on events current and Founding-era. (interview by Robert Costa, National Review Online)
• Self-Image and Party Politics (By DAVID BROOKS AND BOB HERBERT, NY Times/The Conversation) Is it possible for both parties to lose at the same time?
• More Signs of Trouble for 2010 (William Galston, The New Republic)

More news headlines for independent voters at The Hankster

DOUBLE STANDARD? When John Cusack bombards his girlfriend's home with music, it's cute. When the CIA uses a boombox, it's torture.

So, a pretentious group of musicians is upset that their music is being used to torment America’s most dangerous enemies?

And now they want the U.S. government to release an official song list?

I can’t imagine that such a document actually exists. Are we supposed to believe that CIA and Pentagon interrogators around the world were issued official playlists by some audio-torture DJ?

It’s a safe bet that the music choices used to keep terrorists awake 24/7 were straight from a gazillion different iPods.

However, there WAS an official songlist when the U.S. Army flushed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of hiding in 1989. The psychological warfare guys surrounding the Vatican Embassy during “Operation Just Cause” called in their requests to Army Radio.

How retro.

Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" made this dictator's skin crawl!

THE OFFICIAL 1989 MUSIC TORTURE SONG LIST FOR NORIEGA

Straight from U.S. Army records, here is a portion of the radio playlist used to annoy Manuel Noriega.

1. (You’ve Got) Another Thing Coming — Judas Priest
2. All I Want is You — U2
3. Big Shot — Billy Joel
4. Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen
5. Bring Down the Hammer — Georgia Satellites
6. Don’t Look Back — Boston
7. Don’t Fear the Reaper — Blue Oyster Cult
8. Eat My Shorts — Rick Dees
9. Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone) — Tom Petty
10. Give It Up — KC and the Sunshine Band
11. Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down — Paul Young
12. Guilty — Bonham
13. Hang ‘Em High — Van Halen
14. Hanging Tough — New Kids on the Block
15. I Fought The Law and the Law Won — Bobby Fuller
16. Judgment Day — Whitesnake
17. Never Gonna Give You Up — Rick Astley
18. No More Mister Nice Guy — Alice Cooper
19. Panama — Van Halen
20. Paranoid — Black Sabbath
21. Stay Hungry — Twisted Sister
22. The Party’s Over — Journey
23. The Star Spangled Banner — Jimi Hendrix
24. They’re Coming to Take Me Away — Henry VIII
25. Time is on My Side — Rolling Stones
26. Wanted Dead or Alive — Bon Jovi
27. We Didn’t Start the Fire — Billy Joel
28. We Gotta Get Out of This Place — The Animals
29. Who Will You Run To? — Heart

Who knew that Billy Joel and New Kids on the Block would ever serve their country so effectively?

Wanna see the full list of Noriega torture tunes?  CLICK HERE.

Atlanta, GA — Georgia Independent Voters (GIV), a state-based association representing independent voters, announced today its endorsement of former State Senator Kasim Reed for mayor of the City of Atlanta.

“We’re proud to announce our support for Kasim Reed for Mayor of Atlanta,” said Thyrsa M. Gravely, a long-time independent political organizer and a key player in GIV’s candidate screening process. “Reed has been on the just side of important electoral issues here in Georgia, and in our conversations he indicated a willingness to address our concerns regarding political reform by being a spokesperson at the state and national level.”

“I am very grateful to receive the endorsement of Georgia Independent Voters. A political process that is open to all is a major concern of mine,” said Reed. “Too many voters are disillusioned and kept out of the political process. As Mayor, I will work with the Governor and the state legislature towards opening Georgia’s electoral process, and making it more accessible to all voters.”

GIV’s endorsement came as a result of candidate screening sessions and numerous dialogues over the course of the summer. In July the group met with nine of the hopeful candidates, but elected not to endorse at that time. “We wanted to see how the field would shape up after the filing period closed in early September,” said Murray Dabby, a co-founder of GIV. “We wanted to endorse when we thought we could have the biggest impact.”

Numbers of independents continue to grow, and independents currently form 39% of the electorate according to a recent Pew Research poll. As a result, independents have played an increasingly important role in elections around the country. In the 2008 presidential election, independents tipped the scales for Obama, helping him secure the Democratic Party nomination over Clinton.

“Kasim Reed is a part of a new generation of Democrats, like President Obama, who appreciate independents. Reed is very conversant on issues of concern to us and is clearly the most independent-minded, and most reform-minded candidate in the race,” said Dabby. “Issues of political reform are a mystery to many old-guard, traditional politicians, but things like lowering ballot access barriers, making voter registration easier, and making the redistricting process less political are issues that are important to independents, who are left out of the political process in so many ways.”

Georgia Independent Voters is a grassroots organization working to reform the political process and develop the voice of independent voters around Georgia.

http://www.georgiaindependentvoters.org

Independent Voters

• How Dems Can Cut Their Losses (by Charlie Cook, National Journal) Part of the genius of the 1994 GOP “Contract with America” was its message that resonated with the independent voters and others who voted for Ross Perot in 1992. It was less ideological and more outsider.
• Morning Fix: A premature celebration for the GOP (Chris Cillizza, Washington Post/The Fix)
• Public option gains support (By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen, Washington Post) Only 20 percent of adults identify themselves as Republicans, little changed in recent months, but still the lowest single number in Post-ABC polls since 1983. Political independents continue to make up the largest group, at 42 percent of respondents; 33 percent call themselves Democrats.
• The Return Of Coughlinism (Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic/Daily Dish)

Open Primaries

• California “Top-Two” Proposal Compared to Washington State’s “Top-Two” Law (Ballot Access News)

More news headlines at The Hankster

Along with the head scratching regarding President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize came quite a few humorous quips.  Including from the President himself:

After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” So it’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.

The President reflected the general feeling that the Nobel Peace Prize award was, at best, premature.  He chose to turn the attention to the country itself, and the hopes and dreams of all people.  Good on you, Mr. President.

But look closely at the text of the speech.  The President recognizes another fact, that the Nobel Committee awarded this prize on the eve of the decision to expand the war in Afghanistan:

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the commander in chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies.

Ego is one of the core character traits of any world leader, and some have noted that our President is in possession of one himself, to put it mildly.

His frustration with a single media outlet that does not genuflect at the altar of his personality, Fox News Network, leads to a public spat, crossing a line not even the ego-mania of President Nixon would breach:  shooting downhill.  Fox News can only benefit from the attention, and gain even more viewers as they realize only one media outlet is catching the attention of the administration.

His speeches are peppered with self references, and his “World Apology Tour” found him apologizing on our behalf.  Yet, I don’t recall that he ever apologized for saying the Cambridge Police Department “acted stupidly”, even though his subsequent actions showed he knew he blew it.  Ego gets in the way of many things with our leaders.  And the Nobel Committee knows that.

Can a man who accepts the Nobel Peace Prize live with the diminished reputation as the only winner to immediately escalate a war, sending tens of thousands of troops into harm’s way?

The Nobel Committee sent the Peace Prize in a box large enough to house our President.  Mr. Obama’s immediate response indicates that perhaps he won’t climb into the box.  Let’s hope not.

Cross posted to FrankHagan.com

Commentary by Jackie Salit

NOTE To Donklephant Readers: This article by independent strategist Jackie Salit came across my desk and I thought it was too good not to share in full with you. -Nancy

When we finally get far enough down the road on health care reform, it will become clear that a driving force in the intensity of the fight was a heart attack. Not the medical kind. The political kind.

Independents swung decisively to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. And it is this shift by independents – who repositioned themselves from center-right to center-left – that gave the Republican right the political equivalent of cardiac arrest.

In 1992, 19 million independents voted for Ross Perot. In 2008, 19 million independents voted for Barack Obama. Over the span of 15 years, the largely white, center-right independent movement re-aligned itself with Black America and progressive-minded voters.

This did not happen out of the blue. It did not happen by magic. It happened because the progressive wing of the independent movement did the painstaking and often controversial work of bringing the Perot movement and the Fulani movement together at the grassroots. The Fulani movement refers to the country’s leading African American independent, Dr. Lenora Fulani, who exposed the black community to independent politics and introduced the independent movement to an alliance with Black America.

No doubt the dramatics that the right wing brought to the Town Hall meetings this summer were intended for the television cameras. But the organizers, strategists and radio personalities who orchestrated the theatrics had a particular audience in mind: Independents. If they could tarnish Obama’s image with indies, they could damage the black and independent alliance and re-establish the Republican Party as an influential force amongst independents. Some of that could be accomplished, they felt, by claiming Obama’s health plan would drive up the national debt – a concern that animated the early Perot movement. Some Republican strategists felt that if they simply branded Obama a socialist, it would scare independents away – not from the health care plan (everyone recognizes a plan of some kind will get passed) but away from the center-left coalition that elected him.

If indies are feeling somewhat disillusioned with President Obama over the health care reform fight, it has more to do with fears that he is being overly influenced by the partisans in Congress. Since independents voted for him to be a more independent president, it’s easy to see how some felt disappointed by his handling of the Republican onslaught. Obama’s independent appeal was based on his challenge to the prevailing culture of Clintonian opportunism in the Democratic Party and partisanship inside the Beltway. Put another way, the independent vote for Obama was an effort to define a new kind of progressivism, one that was not synonymous with Democratic Party control.

After years of hard work and organizing, independents have become a sought-after partner in American politics. They elected President Obama and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, arguably the country’s two most independent and pragmatically progressive elected officials. No wonder the Republican Party right wants a clawback.

Independents are vulnerable to being peeled away by the Republican right. The Pew Research Center reports that were the 2010 midterms to be held today, independents would lean towards Republicans by a 43 to 38 percent margin. But, the evolution of a 21st century independent movement is not that simple. First, the movement is very fluid and very new. Historical movements develop through twists and turns, not in a straight line. The far right has attempted to take over the independent movement before. In 1994, Newt Gingrich crafted the “Contract with America” to woo Perotistas back into the Republican tent. And in 2000, social conservative Pat Buchanan hijacked the Reform Party presidential nomination, though he was roundly repudiated by independents in the general election.

If Republicans are increasing their influence among independents, it’s also because the Democratic Party Left has not been a friend to the independent movement. Sure, Democrats were happy that indies broke for Obama. But they were disappointed that we didn’t become Democrats. They equate progressivism with being in the Democratic Party. But they’re wrong.

Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party has been enthusiastic about the development of indies as a third force. For different reasons, surely. But they share a common goal: to maintain the primacy of two-value logic (where there is only one or the other, never neither) and make sure independents are passive companions. That’s one reason that the fight for open primaries – which allow independents to cast ballots in every round of voting – and the campaign to appoint independents to the Federal Election Commission are so important. Those fights are about our right to participate and our right to represent our interests in changing the political culture.

The independent movement went left in 2008, after many years of grassroots organizing to link it to progressive leadership. Now the right wants to peel it back. Obama, presumably, wants to hold on to the partnership, but must also privilege his own party, which turns independents off and makes them more susceptible to Republican attacks. Meanwhile, independents are working hard at the grassroots to hold our own.

Jackie Salit is the president of IndependentVoting.org and the campaign coordinator for New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign on the Independence Party line.

Independent Voters

• On healthcare and other hot issues: Follow the independents–The number of voters not tied to Democrats or Republicans is expanding fast. Both parties need to adjust. (By the Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board) Were the 2010 elections to occur today, 43 percent of independents say they would vote Republican (in a generic congressional ballot), while 38 percent would vote Democratic, the Pew Research Center finds. That’s quite a shift from 2006, when independents favored Democrats over Republicans, 44 to 33 percent.

Open Primaries

• South Dakota Democrats Will Allow Independent Voters to Vote in their Primaries (Ballot Access News)
• Re-enfranchising New Yorkers (by Richard Flanagan, Gotham Gazette) Voters overwhelmingly rejected Macchiarola’s plan for nonpartisan elections, 70 percent to 30 percent. But only 13 percent of registered voters bothered to show up for the off-year election of 2003, and many had ties to the unions, interest groups and political clubs that benefit from the status quo and know how to pull the levers of the current system to their advantage. They were loathe to expand the electorate and risk the surrender of power.

Independent Gov Races

In an unsettled political environment where voters are exercising independent options, independent candidates like NJ gubernatorial candidate Chris Daggett pick up support….

• Poll: New Jersey gubernatorial race a virtual tie (From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart)
• Daggett gets little help from ballot position (Press of Atlantic City) New Jersey laws reserving the top two spots on any ballot for the two major-party candidates. Last month, Daggett – along with Libertarian Party candidate Kenneth Kaplan – took the step of filing suit against the practice.
• Daggett for guv? Why not? (By ALEX GECAN, For The Trentonian)

Bloomberg 09

NYC Dem machine targets independent run by Mike Bloomberg with 2 darts: money (the Mayor is very wealthy…) and term limits (which the Dem-controlled City Council extended….) Good luck with that! Meanwhile, it’s the NYC Independence and the Working Families Parties that are supplying the spark in this year’s city-wide elections. In a city of 5-1 Dem registration, that’s not good news for clubhouse politics…

• Bloomberg’s Line Dance (BY ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Daily News/Daily Politics)
• Voters Like Mayor, but Not His Path to 3rd Run (By MICHAEL BARBARO, NY Times)
• New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg received the endorsement of the Hotel and Motel Trades Council (From msnbc’s First Read with Chuck Todd)
• After term limit tiff, Bloomberg still gets hotel endorsement (ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, NY Daily News/Brawl for the Hall) The only union with a major field operation that remains unpledged is 1199, which voted for Thompson during the WFP endorsement process. Neutrality is not out of the question for 1199, a union source said.

For more news headlines for independent voters, see The Hankster