By Michael Bryan
Honest, if incompetent, mistake? Or attempt to suppress the Democratic vote? We report, you decide.
Jeff Flake's campaign is robocalling to get out the vote. For some Democrats in the Valley, that call has contained blatantly incorrect information as to the location of that voter's polling place.
See the video below the fold…
Posted by AzBlueMeanie: In the final Latino Decisions Tracking Poll before election day, President Obama is "poised to win a record high share of the Latino vote, and in turn likely to win key swing states and enough electoral college votes to retain the presidency." Latino Decisions: if Latino vote is high, Obama will carry … Read more
Posted by AzBlueMeanie: One of the ballot measures we are following here at Blog for Arizona is a Montana initiative, I-66, that declares corporations are not human beings and bans corporate money in politics. It is "Prarie Populism" supported by the Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer; the Republican lieutenant governor, John Bohlinger, and various citizens’ groups; … Read more
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Conservative talk radio host and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Michael Smerconish, writes this thoughtful piece that has the hate mongers of the right-wing noise machine frothing at the mouth with rabid Obama Derangement Syndrome. Obama: Substance not Smears:
This election has always been a referendum on Barack Obama. For some,
not on matters of substance. They can't have it both ways. It's
hypocritical to distribute a vicious, false narrative about him while
fancying yourself a patriot and a great American. Vilify a sitting
president of the United States with fiction and innuendo, and you are
neither.
* * *
It's been unrelenting. The day after Obama took office, Rush Limbaugh
told Sean Hannity he wanted him to "fail." Later, Glenn Beck called the
president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred of white people."
Donald Trump's birtherism took hold while words like socialist were
uttered with increased frequency. And a prairie fire of falsehoods
spread through the Internet suggesting, among other things, that Obama
is a Muslim or refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, paving the
way for Dinesh D'Souza's fictionalized "documentary" 2016, which
characterized Obama as fulfilling the anticolonial agenda of his father –
a man he literally knew for just one weekend!
Among the usual memes used to undermine the president is the threat
of some apocalyptic cataclysm, usually in the form of an assertion of
federal power, like the seizing of guns. These predictions demand
unthinking acceptance of the notion that the president, like a bizarre
Manchurian candidate, is saving his nefarious agenda for a second term
that might never arrive. By my count, the website Snopes.com has
evaluated and debunked 103 of 124 Internet assertions about Obama.
Just before Hurricane Sandy hit, Ann Coulter called our sitting
president a "retard," Sarah Palin mocked his "shuck and jive shtick,"
and John Sununu openly questioned Gen. Colin Powell's weighty
endorsement as being motivated by race. At least earlier in the campaign
there was some effort at camouflage. Such as when Mitt Romney aired an
anti-Obama welfare commercial that falsely suggested Obama supported
handouts ("They just send you your welfare check") when, in fact, Obama
was accommodating requests of several governors, two of them
conservative Republicans, to try new ways to put people back to work. A
similar sentiment was expressed by Romney when he maligned the 47
percent who don't pay federal income taxes, overlooking that 83 percent
of that group are either working and paying payroll taxes or they're
elderly.
And, almost daily, there have been dire warnings about Obama, often with sirens, from the Drudge Report. . . No wonder I routinely field calls from radio listeners who, with no
hint of embarrassment in their voices, say things such as "I call him
'comrade' " or "he's not my president."
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Ilyse Hogue, co-director of Friends of Democracy, a super PAC aimed at electing candidates who champion campaign finance reform, and the former director of political advocacy and communications for MoveOn.org, has written this opinion piece for CNN. GOP's push to suppress vote threatens democracy (excerpts):
This election year is the
culmination of years of Republican efforts to foment confusion and fear
to keep certain Americans from voting. That is a subplot of this
election, but one that will have massive consequences. In close and
bitterly fought elections, there's far more at stake than who occupies
the White House: Americans' belief in the integrity of our democracy
hangs in the balance.
These efforts are
pernicious, pervasive and professionalized. In a recent New Yorker
article, Jane Mayer profiled Hans von Spakowsky, a legal fellow at the
conservative Heritage Foundation who has been hyping the myth of voter impersonation fraud since 1998, despite mountains of evidence refuting his claim.
(The Brennan Center for Justice has concluded that many more people are
struck by lightning than commit in-person voter fraud.) Rep. John Lewis
— a civil rights hero who bled to get all Americans the right to vote
— describes von Spakowsky as waking up every morning thinking "What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote?"
Spakowsky is a close adviser to True the Vote,
a Houston-based organization funded by wealthy conservative donors that
has led challenges against the registration of minority voters across
the country.
Because of these
challenges, thousands of Americans who have voted reliably in the same
place every year have had to attend formal hearings to defend their
registrations or be disqualified from voting. The group has been so
aggressive and so inaccurate in its work that Rep. Elijah Cummings has said it could "amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights."
The backbone of the voter
suppression movement has been the national push to institute a
labyrinth of voter identification laws. Thirty-three states have passed such laws since 2009.