Progress Now Action

Amendment 54 is a free speech issue. Free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There's a reason it is the first amendment. Without freedom of speech, you cannot protect any of the provisions of the Bill Of Rights.

Here are commentaries from Colorado newspapers.

The Rocky Mountain News

The ban applies not just to the agency the contractor is doing business with but to any state or local candidate or party. We can't fathom why, say, a paving contractor in Weld County would be considered corrupt if he and his partners donated to a state House candidate on the Western Slope, or the Democratic Party.

It gets worse. The amendment applies not only to the contractor, but also to "immediate family members," including spouses, children, siblings, grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and domestic partners.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/oct/01/the-gag-amendment/

(continued)

(and what you can do to help)  

No one will be shocked that we're witnessing deception in politics. Someone long ago realized if you have an unpopular cause, you call it the opposite of what it is. We've endured that legacy ever since.  

A relentless, decades-long attack on worker organizations  

Union pay-scale tends to bring up all wages in a given area. If one company pays better, workers may be tempted to leave their non-union jobs to get the higher pay. Business owners know this, and some have united in the cause of destroying unions. They have one overriding goal: higher profits for business owners and investors, accomplished by reducing labor costs.  

Critics of the decades-old campaign to drive down wages observe that “while the National Right to Work Committee purports to engage in grass-roots lobbying on behalf of the 'little guy', [it] was formed by a group of southern businessmen with the express purpose of fighting unions... they 'added a few workers for the purpose of public relations.' ... The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has received millions of dollars in grants from foundations controlled by major U.S. Industrialists...” [from Wikipedia]  

In their relentless drive toward lower wages, less safe working conditions, and diminished political power for working people throughout America, they have harnessed the deception model of politicking. But this campaign isn't just deceptive; it is dishonest, opportunistic, and brutally relentless.

In 1961 Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed the very issue that Colorado voters will consider when they go to the polls on November 4. In 1961 (and by its proponents ever since), it was referred to as "right to work." Today we call it simply "work for less."

Dr. King observed,

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work.' It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.

As we contemplate going to the polls this election, we must keep in mind that the longterm right wing agenda to drive down wages hasn't ended. Indeed, the proponents of Work For Less laws have crafted a constitutional change for Colorado that would throw people into jail for doing exactly what we (business owners and working people) do in Colorado every day.

Johne at SquareState has blogged about how deceptive and injurious this amendment would be to Colorado's working people.

Qwen Ifill asked both vice-presidential candidates about a situation in which the top of the ticket could no longer fulfill presidential responsibilities (i.e., incapacity or death.) Joe Biden spoke with gravity in his voice, talking first about what a tragedy that would be, and then promising to continue Barack Obama's policies. Governor Palin briefly agreed that it would be a tragedy and then discussed to what extent she would continue John McCain's policies. But there were two aspects of her response that were unsettling. She was smiling as she considered her own ascendancy to the presidency under such circumstances. And, she talked about the need to introduce Wasilla sensibilities to governance of the country.

While there is nothing wrong with the Wasilla comment per se, her expanding on the vision of her 72 year old running mate, who has had four bouts with cancer, could not have come at a worse time, in response to this very serious question. It suggests that she has thought about this, and she would be too willing to step into McCain's shoes. Dana Milbank also found Palin's response incongruous, if not jarring:

Asked about the possibility that she would assume the presidency if the president died in office, she found herself saying, "I think we need a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, D.C." 

It is all too convenient to argue that she consciously connected "we need" with the idea of McCane's demise. But could there be a subconscious thought process at work here?

Palin, 5 seconds into responding about a possible McCain death or incapacity

Palin, 9 seconds into a several-minutes-long response about a possible McCain death or incapacity -- was the smile insensitive? Does it suggest something about Palin's ambitions?

I'll be interested to hear what readers think about this. The only innocent explanation that i can think of for such light-heartedness while discussing McCain's possible illness or death, is that Governor Palin's response rambled a lot. She very briefly (six seconds) agreed with Biden's somber reaction; chatted about her differences ("a team of mavericks") with McCain; returned for a moment to the possible reality of death; jumped immediately to the opportunity to bring Wasilla to Washington; then drew some distinctions between families and Washington.

Viewing the photo above, however -- and given the topic she was addressing -- it struck me as too brief a period of solemnity.

You're in a position to rise to the most powerful leadership position in the world, but you would do so at someone else's expense. Think about the implications of the question -- assassination, debilitating illlness, return of deadly cancer; then count off nine seconds to yourself -- and then ask yourself, would you have such a smile, so quickly?

Petty.

The McCain Campaign is a lot of things, but i've noticed something that, perhaps, no one else has picked up on -- a tendency to blame everyone, including voters, for their problems.

Here (below the video) is one example.

Watching the news coverage of congress has been a bit surreal. ALL OF THE NEWS COVERAGE that i've watched today has automatically assumed that the bailout is necessary to the welfare of the country. There has been NO consideration given to those who either reject the bailout entirely, or believe there may be better alternatives that have not been explored.  

There's a significant element of blackmail in the demand for a bailout. None of us is in a position to know how much of the bailout is hype, how much of it would be beneficial, and how much of the money would disappear into thin air without a trace, like the nine billion dollars that the Bush Administration lost in Iraq.  

But consider this possibility: the Bush Administration is leaving soon. They initially tried to get this bill passed without any oversight whatsoever. What if the bailout would make things worse?

The article, apparently embarrassing to FoxNews, is titled, Conservatives Begin Questioning Palin’s Heft. Scores of generated web links point to the article on the FoxNews website -- or rather, to the address where the article could once be found.

Because it is an AP article, i'm not going to reproduce it here. (They're touchy about such practices.) But you can find it at this link:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.china/browse_thread/thread/da503176236efa28?pli=1

 I'm not the only one who noticed. Discussion about the FoxNews story deletions can be found here:

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/28/analysis-pressure-builds-palin-ahead-vp-debate/comments/

Brad Blog has the story:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6438

Behold the political system, stark and startling in the glare of new media attention.  

Consider these excerpts from Newsweek:

 McCain's trust in [campaign manager Rick Davis] was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager's firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008. As the mortgage crisis has escalated, almost any association with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae has become politically toxic...

One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. "It was stupid," the adviser said. "A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move."  

http://www.newsweek.com/id/161218  

Let me get this straight. The McCain Campaign attacked the Obama Campaign for close ties to a critical industry that has now been bailed out by the government.  

But the McCain Campaign had its own very close ties to the same industry. And their preferred solution to this embarrassment would have been to leave it all alone? To just pretend when lobbyists are strategically positioned in the middle of campaigns for the highest elected office in the land, ideally poised to get government to go easy on their industry, that everything is OK so long as the story doesn't get out?  

I have a suggestion. Why don't we have a conversation about the role of corporate lobbyists doing our nation's political business. And why don't we demand that the corporate media, which has long failed in its mission to cast light into the shadows, facilitate and promote that discussion?

(...about the Wall Street bailout...)

Jack London is famous for his dog stories. Few today know that he was a well-known socialist writer, or that his socialist views were shared (in his estimation) by seven million working class revolutionaries. Among the reasons London gave for embracing socialism, he wrote,

The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed. And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed deplorably, ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the world. It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and made modern society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and spiritual uplift. Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life organized, all this was possible. Here was the chance, God-given, and the capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. [emphasis added]

London wrote these words in the essay "Revolution," published in 1909.  He described how, in response to such perceptions, those seven million working people signed their letters to each other, "yours for the revolution."

Even as socialist political parties declined in the following decades, the basic tenets of socialist philosophy continued to animate American politics into the 'thirties, and left a significant imprint on Roosevelt's New Deal.

McCain Campaign called erratic, Conservatives criticize

The McCain Campaign has been described as erratic. This may be in part because this morning the McCain Campaign released ads declaring that McCain has won tonight's debate.

Four recent articles offer criticism of McCain or his ticket from people that you might expect should be supporting him.

One part of the McCain Campaign put out the above ad before the other part -- McCain himself -- had even announced that he would participate in the debate. This, against the backdrop of one of his ex-advisers declaring that "...his campaign is governed by tactics and not ideology..."

Pundits on cable TV have started calling John McCain a "drama queen." I think that may be a sexist term, but i admit that it seems to capture my own impression of McCain's recent grandstanding. In fact, both the top and the bottom of the McCain-Palin ticket have been taking hits from their own presumed base.

While conservative commentator George Will excoriated McCain, concluding that he had a "dismaying temperament" (and this was two days before he suspended his campaign and stood up the David Letterman Show), conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has reluctantly concluded that Sarah Palin is "out of her league" and should bow out.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal (long known as the blueblood paper of record for Republicans) said that McCain "gambled on a risky course... what Sen. McCain cast as a bipartisan, above-politics move, had descended into raw politics..."

(about the Palin-McCain ticket)

When John McCain introduced Governor Palin, he introduced her as a former union member.

A news article that reported McCain's introduction of Palin observes,

At the sixth-annual Labor Day picnic in Memphis, Palin's union ties didn't impress.

"She's anti-union and McCain is anti-union," said Howard R. Richardson, 77, a retired senior vice president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, one of the labor groups that voted to merge in 2004 form UNITE HERE.

She had two summer jobs which may have given her a card in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). However, the IBEW is on record supporting a different ticket.

Let us be charitable. Let us assume that Sarah Palin's participation in concocting the speech that she gave at the Republican National Convention was limited to reading it from the teleprompter, and perhaps cursory approval. To believe otherwise is to accuse her of something quite sinister -- the willful parroting of words of a racist who believed, and wrote, that fascism has its uses.

The quotation itself was innocuous and seemed non-controversial when it was spoken: 

“We grow good people in our small towns with honesty and sincerity and dignity”.

Was there an attempt to hide the authorship? Palin mentioned only that the words came from a "writer." It wasn't long before bloggers identified the author of that passage. We might ponder how the words of such a bigot got into one of the main speeches at a major party convention.

Westbrook Pegler was a columnist who died in 1969. He is best remembered for cheering a lynching in California, for advocating the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and lamenting that during an assassination attempt of Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was "regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara hit the wrong man when he shot at Roosevelt in Miami."

If the Palin-McCain ticket should win, Governor Palin will be the proverbial heartbeat away from owning the most powerful seat in the world. How competent is she? Although it is fair to suggest that anyone can "get hacked", Palin undoubtedly made herself a ripe target when it became public knowledge that she conducted official State of Alaska business from her Yahoo email account. That account has been hacked.

The information found there, including official communications, was provided anonymously to a website called Wikileaks. As i type this, that website has either been taken offline, or has become overloaded.

But the information also included personal information that will probably force all of Palin's contacts to change their email accounts. This includes the "First Dude", Palin's husband (ek9wnr@something.com) and daughter Bristol (bristol_palin@something.com). 

Palin had previously been criticized for using Yahoo email as a means to avoid scrutiny. Yahoo has never been considered a secure email service:

The practice [of using email services like Yahoo! for official business] is dangerous, said experts, and can run counter to laws ensuring government is open and accountable -- a tough point for Palin, who has made "open government" a catchphrase of her political identity...

Moreover, a hacked account could be used to falsify communications ... a point proven by one of the hackers, who used Palin's account to send a message to one of her assistants.  

We don't know whether Palin's account was hacked because she picked "lipstick" as her password,  or whether someone used a more sophisticated attack. But one must question the wisdom of someone putting government secrets at risk for the purpose of personal secrecy. How careful might she be with those nuclear codes?

Update: Gawker has copies of some Palin info from her personal Yahoo account.

Update 2: Breaking into Sarah Palin's webmail account was a simple hack--one that required little to no technical expertise.

"This election is not about issues," said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.

Of course not. The McCain Campaign wants it to be about personalities.

Karl Rove long ago recognized that George W. Bush could be packaged. The Kennebunkport cowboy may be all hat, no cattle, but his aw-shucks brush-clearing personability probably did as much to win him two elections as anything else. It has been said that many voters would rather have a beer with Bush than with either Gore or Kerry. But W's current popularity attests to the fact that personality is a thin attribute on which to hang a reputation.

The practice of creating and sustaining a heroic personality for public consumption seems to have become a staple in the political trick bag. When it became necessary to defend the war in Afghanistan, the Bush Administration lionized Pat Tillman and lied about his death. In Iraq, Jessica Lynch was transformed from injured, helpless victim to female Rambo. 

Tillman and Lynch were not co-conspirators in the expropriation of their personal stories, unlike Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is intimately involved in the effort to construct her own favorable personna. The significant question must be, when will the public discover the extent to which Palin's image has been conjured by the McCain Campaign? Newsweek suggests that her popularity is already subject to a reality check. Her favorables have slipped, her unfavorables have climbed. Stay tuned, this tracking poll may mark the beginning of a trend.

(updated)

The McCain Campaign has lied about the particulars of inexperienced but popular Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin's life in order to enhance her popularity. The McCain Campaign's half-truths, distortions, and outright lies have been well-documented in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

McCain's strategy to get elected includes creating an image of Sarah Palin's "every-voter" credentials. At his very first introduction of Palin in Dayton, Ohio -- a state with a large unionized workforce -- just before Labor Day, McCain sought to burnish her kinship with working people, including the unsupported statement that Palin "was a union member":

[excerpt] When Sen. John McCain on Friday announced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his choice for vice president on the Republican ticket, McCain said Palin was a union member and is married to a union member.

Palin was associated with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, according to the McCain campaign, while her husband is a member of the United Steelworkers.

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/sep/02/labor-picnic-serves-helping-of-politics/

"The person I am about to introduce was a union member..." --John McCain on video at 04:25 minute point:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/29/sarah-palin-john-mccain-i_n_122401.html?view=screen

Transcript of McCain's introduction:

http://homernews.com/stories/082908/news_vp.shtml

 
The story of Palin's union membership has since fallen into a media black hole.

[Overland High School teacher Jay] Bennish is the product of a teacher-training enterprise that on some campuses has slipped its moorings...

The Chronicle of Higher Education documented this trend in a Dec. 15 article, noting that "some education schools have begun questioning whether students value social justice, acknowledge white privilege, and agree to be change agents in battling sexism, racism and homophobia."

Just last month, a public outcry forced Washington State University to revise a politically charged evaluation form for would-be teachers that had been used to identify and punish conservative leanings. One student who had refused to give the expected answers regarding "the complexities of race, power, gender, class, sexual orientation, and privilege in American society" was ordered to take sensitivity training or leave the program. Ed Swan refused to do either...