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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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Okay, so in case you just started reading I am the founder of a club appropriately called the Lying Sack of Shit Club (LSOS Club), because…well…because there are so many LSOS’s out there that need to be recognized and given the badge of LSOS membership.
No surprise, people in politics represent about 90+% of the members in the club. And in case you’re wondering if Romney is a member. You bet your sweet ass (and mine too :) he is. And he’s at the top of the list. Here’s another reason why…a piece of news that just isn’t getting much air time, and should:
Readers: I know it’s been a long time since I’ve asked. But, if someone you know deserves the LSOS membership badge, let me know and I’d be happy to give some recognition and add them to membership.
Peace out. Oh, and blog me. Hey, check it out: Did you notice there is now a “spellcheck” and an “expanded comment box” to make your blogging experience even better?
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
I don’t care how much money the republicans have spent to keep their cronies in office…and they have spent 7 times what the Democrats have spent in this ScottWalker/ Tom Barrett race…Walker needs to take a walk. And so do you: Straight to the polls. The Wisconsin recall election is today and every vote counts. Don’t trust the polls that Walker has a lead over Barrett. Mike, TM already warned us of the republican’s election plans. If you want my opinion, they may try to use this election as a rehearsal for what’s planned for the presidential election.
Wisconsin voters are reporting receiving robocalls that claim voters who signed recall petitions or voted to recall Governor Scott Walker are not required to vote again tomorrow, June 5th. This is incorrect information.
Regardless of whether you signed petitions or voted previously, you still need to vote tomorrow in the June 5th recall election.
Dirty Tricks in Full Effect in Wisconsin
The dirty tricks are in full effect in Wisconsin. Wisconsin voters are reporting receiving robocalls that claim voters who signed recall petitions or voted to recall Governor Scott Walker are not required to vote again tomorrow, June 5th. This is incorrect information. Regardless of whether you signed petitions or voted previously, you still need to vote tomorrow in the June 5th recall election.
In addition, there are groups pretending to be protectors of voting rights who are already spreading misinformation on voting, and they may be out tomorrow attempting to intimidate voters waiting in line to vote. Sometimes they will be wearing official-looking clothing or jackets that have things like ‘Election Protection’ printed on the back. As mentioned on the Ed Schultz radio show today, you do not need to justify your presence at the polling place to anyone. You are not required to show anyone proof that you are registered. You are not required to talk to anyone other than the friendly people sitting at the polling place desk or table.
Outside the polling place, you are allowed to videotape or photograph anything you like. If anyone harrasses you, you can take their picture, report them to election officials, or even call the police. Inside your polling place, report any troublemakers to election officials.
After voting has closed, your polling place becomes an open meeting. You are allowed to peacefully observe, and more.
Do not be intimidated, do not turn away from your right to vote for any reason. Go out and vote tomorrow!
***
Also in the similar vein, this is what was said on the Ed Show last night:
Readers: Notice how many times the audience shouts “Liar!”. Just another LSOS spewing fear and lies. I think Sen. Glenn Grothman deserves membership to the LSOS Club – don’t you? Blog me. And go out and vote today.
M votes for the local elections, just in case you’re wondering:
Yes on 28.
Yes on 29
No on A
Yes on B
Sen. Dianne Feinstein
State Sen: Mark Leno
State Assembly: Phil Ting
Ian: I would never drop Adam, AH and Bita. At the moment they are doing their thing.
Cliff: Now…what prevented you from at least saying hello?
Howie: Nice to see you here again. Thanks for the sharing the news of Tsarmi.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
For those of you that didn’t see this on the Ed Show, I thought I would post what seems to be a hot topic from the comments I read on yesterday’s post:
“Fox and Friends” aired a remarkable four-minute video on its Wednesday show.
The video, which the hosts of the show advertised as taking a “look back” at President Obama’s four years in office, could easily be mistaken for a Republican attack ad. It was aired multiple times throughout the show. (UPDATE: Fox News later issued a statement disavowing the ad and attributing it to an associate producer. See the statement below.)
“We decided to take a look back at the president’s first term to see if it lived up to hope and change,” host Gretchen Carlson asked at one point, introducing the video.
In the video —which is labeled as a “Fox and Friends Presents” production — viewers see images of Obama talking about jobs contrasted with footage of homeless people. There is dark, foreboding music, and statistics about the unemployment rate, the rise in the number of food stamps, and the national debt, among other things.
The hosts heaped lavish praise on the producer of the video saying that it had taken a “tremendous amount of research” to put together.
Some media critics were outraged by the video. The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik denounced it, calling it reminiscent of “1930s propaganda”:
As the guy who challenged the Obama administration two years when it tried to deny Fox News access to interviews and other opportunities offered to the media on the grounds that Fox was not a legitimate news operation, I have to tell you even I am shocked by how blatantly Fox is throwing off any pretense of being a journalistic entity with videos like this. Don’t be fooled by Bret Baier’s Boy Scout smile or all the talk about how some shows are news and some are opinion on the channel. Any news organization that puts up this kind of video is rotten to the core.
Conservative commentators also expressed discomfort with the video. Hot Air’s Ed Morrisey said that it didn’t seem like something a news organization should be producing:
I know the initial response will be that other news organizations offer biased perspectives and hagiographies of Obama that go well beyond a single video … and that response is entirely valid. However, we usually criticize that kind of behavior with other news organizations, too. If anyone wanted to look for evidence that the overall Fox News organization intends to campaign against Obama rather than cover the campaign, this video would be difficult to refute as evidence for that claim.
UPDATE: Bill Shine, the executive vice president for programming at Fox News, issued a statement about the video on Wednesday afternoon.
“The package that aired on ‘Fox & Friends’ was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network,” Shine said. “This has been addressed with the show’s producers.”
Fox News later confirmed that the video had been removed from both its main website and the network’s aggregation site, foxnation.com.
*******
Readers: I can’t seem to get the video to load so that I can embed it here. If you’re interested in watching it, click here, please. Thanks. It’s Friday!...you know what to do.
Zen Lill: Thanks for the phone call yesterday morning. Sorry I could not get to you. Just to let you know, mornings are tough between blog time and some personal things I do each morning. I will try and return your call when I get a minute. I HOPE everything is okay with your car!
I’m out the door…
Peace & Love: “Live it, Give it”.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
Vivian: I just heard about this on KPFA (I think) the other day. This topic is so important because this massive disenfranchisement could have a major affect on the vote in Florida. This was also on the Ed Show last week:
In light of Elliot’s comment and in support Mike, TM’s comment, and because not enough can be said about this, I am posting an article from back in 2009 that is quite illuminating. Even if voters can get to the polls, we still need to be concerned as to whether their votes will be counted toward the candidate they actually voted for and marked on the ballot.
Unless US Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America’s electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America’s future with a few proprietary keystrokes.
ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine)
Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.
But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.
For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the US Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.
And in fact, it’s even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t.
Let’s do a quick review:
1) ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;
2) As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, what scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;
3) The source code on all US touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines—including ES&S—are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work;
4) Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the public’s inability to gain control or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;
5) With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter virtually every election in the US with a few keystrokes. Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;
6) Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators used in this country with which voters use pencils to fill in circles indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of the US vote count;
7) The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased “accidentally” by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.
Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida?s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not. Computer software “disappeared” 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush?s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the rightful winner.
In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).
Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in “recounting the vote” which confirmed the Bush “victory,” despite exit poll results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.
In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees them.
Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the “retail” level is far more difficult than stealing votes at the “wholesale” level with an electronic flip of a switch.
As it’s done in in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only realistic means by which the US can establish a democratic system of ballot casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!
*******
Readers: This was the warning given back on September 09, that the Democrats didn’t listen to. Are they listening now? And if they aren’t will there be a repeat of the 2010 Steal?
We better HOPE not. And I just want to add thanks to Mike, MT’s comment, it seems that Dems are privy to the fraud. But what will be done? HOPEing is not enough. This election is more important than 2008 and those that oppose know it, and will do anything and everything in their power to ensure they are successful and the White House goes back to being “white”. Sick, I know but from all that we read here, do not doubt it for one minute. This is not a time to sit back and be quiet.
Blog me, and do something.
Thank you.
George: Welcome. Thanks for commenting. And yes, you are correct, I do blame your party (republican) for the lack of product safety. But it seems that many republicans don’t seem to care about certain important issues, including health issues, until it happens in their own backyard. I am truly sorry to hear about your son. It seems that this is a wake-up call that has inspired you to think differently. I HOPE that you also question your party’s motives, and act differently.
Alycedale: I like the title. Well deserved for those that fit the description…and there are many…at least 30%. :)
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
Once again the republicans are ruthless when it comes to wanting to win this election at all cost, and Romney is no different. Romney could care less about anything else but making it into the White House, doing and saying whatever it takes to get there.
In the position of the President of the United States, we hold that person in high regard as someone we can count on and trust. Romney has proven time and time again he isn’t a leader and he isn’t capable. As has been stated by many, “Whichever direction will garner him votes, that is the way he will go”. So yes…this is a man who is not grounded at all, and the only thing he has mastered is “flip flopping” and being “socially inept”.
Here is the latest of his ineptness in handling a statement that should’ve been addressed. During a town hall event, a crazy woman makes a ridiculous statement about Obama, and how he should be tried for treason. Romney doesn’t even correct the audience member, which makes it look like he agrees with her. Then later states: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me,” he said. “Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.” He not only doesn’t know how to act like a leader by staying silent, but he obviously doesn’t know the difference between a “statement” and a “question”.
An awkward moment occurred at Mitt Romney’s town hall event in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday when an audience member, in the process of asking him a question, asserted that President Barack Obama should be tried for treason. Romney remained silent during the question-and-answer session, only to say that he “of course” did not agree with the sentiment while greeting voters after the event.
The incident nevertheless illustrated what seems likely to be a tricky proposition for Romney as the general election season progresses: balancing the anti-Obama sentiments of the party’s base with the need to maintain a civil level of discourse.
“We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution,” the audience member said to applause. “And I want to know — yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason — but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country.”
Romney didn’t correct the woman, choosing instead to address the question she posed.
“Well, as I’m sure you do, I happen to believe the Constitution was not just brilliant but probably inspired. I happen to believe the same thing about the Declaration of Independence,” said Romney. “I would respect the different branches of government if I am fortunate enough to become president.”
“I would reserve the right as president to put in place executive orders,” Romney added. “I would put in place … an executive order that grants a waiver from Obamacare to all 50 states.”
Shortly after the event, Romney appeared on CNN, where he was asked about the incident. “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me,” he said. “Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.”
Indeed, it’s difficult to declare at what point Romney is obligated to correct or push back against a member of the crowd. But the whole episode brought to mind the infamous 2008 campaign event when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) corrected an audience member who asserted her belief that then-Sen. Obama was a Muslim. By not doing the same as McCain, Romney opened himself up to criticism.
“We saw what a weak leader Romney was in the whole [Richard] Grenell mess,” DNC Communications Director Brad Woodhouse said, in reference to the openly gay foreign policy spokesman who left the Romney campaign last week. “Not surprised he didn’t push back on the treason remark.”
“Today we saw Mitt Romney’s version of leadership: standing by silently as his chief surrogate attacked the president’s family at the event and another supporter alleged that the president should be tried for treason,” said Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign. “Time after time in this campaign, Mitt Romney has had the opportunity to show that he has the fortitude to stand up to hateful and over-the-line rhetoric and time after time, he has failed to do so. If this is the ‘leadership’ he has shown on the campaign trail, what can the American people expect of him as commander-in-chief?”
This article was updated to include remarks Romney made during an appearance on CNN and a response from the Obama campaign.
*******
Readers: So many interesting topics in the news, it is hard to pick just one to talk about. What’s on your mind? Blog me.
Peace & Love…
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
