A Joe-the-Plumber
Free Zone! Not a word about him in today’s show!
UPDATED POST: See last entry below for an article I just received from THE NATION magazine about Voter Fraud. I know that The Nation is a left-leaning magazine but the points made in the piece are germane to discussions about ACORN and other voter fraud conversations that have been going on here on the LRC Blog.
Whole lotta linkin' (not Abe!) goin' on, see below to connect to sites Matt mentions. Arianna’s
on the road today; it’s an all-male revue. The final debate’s over.
Can McCain make a comeback? Tony sees
a glimmer of hope in the polls. Bob defends the underdog, but calls
some of his followers scary. Tony takes extreme exception to this
characterization and says McCain’s “been running far too clean a
campaign” compared to Obama, whom he says “has ruthlessly been playing
the race card.” Matt says he’s heard that Colin Powell will announce
for Obama this weekend. Enough politics: how ‘bout that economy? Tony
says it's easy to buy equities if you've got 80 billion dollars (like
Buffett, see below). Bob tells us why he bought Google, and “did the
right thing” while making a 50% profit. Bob also stresses the need to
help the homeowner not the bandit bankers; Matt says we need both
mortgage relief and an economic stimulus, and is writing a piece about
his conversion away from fiscal conservatism, “Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Trillion Dollar Debt…” I’ll share it once it’s
published.
PS: I am
planning a tiny little contest -- the person who most closely picks both the final vote percentage and the
number of electoral votes for each candidate -- deadline Nov. 3 -- could win --
hang on now -- one of TWO Left, Right & Center sun visors! Yep, it's a
collector's item, only about 100 were made, and I just found the last two that I was hoarding in my
closet! I'll work out the details and tell you how to enter, stay tuned to this
space.
One final note: LRC is live ONSTAGE in Santa Monica, ON
AIR in SoCal and ONLINE worldwide @ KCRW.com (video and audio webcasts) on Sunday, Nov. 9th starting at 5:45
pm Pacific Time (for the behind-the-scenes stuff), 6 pm live
broadcast/webcast. We'll make the show available as a special podcast or you can watch it on demand later.
NY Times Sunday Magazine preview
For a guy who just four years ago was running his
first statewide campaign, Barack Obama has made startlingly
few missteps as a presidential candidate. But the moment Obama would most like
to take back now, if he could, was the one last April when, speaking to a small
gathering of Bay Area contributors, he said that small-town voters in
Pennsylvania and other states had grown “bitter” over lost jobs, which caused
them to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like
them.” That comment, subsequently posted by a blogger for the Huffington Post, undercut
one of the central premises of Obama’s campaign, an argument he first floated
in his famous 2004 convention address — that he could somehow erode the tired
distinctions between red states and blue ones and appeal to disaffected white
men who had written off national Democrats as hopelessly elitist. Instead, in
the weeks that followed, white working-class primary voters, not only in
industrial states like Pennsylvania but also in rural states like Kentucky and
West Virginia, rejected his candidacy by wide margins, and he staggered,
wounded, toward the nomination.
“That was
my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told me recently. (more at the link above)
THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its
problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks
are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise,
business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.
So ... I’ve been buying American stocks. (more at the link above)
The Bing Blog
http://stanleybing.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/
Thursday, October 16, 2008 at
12:18 pm
I walked home last night from the office. All along the route, I passed the
places I used to stop in for a drink. It’s been a month now since I had a nice,
frosty martini, so cold that the ice chips float to the top and the sides of
the glass bead up with condensation… or a brawny glass of Johnny Walker
Black, sinuous and golden in a big bottomed glass… or even a
festive balloon or two of rich, big-shouldered, blood-red Zin, oaky and
spicy and redolent of cinnamon and chocolate…
I walked by these places but did not go in. I figure the time to start
drinking again is when I don’t feel the inexorable pull to the cozy dimness
that lies beyond their inviting portals. In other words, when I don’t need
a drink is precisely the moment when I’ll feel okay having one.
THE BIG PICTURE economic blog
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/
Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke
Before the National Economists Club, Washington, D.C.
November 21, 2002
Deflation: Making Sure "It" Doesn't Happen Here
Since World War II, inflation--the apparently inexorable rise in the
prices of goods and services--has been the bane of central bankers.
Economists of various stripes have argued that inflation is the
inevitable result of (pick your favorite) the abandonment of metallic
monetary standards, a lack of fiscal discipline, shocks to the price of
oil and other commodities, struggles over the distribution of income,
excessive money creation, self-confirming inflation expectations, an
"inflation bias" in the policies of central banks, and still others.
Despite widespread "inflation pessimism," however, during the 1980s and
1990s most industrial-country central banks were able to cage, if not
entirely tame, the inflation dragon. Although a number of factors
converged to make this happy outcome possible, an essential element was
the heightened understanding by central bankers and, equally as
important, by political leaders and the public at large of the very
high costs of allowing the economy to stray too far from price
stability.
With inflation rates now quite low in the United States,
however, some have expressed concern that we may soon face a new
problem--the danger of deflation, or falling prices. That this concern
is not purely hypothetical is brought home to us whenever we read
newspaper reports about Japan, where what seems to be a relatively
moderate deflation--a
decline in consumer prices of about 1 percent per year--has been
associated with years of painfully slow growth, rising joblessness, and
apparently intractable financial problems in the banking and corporate
sectors. While it is difficult to sort out cause from effect, the
consensus view is that deflation has been an important negative factor
in the Japanese slump.
So, is deflation a threat to the economic health of the United States?
Not to leave you in suspense, I believe that the chance of significant
deflation in the United
States in the foreseeable future is
extremely small, for two principal reasons. (read complete speech at link above)
UPDATE ADDED ON 10.21:
The Nation's DC Editor takes on ACORN, GOP voter suppression and the post
office.
First, voter fraud doesn’t exist. Second, if ACORN were
trying to do it, they sure are going about it all wrong. No, this is just a
routine Republican scam.
How I
Committed Voter Fraud
by Christopher Hayes
Last week, I committed voter fraud. Or, I should say: ‘voter
fraud’ -- inside the same sarcastic scare quotes that John McCain deployed when
he recently invoked that old tricky word ‘health’, as in "health of the
mother.”
I didn't even need to take my cues from ACORN. I'm kind of a
voter-fraud cell of one, you might say. Here's how it went down.
Having moved to DC last year, I suddenly realized a week ago
that I needed to register to vote at my new (disenfranchised) address by October
5. So I dutifully printed out the form, filled it out and prepared to mail it. I
happen to live in one of those pre-war apartment buildings that has a mail
chute. As I went to the mail chute to deposit my registration I encounter a
problem: The chute hole was too small for the large registration form. So,
foolishly, I folded it in half and stuffed it in. Immediately, I realized I'd
made a terrible mistake. The form got about a foot down before getting stuck. I
went and got a coat hanger, attempting to fish it out, but, of course, as always
happens in these situations, only succeeded in pushing it further down. I
resigned in despair and gaped: There was my precious franchise, tantalizingly
close, and yet so far. What to do?
Since it was only a few days before the registration deadline
I had no choice. The next day I printed out another form and mailed it
from a mailbox on Capitol Hill. But here's where the serious, class A fraud
comes in. That very same day, my excellent and competent building super had
managed to get the mail chute unstuck, meaning there were now -- gasp! -- two
identical registration forms speeding their way towards DC Board of Elections
Headquarters. That's right, a fraudulent registration with my name on
it.
Ok, so obviously this is absurd. I had no intent to defraud
the DC Board of Elections, and certainly no intent nor means of voting twice,
which is the actual theoretical danger being invoked here. The faux-outrage that
Republicans have marshaled over alleged voter fraud is so transparently faked,
so expertly cynical its almost surreal.
When John McCain accused ACORN of being on the "verge of maybe
perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history" Obama just broke down
laughing. I was too. It was the only reasonable reaction.
But sure enough, they've managed to embed the notion deeply
among the right-wing base and its now bled into popular discussion. I even heard
someone on ESPN make an ACORN vote-fraud joke the other night, and I knew this
had gotten out of hand).
As nearly everyone on the left has pointed out, this is now a
Republican routine. Every two years, they gin up baseless accusations of "voter
fraud," often directed at ACORN. The strategic imperative is simple: Create a
pretense that will allow them to more credibly hassle and hopefully suppress
poor and minority voters.
Just to get this out of the way: In the real world, there is
no such thing as voter fraud. There will be roughly as many fraudulent votes
cast in this election as there were stockpiles of biological weapons in Iraq.
That is to say, none.
“But what about all those duplicate and obviously fake voter
registration cards submitted by ACORN?” you ask. They were required by law to
submit them. In order to prevent tampering, state law in many places requires
groups like ACORN to submit all the forms they collect, whether obviously
erroneous or not.
Keep in mind that ACORN registered somewhere around 1.3
million people this cycle. Not surprisingly, there are errors. Think of all the
times you've eaten at a restaurant in your life. On the rare occasions when the
restaurant totaled the bill wrong, were they trying to defraud you? Did you
inform the cops of an attempted robbery? Are you suspicious of restaurants
generally and view them as an enterprise committed to widespread fraud? No, of
course not. You would have to be a paranoid doofus to believe that.
But let's do it anyway. Imagine ACORN wanted to pull off a
massive campaign of voter fraud. What would that look like? Well, first they'd
probably want to target swing states. And if they were going to undertake the
task, they'd have to set up a goal of delivering a certain amount of votes in
each of these states, say, just to be conservative, 500. Now, if they were
planning on stealing or buying that many votes in each swing state, it's pretty
unlikely they would be sending out press releases every day publicizing their
work, boasting about their voter registration numbers and inviting reporters
like myself to come shadow their workers. Indeed, it's unclear why they would
bother registering so many people to begin with. Just how would 1.3 million
extra registrations aid them in pulling off their fraud? How do all those extra
registrations help any one person vote twice?
In fact, the easiest, most direct way to commit fraud would be
to find 500 people and simply pay them to register and then vote the way you
want. But doing that wouldn't be aided by a widespread voter registration drive
with lots of faulty registrations. Indeed, that would only draw unwarranted
attention! And if some organization were to attempt some plot to pay lots
of people who ordinarily don't vote to register and then vote the way they say,
what are the odds that would stay secret? Approximately zero.
In other words, the ACORN-Truthers persist in believing
something that on its face is manifestly and obviously absurd. But this isn't
some fringe movement. This is being cynically fomented by everyone in the entire
right-wing noise machine, from talk radio, to Fox News, all the way up to the
actual members of the ticket, Sarah Palin and John McCain. My suspicion is that
the people who are fomenting this garbage, the RNC, Sarah Palin, Fox News and
others know that it's crap.
But for frank political reasons they are heavily invested in
reducing the number of poor people and black people who vote. Black people are
going to vote for Barack Obama in overwhelming, historic numbers. Poor people
vote for Democrats by massive margins as well. Ergo, the Republicans want to
keep them home. Simple as that. Increasing the likelihood that these voters are
struck from voter roles, or intimidated into staying home redounds to their
benefit.
Then there's the rank and file, the members of the GOP's base
who've been told by their leaders that there actually is a massive conspiracy
afoot and whose belief to that effect have now so hardened that no bit of logic,
reason or evidence will puncture it. This is dangerous stuff.
If Obama wins, we are going to be living with this for a
while. Not only is this a deeply cynical attempt to subvert the democratic
process itself, to roll back the clock to the days of yore when the franchise
was a bit more, ahem, heavily restricted. It is also an attempt to deny Barack
Obama, the Democratic party, and the center-left a legitimate claim at state
power.
In the meantime, it is, as it so often is, up to the media to
call this was it is: deranged and paranoid. Anyone who implies or accuses ACORN
of pulling off a fraud of historic proportions should be treated by the media
with about as much deference as those nutjobs who say 9/11 was an inside
job.
Christopher Hayes is the Washington editor for The
Nation magazine.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation – distributed by Agence
Global
