@Jimcat Kasprzak
I also remember that before the election of 2000, some far-right Republicans were saying that they feared that Bill Clinton would do exactly the same thing if Gore didn't win the election.
I think that it was a wingnut idea coming from the right, and it's a wingnut idea coming from the left.
The difference is that in 2004, Bush Administration officials actually explored the idea of whether the election could be "postponed" for security reasons:
Newsweek said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, wants Ridge to ask Congress to pass legislation giving the government power to cancel or reschedule a federal election. Soaries said New York suspended primary elections on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, but the federal government does not appear to have that authority.
The public response was negative, and the idea never went anywhere, but to suggest that it's equally paranoid on the right and the left is a false equivalence.
And if you look at Maryland Avenue and 3rd St SW, next to the American Indian Museum, you can see the huge knot of people who were still waiting to get in at the gate to the "Silver" section.
Has anyone seen any info about what time the photo was taken? I'd be interested to know if it was actually during the ceremony, or beforehand. Just so I can properly point to which tiny dot is me. :-)
And beyond all of this there is the fact that the torture techniques those in the SERE program were being trained to resist were those developed by the Soviets and the Chinese to elicit false confessions! There are other aspects of this that are more horrible, more criminal, and more immoral, but that fact is without a doubt the stupidest part of the whole evil episode. Only their we-are-always-right "24"-addled brains could ignore that essential information and decide that if our soldiers are being trained to deal with it, the exact opposite must be true. Grrr!
Conservatives and their fellow travelers (like Lieberman) have worked very hard to define "centrist" to mean a "center" halfway between wherever we are now and where the right wing wants us to be.
I’m already seeing comments in various blogs about how the Obama victory means liberals “don’t get to play the race card anymore†(whatever the hell that means).
"Playing the race card" means using race as a political weapon by demonizing another race (Willie Horton and the infamous "black hands" ad being classic examples.)
Conservatives, as part of their general war on political language that doesn't favor them, have been working for years to define "playing the race card" as any acknowledgment by a politician that race exists, and we don't live in a perfect post-racial society. Hence the idiotic complaints about "liberals playing the race card." (Which is not to say that liberals can't, just that most of the attempts by conservatives to put actions in this category are fundamentally dishonest.)
robert west:
Redshift: there's a difference, however, between being ok legally and being ok politically. Which is to say: in some parts of the country, even if it's legally OK for a non-citizen to help a campaign, doing so may actually inflict a political price on the campaign.
It's far better, IMO, to err on the side of caution on this one.
And I would say that political judgment is better left to the campaign, rather than pre-emptively taking yourself out. They know what they're doing, really. As long as you're clear with the campaign about your status, and let them know you won't be offended if they can't use you, they can decide whether it will cause them any problems. Despite the anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner demagoguery in certain quarters, there are lots of places where this would be no problem.
It's way too easy for people to convince themselves they shouldn't volunteer. Let's not add to them.
Lori:
"Each State in Union also has a Secretary of State, who is in charge of that State's Board of Elections, and an Attorney General, who is responsible for that State's Justice Department. Both of these are elected positions, so of course they belong to one of the political parties -- but it may not be the same party as the Governor of that State."
Actually, it depends on the state. Virginia's Secretary of State is appointed, not elected.
myrthe:
Is this a new thing, or have US government jobs always been partisan? Is this a bug or a feature, is it better to have declared allegiances?
It is a new thing. The actions of Harris and Blackwell were shocking to a lot of people (one reason why they're both out of office now.) There have always been corrupt officials who favored their party (and probably more at the more local levels), but most of those elected or appointed by elected officials took their duties and the laws they were to enforce seriously.
In my experience, it's only been recently that a shameless attitude of "of course I'm going to use my office to benefit myself and my party" has emerge. At the federal level, there are laws against this sort of thing, and this is the first administration in my adult life to openly ignore them.
Zeynep and Mikael -- I think Zeynep got some bad information, probably from a campaign that didn't have the manpower to find out the exact rules, and didn't want to take any chances. I'd suggest getting in touch with the Obama campaign (or another campaign) in your area. There are definitely tasks non-citizens can do both on Election Day and before, and this campaign is savvy enough to know which is which.
Here in Virginia, for example, the only campaign activities that require you to be a registered voter are registering other voters and being an observer *inside* a polling place. Everything else is fair game, and I'm sure your help would be welcome.
Emptywheel over at Firedoglake had some info back in May about Minneapolis' Joint Terrorist Task Force recruiting people to infiltrate peace groups; I'll try to point people there over here to help.
I was there with my lovely wife anthro_geek, though as the party had already reached the crowded-elevator stage (and past the picture-taking stage), I didn't actually get to meet you guys before you had to leave for the Tor party. Still, it was nice meeting some of some of my fellow fluorospherians, and it was cool to get to go to one of the exclusive Worldcon parties, rather than just overhearing talk about them and muttering to myself "well, I wouldn't want to go anyway, hmph!"
The glorification of "each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows" is an interesting reminder of how industrialization used to be a virtue in itself, even in food, just like stock certificates used to proudly feature engravings of factories belching smoke.
#17 - David, I think the difference is that those letter-writing campaigns are directed at offices or newspapers where that's the standard form of communication. The McCain comment spam program is more like if MoveOn sent you a letter and a list of parties or meetings to go to and recite it from memory, regardless of whether anyone's talking about the topic.
The absolute best result of the McCain comment spam program is how it created an instant boilerplate response for trolls on political blogs that is relatively good-humored and avoids most of the problems created when people can't resist engaging them:
"Okay, you've earned your McCain Points. Bye now."
I first heard of the MBA during the Libby trial, when they pulled the same ploy of claiming they represent "the bloggers" and tried to be the gatekeepers for who got press credentials. Fortunately, the judge didn't buy it, and more fortunately, the judge did accept the idea that bloggers were worthy of press credentials. The MBA got one set of credentials, which they shared between a set of bloggers who produced nothing particularly noteworthy, Firedoglake got their own, and produced groundbreaking liveblogging and other coverage that even the mainstream media used as a go-to reference. And we all lived happily ever after. (Well, we're still working on that.)
(Full disclosure: I've been part of the Firedoglake community from near the beginning, so my view of the MBA may be a little biased. But not much. ;-)
"The Democrats have a good reason to be hesitant to pursue this: if Bush was clearly lying, the Dems were either his partners or his dupes."
I have to disagree. The report says that based on a review of the evidence, Bush was lying, not "Bush was clearly lying and anybody could have seen that at the time." The whole point is that Bush was misrepresenting what he knew to Congress and to the nation, not what "everbody" knew. Establishing that with solid evidence took getting up an Intelligence Committee investigation and getting a majority so the Republican committee chair couldn't sit on the results any longer.
I don't disagree that there was a lack of skepticism and plenty of political cowardice about whether he could be successfully challenged on it (and there still is), but equating that with being dupes or partners is like saying that no one should be prosecuted for fraud because the victim should have been able to see through it.
Fred Hiatt's bizarre thesis seems to be that since there are some things that Bush didn't lie about, it's inaccurate to say that he lied. He tries to obfuscate it by pretending that the things Bush didn't lie about are the only things in the report, but that's basically it.
I hadn't realized that if you've ever told the truth, you can't fairly be accused of lying. I'd better get started on my not-lying; clearly, I've got a lot of catching up to do.
Michael@27: Sadly, I don't think Gregory's attitude is atypical. Most of the media figures who either failed to call the Bush Administration on their obvious lies, or worse, cheered those who advocated for war and ridiculed those who didn't still do not appear to have any understanding that they did anything wrong. Take this tidbit highlighted by Atrios, for example -- I understand that tone doesn't convey well in text, but the reporter can't even grasp that the comment is mocking journalists for their failure to do their jobs.
But more to the point, why should they accept how wrong they were? The fact remains that people who were tragically wrong about war and almost everything else still get invited on TV as foreign policy experts, and people who called it correctly are rarely seen.
What strikes me about the title is that even in his bridge-burning tell-all, Scotty McClellan can't be completely honest -- it's Washington's "culture of deception," not the GOP's or the Bush Administration's. Despite the fact that there is no one to be blamed for the endless deceptions but the Republican Party and their supporters across the country who cheered them every step of the way (until they started losing), he's already playing the angle that Republicans and conservatives are pure and good until "Washington" exerts its corrupting influence.
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