As an aside, ACORN has also been involved in the OWS movement. I am sure that is a HUGE surprise – not. And I am sure you would not be surprised to learn they were also shredding documents as fast as they could to cover that involvement up. But I digress.

Yes, former Rep. Davis admitted that the Democrats are essentially using the talking point that Voter ID disenfranchises voters because it would impede their ability to cheat (WordPress won’t allow the embed code, but here is the link to watch the video):

Top Democrats are aggressively pushing the claim that Republicans’ worries about voter fraud are an insincere excuse to suppress voting by African-Americans and Hispanics.

But former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis told The Daily Caller that anti-fraud measures are needed to protect African-Americans from corrupt political bosses — many of them African-Americans themselves — who run Democratic Party machines in the South.

[snip]

“What I have seen in my state, in my region, is the the most aggressive practitioners of voter-fraud are local machines who are tied lock, stock and barrel to the special interests in their communities — the landfills, the casino operators — and they’re cooking the [ballot] boxes on election day, they’re manufacturing absentee ballots, they’re voting [in the names of] people named Donald Duck, because they want to control politics and thwart progress,” he told TheDC.

“People who are progressives have no business defending those individuals.” (Click here to read the rest.)

While I was fairly certain this was going on, especially after the 2008 election, for a former Democratic Representative to confirm it is startling.

And this is especially poignant here in South Carolina, where the Democrats have been screaming bloody murder about the new Voter ID law set to go into effect in January. An anchor at MSNBC claimed it would be “electoral genocide” that would disenfranchise blacks in the state. Even considering the source, that is dangerous rhetoric indeed.

ABC News reported that Voter ID lawwill be taking place in a number of other states in 2012, as well, tripling the number of states requiring a photo ID. But even in this article, the way information is presented seems a bit skewed:

[snip]A report from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice showed that in Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, all of which will enact stricter photo ID laws before the 2012 election, 3.2 million potential voters do not have the state-issued ID that will be required for them to vote.

Lawrence Norden, an author of the Brennan Center report, said he “absolutely” thinks the new ID laws could impact the outcome of the election.

“We’re not claiming that all 3.2 million, in the case of voter ID laws, are actually not going to be able to vote,” Norden said. “But what we are saying is, it’s going to make it harder for those people to vote and some portion of them are probably not going to be able to vote even though they want to.” [snip] (Click here to read the rest.)

Uh huh. No, they aren’t claiming that all those folks won’t get a chance to vote, but they sure do like to IMPLY it, seems to me.

Well, at least here in South Cackalacki, people who could not get to the DMV for lack of a vehicle or ride, people were given the option of getting a ride to the DMV FREE OF CHARGE. Want to know how many residents took the State up on its offer? You might want to sit down for this, if you aren’t already: 25. Yes, twenty-five people used this free service.

Here’s the thing: former Representative Davis has pulled back the curtain on the real reason there is such a brouhaha being waged by the Democrats over voter ID. It will impede Democratic Party bosses from committing rampant voter fraud, up to FIFTY PERCENT in some locales. He is absolutely right when he makes this claim:

“People who are progressives have no business defending those individuals.”

Amen to that. I would extend that to anyone who cares about our democracy, our right to our own vote, our right to have elections that are fair and free of election shenanigans, have no business defending these individuals, or practices. Uh, yeah – not to mention that voter fraud is also ILLEGAL.

And I would take that one step further – it is immoral, and unethical, to commit voter fraud. This “Win At All Cost” mentality that has infected this nation is a blight, and must be stopped. We should guard closely, jealously, the authentic vote, otherwise our entire system is a sham. Never again should we have to question the authenticity of a vote, an election, or even a caucus, as a result of rampant fraud.

But even more, this faux outrage over the alleged disenfranchisement of blacks (and Hispanics) when this sort of fraud is being perpetrated by those claiming disenfranchisement. is insulting in the extreme, and insulting to the hard work of those who fought so hard to get their community the right to vote.

It reminds me of this woman, a Civil Rights Worker, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and her “grief” at witnessing disenfranchisement at the hands of young black men in Indiana (4:00 mark to 6:05 mark):

Click here to view the embedded video.

It causes me grief, too, for her community, and for all Americans. As the election season heats up, every single one of us, regardless of race or ethnicity, should be able to count on our vote counting for something. Thank heavens for the courage of people like Artur Davis, for speaking truth to power, and outing the Democrats for their disingenuous claim over Voter ID. It is our right to have free, and fair elections, and anyone found to be committing voter fraud should have the full force of the law brought down upon them.

The right to vote, and the right to an honest outcome, was the American Way. And it needs to be again as we embark upon another election season. Anything less is unacceptable.

What do you think?

I came across an article recently that confirmed what many of us have suspected: the media helps shape opinions on female political candidates. Anyone who has heard the stories about Nikki Haley’s alleged affairs (proven false as her released emails demonstrate, though you rarely hear that), or the alleged one night stand with Christine O’Donnell, which turned out to be hogwash (sexist, misogynistic hogwash at that, so much so that even N.O.W. felt compelled to defend her), or Meg Whitman being called a whore by her competitor’s aide, know of what I speak.

That is to say, the focus seems to be less on their actual political positions than airing unsubstantiated claims, usually of a sexual nature or involving a sexist characterization. That distinction was highlighted in a recent Christian Science Monitor piece, “Ending the ‘Hot Or Not’ Factor For Nikki Haley And Female Candidates.” The authors of this piece, Swanee Hunt and Kerry Healey are mighty powerful women in their own right, the former being an Ambassador to Austria, the latter the former Lt. Gov. of Massachusetts. They know what it is like to be a woman in the political world.

Their commentary is based on the results of a recent survey by the Lake Survey Partners. The entire piece is well worth your time, and I encourage you to read it. Some of the highlights follow:

American women hold twelve percent of governor’s seats and make up seventeen percent of Congress. If these numbers sound low, that’s because they are. The United States ranks a stunning 85 in the world in women’s parliamentary representation. No matter which side of the aisle prevails in the upcoming mid-term elections, both sides can agree the US needs to draw on one hundred percent of its citizens’ talents to meet our huge challenges.

Many factors contribute to the gender gap in political leadership, but a recent study sponsored by the new “Name It. Change It.” campaign highlights the key role of sexism in the media’s treatment of female candidates. This sexism acts both to deter women from running for office and also decreases their chances of success when they do throw their hats in the ring.

[...]

In the past few months, the experiences of South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley (R), Representative Betty Sutton (D) of Ohio, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Elena Kagan have demonstrated how women of all parties and branches of government get slammed by the same denigrating treatment. Despite differences in backgrounds, careers, and ideologies, as they’ve traveled the road of women in public life, their journeys – a congressional seat, a gubernatorial nomination, and the highest bench in the land – have been regrettably similar.

As the piece goes on to say, these women, despite the odds stacked against them by numerous media outlets, persevered. Nikki Haley not only won the primary, but she just received the endorsement of the Post and Courier, Charleston’s newspaper. Haley is no flash in the pan, after all – she has served in the SC House since 2004, and has a tremendous amount of experience preceding her time there. Though one would be hard-pressed to know much more about her than the allegations of infidelity.

Back to the Christian Science Monitor piece:

Now that we know the real and lasting damage to public discourse and political representation caused by offhand sexist remarks in the media, we all have a duty to push back.

Sexist commentary isn’t a harmless joke. Just last week, Boston radio station WRKO plumbed new depths when it stood by a producer’s mocking “endorsement” of Karyn Polito’s campaign for state treasurer that included an obscene comment about her body. That kind of endorsement hurts, not helps, and now we have the research to prove it. In the past two weeks, “Name It. Change It.” has called for public response to this and 12 similar sexist attacks on Republican, Democrat, and Green Rainbow candidates. As a result, WRKO was flooded with calls protesting the producer’s outburst.

Every election day, we two travel to the polls to cancel each other’s votes. But we, and millions like us, must stand together and “name it” until media outlets “change it.”

Amen to that. If you want to make a difference fighting sexism in the media, just click here: “Name It. Change It.”

And don’t forget to vote. One of the other important pieces highlighted by Hunt and Healey was this:

[snip] This makes voters less likely to cast a vote for female candidates who have been the subject of media assaults that target their gender or their sexuality. [snip]

Let’s not allow the media to make our decisions for us. If you have questions about a candidate’s position, don’t rely on the media’s interpretation of their policies. Go to the candidates’ websites and look for yourselves.

We must hold the media accountable for how they present information to us. In the case of women, we cannot allow them to present the candidates solely in terms of their gender, or their sexuality.

But it isn’t just in terms of gender that we must keep an eye on the very institution charged with bringing us the news we need to be informed citizens. As we know, the JournoList gang kept important information that was likely detrimental to Obama from being published, specifically related to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In addition, they targeted Sarah Palin once she gave her acceptance speech, realizing that she was a force with which to be reckoned.

Well, the media is at it again, and interestingly, still in Alaska. It turns out that a CBS affiliate tried to craft – check that- create negative stories against Joe Miller, particularly hoping to find anyone who supported him that may be a sex offender. Wanna know how the Miller camp found this out? The “journalists” left a message on a Miller campaign worker’s cellphone. No, I am not making this up! They were talking about how to gin up a story on Miller, preferably one that involved a child molester. Naturally, the general manager for the affiliate, KTVA, Jerry Bever, came up with a whole bunch of hooey about how yeah, there’s this recording and all, but, um, well, uh, everyone is just misunderstanding what they are saying. Yeah. Right. That’s the problem. Because how could anyone think for one second that’s what these “reporters” mean when they were saying this:

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s up to you because you’re the expert, but that’s what I would do…I’d wait until you see who showed up because that indicates we already know something…
[Laughter]
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters…
MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah… can you repeat Joe Miller’s…uh… list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester?
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.
[Laughter]
MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’
FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that.
[Laughter]
FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.

Wow. This is a CBS affiliate. As in, they are using OUR airwaves for this kind of rumor mongering.

Sarah Palin is mighty fired up about this whole Miller thing, as one might expect. I believe she used the term, “corrupt bastards” to describe what they attempted to do to Miller. Given Palin’s own experiences with the press making crap up about her and reporting it as fact, she makes the case for Hunt and Healey. Here she is on Greta Van Susteran discussing the state of journalism in general:

Unfortunately, we cannot have a “Do-Over” before the upcoming election, but we can, we must, demand a Fourth Estate that is reporting, not creating news. We must demand that journalists are not just reporting the pieces that helps their favorite politicians, or conversely, not reporting information that would harm their faves. We must demand that they stop framing women politicians on the basis of their sexuality, and/or gender. They must stop with their sexist and demeaning attempts to tear down women in politics. In short, they must return to being reporters, to journalists in the truest sense of the term. We have our eye on them…

UPDATE: This just out: “Producers Involved In Alaska ‘Phonegate’ Fired.” The article stated that: [snip] KTVA’s General Manager released this statement on the station’s web site:

“KTVA today released findings of its internal assessment of allegations that the “news director for CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA, along with assignment editor Nick McDermott, and other reporters, openly discussed creating, if not fabricating, two stories about Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Joe Miller,” as alleged by the Miller campaign. KTVA states that its review included multiple staff interviews, a review of that day’s actual news coverage and a forensic transcript of the recorded audio conversation. [snip] (Read the rest here.)

Wow, how about that?

Below the fold is a video of a speech Mr. Phillips gave in Seattle in September, 2008. It is long, I grant you, which is why I am putting it up today so you can take the time to watch it when you have time. That being said, his talk is so compelling, the time flies by. The information it contains is shocking. What we have heard about what happened in Ohio in 2004 is but a drop in the bucket compared to Mr. Phillips’ findings. Oh, and I should add, he is being humble when he says he is simply a musician and hiker (he helps to make trails). He has four degrees, and was a university professor.

Now I understand that, at least in India, the voting by electronic machines has not been as flawed as it has been, according to fellow NQ writer, pm317. But there seems to be some differences there insofar as their machines are made in keeping with government regulations. Since Diebold (now ES&S) and other companies claim their software is proprietary and NO ONE can know what’s in there, I think there is a difference from the get-go between the two countries. Moreover, according to the post:

Diebold system works on Microsoft software, it has no seals on locks and panels to detect a tempering. It has a keyboard interface (!!!) and the server was tested to have “Blaster” virus. One report on Wired says a lady stumbled upon some files from Diebold, and found that the votes were stored in MS Access files. It also has a PCMCIA SanDisk card for local storage. A touchscreen GUI and a network connection to send the results to a server after encrypting it with DES.

The Indian EVM is just plain circuit, with some assembly code. A few LEDs, and two Seven Segment LED displays. One EVM can list 16 candidates, but up to 4 EVMs can be Linked to accommodate 64 candidates. (In a country of a billion people its possible to have 64 candidates for one single constituency.)

That’s a big difference in terms of security. It’s an interesting read, and adds to this conversation.

At this point, though, it seems that our elections as they stand are fatally flawed, especially as you listen to Mr. Phillips’ experiences. What do you think? Come to our Live Chat at 9:00pm on Weds., May 20th to discuss this critical issue.

Join us on Weds., May 20th, at 9:00 PM for the last chat in our three part series discussing “Hacking Democracy,” electronic voting machines, and paper ballots.

Again, please take time to view the following video of Richard Hayes Phillips’ speech in Seattle in September, 2008, as he enumerates many irregularities he discovered in Ohio in the 2004 election:

We will once again be joined by Kathleen Wynne of Hand Count Our Paper Ballots Now , and we may have a surprise guest expert on the issue of electronic voting machines as well.

This is Part 2 of the article “Black Box Backlash,” the conclusion of Part 1 on Bev Harris, Black Box Voting, and the issue of leaving our democracy to electronic voting machines. This will be the topic of our Live Chat on Weds., May 13th, at 9:00 PM.

Back to the article:

COMPUTER SCIENTISTS were already hotly debating the issue. Stanford University’s David Dill became interested in computer voting when the state of Georgia had technical problems with its new voting machines in 2002. When Dill discovered his own county, Santa Clara in California, was about to start using electronic voting machines without paper output, he swung into action. Dill started an online petition calling for a paper trail that attracted some of the nation’s premier computer scientists. He put up a Web site that eventually became www.verifiedvoting.org and began speaking out about the issue around the country.

Harris’ instincts about posting the source code proved to be dead-on. Four computer scientists from Maryland’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University examined the code and released a scathing review of it. “Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts,” their report stated.

While the Hopkins review did not cause political pandemonium, it did validate Harris’ gut feelings about electronic voting—our votes were not secure because the software recording them was vulnerable to hacking. The report also attracted major media attention across the country.

Diebold spokesperson David Bear says, “Electronic voting is safe, secure, and accurate.” Bear says the code that Harris found on the Internet was partial and outdated. In addition, Bear points out, the software is not used in a vacuum. Election officials use a variety of checks and balances with any system that they employ to ensure its security.

After the Hopkins report, the state of Maryland had a couple of consultants review the touch-screen machines and the way they will be deployed in elections. The consultants made some recommendations to increase security, but Maryland is proceeding with the elections using the Diebold equipment.

Far be it from me to not believe a Diebold spokesperson, but, I don’t believe him. His contention that the machines are safe and secure flies in the face of a number of reports, including being able to access them with a mini-bar key! So, yeah, I’m not buying what he was selling. Makes me wonder why Maryland did, all evidence to the contrary. But, I’m not the only one who is just a tad suspicious:

AUDIT TRAIL TO CALIFORNIA

Harris, however, was not done with Diebold. Last Sept. 5, someone leaked 15,000 internal Diebold memos to Harris. She says she published 24 of them on her own PR Web site and was promptly hit with a cease-and-desist letter from Diebold. Soon, all 15,000 of the memos were circulating on the Internet. Independent media sites around the world and students at more than 30 universities posted them. Diebold tried to stop the postings by claiming copyright on the memos and found itself entangled in a free-speech battle. Eventually, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, posted them on his congressional Web site. Diebold recognized that Kucinich held a trump card and withdrew its objections to the postings.

Sadly, the memos themselves have not been the subject of any thorough analysis. They are mostly e-mails from Diebold employees and are full of phrases that sound bad but are hard to understand without technical expertise and context.

Diebold’s Bear says, “Those were internal discussions between individuals, not the sentiments of the company.”

HARRIS THINKS the memos contain important revelations. Perhaps the most important, she argues, is that there is widespread use of uncertified software for voting machines of all kinds. Whether we vote on the new touch-screen system or the optical-scan paper ballots in use in King County and elsewhere, computer software counts our ballots. Harris believes a strict certification process where federal and state officials carefully test the election software is central to voting security. Without proper certification, she worries that improper code that would allow for the manipulation of election results might be introduced into the system.

By last Nov. 21, Kevin Shelley, California’s secretary of state, had heard enough. He issued an order that all touch- screen voting machines include “an accessible voter verified paper audit trail.” (Washington’s Reed and Nevada’s secretary of state, Dean Heller, came out in favor of audit trails in December.) The next month, Shelley commissioned an audit into whether uncertified Diebold software was being used in California’s elections. Of the 17 California counties that used Diebold election machines in the last election, Shelley’s auditors found, none was using software that had been properly certified by the state. Diebold insists that the changes made to the software are cosmetic. Shelley says the company might lose the right to sell its touch-screen machines in California.

All in all, 2003 was quite a year for Bev Harris. But she insists she is just getting started.

Bear in mind, this was 6 years ago. So much information came to light, yet, Diebold was still selling machines across the country. Harris wasn’t done yet:

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD

In 2004, Harris and her allies have been working on four new fronts: lobbying, public speaking, litigation, and seeking public office.

At the start of this year’s Washington Legislature, there were two bills about issues related to electronic voting. Harris and her ally, Linda Franz, another voting activist, introduced one with the help of legislators in both the House and the Senate. It died a relatively quick death, however.

The other bill, introduced by Secretary of State Reed, represented a big change in his position. Up until December, Reed and his office had strongly resisted any effort to require touch-screen voting machines to have a voter-verified audit trail. Reed says that as he toured the state talking with ordinary voters, he realized there was a lot of anxiety about the new electronic voting. He has seen this phenomenon before, he says, when other new voting technology—like the optical scan paper ballot—was introduced. “It was one thing to hear from a few people on the Internet,” he says, “but we found ordinary citizens didn’t trust these machines.”

Harris and her allies, however, are furious opponents of Reed’s bill. They say it leaves the door open for insecure Internet voting, takes too long to require a paper trail with touch-screen voting machines, and has an insufficient audit requirement and a host of other ills. “You have a secretary of state that crafts legislation that sounds good but doesn’t deliver,” says Franz.

REED IS RELUCTANT to engage in a debate with Harris and her allies. He says he hasn’t seen their bill and downplays the differences between himself and them. He offers only the mildest criticism and says on the whole their activism has been helpful. He does object to the way they have verbally roughed up elections officials like Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger. “Bob has been on radio shows with Bev Harris. I fortunately haven’t had that experience,” he says, laughing.

As of Tuesday, March 9, the fate of Reed’s legislation was still up in the air.

Wow – this guy can be Secretary of State, but he’s afraid to take on this grandmother? Talk about your lack of intestinal fortitude…I know, I know, that seems to go hand-in-hand with being a politician, but still – c’mon already! Not only that, but saying one thing one day, and another the next seems to be a chronic disease for too many politicians:

Longtime voting-rights activist Janet Anderson questions the wisdom of head-on, fierce opposition to Reed and his bill by Harris and her allies. “The secretary of state changed his position 180 degrees. Instead of being supportive, they are making it clear they don’t trust him.”

In fact, Harris’ right-hand man is running against Reed. Andy Stephenson met Harris through Democratic Underground, a left-wing Web site (www.democraticunderground.com), and they immediately became close cohorts. Stephenson, 42, looks like a shorter, stockier version of talk-show host Conan O’Brien, and until recently he owned the Subway shop on 15th Avenue on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. As a former telephone salesperson, he has skills that Harris lacks: He’s great on the phone or talking one-on-one with people.

Stephenson is running a fiery campaign against Reed. “The secretary of state is accountable to no one,” he charges. His campaign for elected office suffers from a flaw common among impassioned rookies, however: He believes his issue will be enough against seasoned politicians like Reed and Democratic Party favorite state Rep. Laura Ruderman, D-Kirkland, who have name identification with voters and will raise much more money and receive much more institutional support than Stephenson will.

HARRIS HASN’T endorsed Stephenson because she doesn’t endorse candidates. But it’s clear Harris likes him and his tactics, which include filing a lawsuit against Reed for allowing the use of uncertified software in King County. The secretary of state’s office denies the charge. Meanwhile, Harris is a plaintiff in a California lawsuit that seeks to end use of Diebold equipment in that state. She and Stephenson promise more lawsuits in other states, including Washington.

The partisan, rancorous nature of Stephenson’s campaign concerns veteran activist Anderson. “I don’t like it when people start speaking in partisan terms, because we all want honest, safe, secure elections. To turn it into partisan name-calling turns off half the people.”

At a recent forum, Stephenson, who is charming tête-à-tête, looked extremely uncomfortable while making an awkward stump speech. As if to emphasize the protest nature of his candidacy, he endorsed dark-horse presidential candidate Kucinich.

Well, we know that outcome – Reed is still Secretary of State in California.

Back to Bev Harris:

RHETORICAL ROAR

Harris, on the other hand, is a marvelous speaker. As a PR professional, she knows how to present her material in a personable, funny way. She hopes to use public speaking tours as another weapon in her arsenal and took her act on the road to California this month.

The tone of Harris’ rhetoric disturbs Anderson. “Bev Harris is a little more conspiracy-oriented than I tend to be. I don’t believe this is a huge Republican plot to steal elections,” she says. “Maybe the whole matter would have been taken more seriously earlier had not the highly partisan charges been made so shrilly.”

That kind of criticism angers Harris. But there’s no doubt some of her claims have lacked substantiation. Near the end of Black Box Voting, she writes: “There are some who are using election-manipulation techniques to transfer a block of power to their friends. This is a business plan, a form of organized crime. . . . ” Yet Harris rejects any claim she is a conspiracy theorist. “I understand the needs of the press in terms of documentation and not overstating your case,” she says, and she has worked to scale back the hype in her writing.

Yet at a recent forum at the University of Washington, the more outrageous Harris’ rhetoric got, the more the audience loved it. One key to Harris’ success has been her in-your-face style. That characteristic, which brought early success, might not resonate with everyone. She isn’t confident of victory in any case. “Actually, it is going to be a long shot that we will win this battle on voting machines,” Harris says. “We have proven our case, but they are still just barreling ahead.” (ghowland@seattleweekly.com)

Just because someone may be a conspiracy theorist doesn’t mean they are WRONG. There has been AMPLE evidence to support Harris’ contentions about Diebold (and other) electronic voting machines, including by our CIA, for pete’s sake! I mean, really – what’s the point of having highly trained professionals give us their opinion if we are simply going to ignore what they have to say? THAT makes no sense, in my opinion. What Ms. Harris has been saying for years now, does. Especially since she has been backed up by a number of universities and specialists in this area.

The question is: why are we still using these machines?

Please join us for our second Live Chat and viewing of Parts 4 – 6 of the HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy” Weds. night, May 13, at 9:00pm (EST) to discuss this, and other questions.

Tonight at 9:00 pm (EST) we continue our discussion of the HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy.” Once again, we will be joined by the founder of Hand Count Paper Ballots Now , Kathleen Wynne, and her colleague, Vickie Karp (biographies below). To join us, you can click the link below at the appropriate time, or sign up for an email reminder:

And now, meet Bev Harris:

America’s leading critic of electronic voting lives on a cul-de-sac in the blue-collar suburb of Renton. Bev Harris drives a gray Dodge Caravan with a bumper sticker that says, “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” Last year, several things broke in her home— the furnace, a sink, and a toilet—and she didn’t have the money to get them fixed right away. In fact, the sink and toilet are still broken.

At 52, Harris worries about being overweight, and she can’t find a hairdresser she’s happy with. In recent years she’s made her living as a literary publicist, hawking such books as Odyssey of the Soul by Hugh Harmon and Pamela Chilton, which is about channeling spirits, and Two Codes for Murder, a true-crime story by Dorothea Fuller Smith. A year and half ago, she admits, “I thought voting was boring.”

Clearly, Harris’ feelings about voting have changed a lot in the past 18 months. Voting has become Harris’ passion and vocation. Voting issues consume her life, even pushing her to work around the clock at times.

Since September 2002, Harris has battled a U.S. senator, large corporations, and election officials across the country in her effort to ensure our votes are counted fairly and accurately. At first, she focused on the problems with computer voting. Since then, the name of her Web site (www.blackboxvoting.org) and her book devoted to the subject—Black Box Voting—have become shorthand for concerns about computers and elections. Moreover, her astounding discoveries on the subject have resulted in damning research by distinguished computer-science professors and numerous articles in major newspapers across the country. Secretaries of state, including Republican Sam Reed of Washington and Democrat Kevin Shelley of California, have responded by proposing key changes in how we will cast our ballots in the future.

HARRIS HAS BECOME a media darling. A major profile is due in Vanity Fair, and her cell phone rings constantly with requests for interviews and documentation, from TV stations and newspapers around the country. Democratic presidential candidates John Edwards, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich all mentioned concerns about electronic voting during this year’s campaign. Former first lady and current U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., are sponsoring national legislation responding to the issues raised by Harris and her allies.

Now she has broadened her critique of election security to include subjects like voting over the Internet and the integrity of the software that counts paper ballots across the nation, including those in King County. More importantly, she wants to focus on solutions to the problems she has uncovered. To do that, she and her allies are taking what has largely been an online movement and bringing it into the real world. They are doing speaking tours, lobbying for legis- lative changes, and even running for office. Will they be as successful in the meat world as they have been on the Internet? Or will they be like presidential candidate Howard Dean—an online tiger and an analog kitten?

Harris’ online success has brought increased scrutiny. Many elections professionals, private and public, believe her alarm over voting security is unfounded. Even some of her allies find her rhetoric hard to take. Harris is unapologetic. She offers a typically unvarnished opinion on elections officials’ understanding of security: “I’ve never seen such a clueless bunch of people.” She feels the mainstream media have begun to back her up. “I’ve been called every kind of nutcase there is, and now I’ve been in The New York Times three times,” she says.

And I wonder just how much investigation the critics put into her claims regarding these voting machines? As Kathleen Wynne is always quick to remind me, it is in the best interests of a number of corporations, and politicians, for things to stay as they are, a point that cannot be overstated enough, in my opinion.

Back to the article now:

TOUCH VS. PUNCH

After the election meltdown of 2000, when an incredibly close race for president shined a very bright light on the shortcomings of the American electoral system, Congress took action. It passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, telling states to phase out the infamous punch-card ballots, with their pregnant, hanging, and dimpled chads. HAVA also required a touch-screen voting machine for every polling place, mainly so blind voters could cast their ballots unassisted. As an incentive, Congress included billions in funding for conversion of local electoral systems. Faced with the need to upgrade technology and some federal largesse, some states, like Maryland, and some counties, like Snohomish here in Washington, decided to convert completely to touch-screen polling places. As a result, more than 20 percent of American voters will use touch-screen machines in this year’s presidential election, according to Election Data Services, a D.C. consultancy.

Voting on a touch screen is like using a bank’s automatic teller machine. There is one vital difference, however: The voting machine does not give you a paper receipt. The absence of a paper trail has alarmed a variety of people, including some of the nation’s most renowned computer scientists. Their bottom line? These machines could be hacked. The solution? An auditable, voter-verified paper trail.

SOURCE CODE MOTHER LODE

For Harris, this all started with a search of the Internet during her lunch hour. She was cruising Commondreams.org, a left-wing Web site, when she noticed an article by Lynn Landes. Since she was still sore about the Florida machinations of the 2000 presidential race, the article’s scathing critique of computer voting piqued Harris’ interest.

She decided to do some research. She learned that Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., had an ownership share in Election Systems & Software (ES&S), whose Web site brags that its equipment counted 56 percent of the nation’s votes in each of the past four presidential elections. Moreover, ES&S voting machines count all the votes in Hagel’s home state of Nebraska, except in those counties that tally ballots by hand. While there is nothing illegal about the senator’s stake in the company, it didn’t seem right to Harris. When she posted the information about the situation on her Web site, she promptly received a cease-and-desist order from ES&S lawyers. She e-mailed the cease-and-desist order to 3,000 of her media contacts. Then she thought she’d better tell her husband, Sonny Dudley, who is African American. She says he framed the issue in terms of civil rights. “‘My people died for the right to vote,’ he boomed. ‘I will vote for who I want and no one’s gonna stop me,’” she recalls in her book.

This was a shocking revelation when I first heard of it several years ago. How it was Senator Hagel maintained his ties to this company while being a US Senator, especially one who ran for re-election in an area using the very machines his company owned, seemed like just a bit of a conflict of interest. Naturally, his office didn’t see it that way:

The issue doesn’t seem so dramatic to LouAnn Linehan, Sen. Hagel’s chief of staff. She says Hagel has never tried to hide his ties to ES&S and that Harris’ claims about the senator run from “inaccurate” to “outrageous.” Says ES&S spokesperson Megan McCormick: “Misinformation and inaccuracies were posted on Bev Harris’ Web site. Because of the extent of the misinformation, ES&S expressed through an outside attorney its concern and requested correction.”

While untangling the specifics of this debate would take an entire article, there’s no doubt that jousting with ES&S and Hagel got Harris hooked on the topic. Although she couldn’t interest mainstream publishers in the subject, David Allen, a former systems engineer turned comic-book publisher, became intrigued with her research. Soon, Harris had a contract with Allen’s Plan Nine Publishing for the company’s first non-comic book.

Publisher Allen’s technical expertise proved to be vitally important. He urged Harris to get a copy of a technical manual for an electronic voting machine. Harris started surfing the Web. On Jan. 23, 2003, she hit the mother lode. On an unprotected Web site, she found 40,000 files of Diebold Election Systems’ source code—the guts of software to run touch-screen voting machines. At first, Harris wasn’t sure what all the weird files were, so she called Allen and directed him to the site. What are we looking at? she asked. “Incredible stupidity,” he replied.

And how. It is remarkable what people “accidentally” end up posting on the internet, but this was a DOOZY:

HARD ON THE SOFTWARE

Diebold is an Ohio-based company with more than $2 billion in annual revenue that was founded in 1859 and makes ATMs and security systems, among other things. In 2002, Diebold got into the election business when it bought Global Election Systems. Diebold is a relatively small player in the industry, with only 33,000 of its voting stations in use across the country, but it is coming on strong. In 2002, Diebold landed a $54 million contract from Georgia that included 19,000 new voting machines. The following year, Maryland signed a $55.6 million contract for 11,000 new machines.

Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia are the big three companies making electronic voting machines. All of them refuse to let outside observers examine their software, citing proprietary and security concerns.

Harris’ discovery represented the first opportunity for the wider world to glimpse the internal workings of the machines that are playing a key role in our democracy. After a little soul searching, Harris downloaded the Diebold software files. It took 44 hours, and they filled seven CDs. By July 2003, after months of informal review and discussion among her friends and allies, Harris decided to allow Scoop, an “unfiltered” news Web site in New Zealand (www.scoop.co.nz/mason), to make the files available to anyone who wanted them. It wasn’t a decision she made lightly. “I knew I had something that could provoke a constitutional crisis,” she says. She hoped that some computer science professors would take an interest.

This pretty much covers what we saw last week in the first three parts of the documentary, “Hacking Democracy.” If you wish to catch up, you can go to THIS LINK to watch the first three parts (Part 2 and 2 will automatically come up at YouTube).

The importance of this topic cannot be overemphasized. We have all been impacted by the “issues” these electronic voting machines have raised, and the questionable tallies they have produced. It is to that, and other related issues, we will direct our attention Wednesday, May 13th, at 9:00pm (EST).

We are fortunate to have as one of our loyal readers Kathleen Wynne, founder of Hand Count Paper Ballots Now (HCPBnow.org), and formerly Associate Director of Black Box Voting. I will let her introduce herself and the issue further below, but MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

Beginning Wednesday, May 6th, at 9:00 pm at No Quarter, for the NEXT THREE WEEKS (May 6th, May 13th, and May 20th), we will be showing the documentary, “Hacking Democracy,” in three parts, with live chat with SusanUnPC, me, and Kathleen. Below is an introduction to Kathleen Wynne, and the issues the movie addresses:

My name is Kathleen Wynne. I am the former Associate Director of Black Box Voting.org and Founder of HCPB(Hand Count Paper Ballots)now.org. I cannot express how grateful I am to NQ and to Rev. Amy for graciously agreeing to host a live chat concerning the Emmy nominated HBO documentary film, “Hacking Democracy”. The film features the work done by Bev Harris and me, during our “in-the-field” investigations into the election issue.

Black Box Voting was the first election reform organization to be able to test a fully functioning optical scan voting machine in Leon County, Florida. None of the computer security scientists entrusted to oversee the security of these machines were ever allowed to observe a fully functioning unit while it was being tested for use, which made it impossible for them to determine whether the machine was secure or even functioning the way it was supposed to! The reason was, and still is, because the vendors who manufacture these machines are protected by “proprietary secret laws.” It finally took two determined, middle-aged women to be given the opportunity to test a fully functioning voting system!! What we discovered will shock and disturb you.

After viewing the film, I believe you will agree with me that the PUMA movement and the election reform movement have a great deal in common. I joined the PUMA movement because it was what I considered to be “a great awakening” of American citizens that something was terribly wrong with our elections process. Much in the same way the election reform movement was started. It is because of this common belief that I hope that we can unite our two movements and work together in taking back our elections. For it is only by taking back our elections that we will be able to take back our country. Indeed, the only power citizens have to make such a change possible is through the ballot box and we have literally given that power away. Our elections have been privatized and are becoming more centralized, which totally undermines the principle of transparency and the public nature of elections. The United States Congress has sanctioned this privatization, which in my mind, is a huge conflict of interest. Our elections are now virtually owned and operated by corporations, overseen by “experts,” and strictly managed by election officials. Citizens have been driven from the last refuge we have to remain a government by, for and of the people – our elections.

After over 6 years of investigating the many and varied problems plaguing our elections, I am convinced now, more than ever, that the only way “we, the people” will be able to take back our elections is to junk the machines and return to hand counted paper ballots. This is the primary reason I founded the website “HCPBnow.org” in order to garner a “critical mass” of citizen support for the return to hand counts. I am dedicated to this cause. As Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips wrote in his book “Witness to a Crime: A Citizens’ Audit of an American Election”, which focused on the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio – “paper ballots are the solution, not the problem – but only if counted by hand, at the polling place, in full public view, on election night, no matter how long it takes.”

It is my contention that if we fail in this great cause, we will no longer live in a democracy, but will exist under tyranny. It should also be noted that recently the German Supreme Court banned voting machines as unconstitutional and will be counting the votes by hand in their upcoming elections in June and September! The irony cannot be lost that it was former Nazi Germany who was first in taking steps to preserve election transparency and integrity, instead of America!

Come join us May 6th, May 13th, and May 20th at 9:00 for “Hacking Democracy” and Live Chat!

started running the “stages of grief” trope on Hillary supporters way back in February—you know, from anger, through denial, bargaining, depression, to acceptance. It’s an easy riff to run, even for bad writers, so it’s been all over the Obama blogs

Of course this “stages of grief” narrative oozed with sexism and condescension. The subtext implied that Hillary’s female supporters, emotional at the loss, had to be given post-partum recovery time, but then they would come around and, for those hold-outs, a few reminders about Roe v. Wade would get them in line. That was the strategy throughout the summer.

McCain’s selection of Palin as vice president, exquisitely timed to halt Obama’s bounce, has dominated the news for more than two weeks. It has also radically re-shaped the race. By most reports, Obama is slightly behind McCain in national polls and, more importantly, McCain has taken the lead in the electoral college.

The panic from the Obamabots in palpable.

Let me suggest that there are 3 levels of panic.

1. Wunderwaffen.

During World War Two, Hitler forced his beleaguered arms manufacturers to produce “miracle weapons,” strange armaments which he believed would turn the war in Germany’s favor.

Like armchair generals in a losing battle, losing political campaigns have supporters who desire the Wunderwaffen, a magical weapon which can sink the other side or a proven winner who can take the reins of the campaign and guide it to victory. In 2004, while Kerry was being hammered by Bush, many pleaded for James Carville to take over Kerry’s war room and provide the message discipline from 1992. From the Democratic Underground, August 27, 2004:

I have been saying this for over a month now…I wrote Mr Carville the following email:

Mr. Carville, please save the Kerry campaign!
He is throwing out sound bites that are perfect ammo for Rove and his evil crew. You can train this man.You can save this campaign and this country. We need you Mr. Carville.

In 2008, as victory becomes increasingly uncertain, Obama supporters are banking on voter registration and the belief that cell phone users are not accounted for in national polls. The same theories were trotted out in 2004 but the polls then fairly predicted the actual vote. However, there are even stranger ideas floating around Obama-land. At TalkLeft, there’s an armchair general named mmc9431 who believes that Obama should announce part of his cabinet now and turn them into roving ambassadors for the campaign:

Obama needs to come out with something very bold on his own if he’s going to have any chance of regaining the advantage.
Maybe he should announce ahead of time, 3 of his cabinet choices that would motivate his base. Sec of State, Attorney General and Sec of Treasury. These 3 could then go out and campaign of their platform. We’d have three people out there constantly pounding on issues rather than personalities.

Likewise, over at Daily Kos, Ursa Majority’s Wunderwaffen is one good television ad that will convince all the “low information” rubes to vote for Obama:

Yes, you heard it right. We need a killer ad (radio and TV) to get back onto message while shrinking McCain. And, with middle and low information swing voters, you’ve got to try to tie it all together in one digestible message. So, let’s get back to our effective messages of the post “Obama as Britney” era (i.e., McCain isn’t taking the issues seriously) and use McCain’s words and actions against him.

2. Denial

Obama supporters are now somewhere between searching for the magic bullet and denying that anything is wrong. The Kerry campaign is also rich with similar examples at a similar time in the campaign.

On September 17, 2004, almost exactly four years ago, Cartooner, at Democratic Underground, predicted that John Kerry would win in a landslide:

Call it an epiphany; call it crazy, and it’s just a hunch; but hey, A HUNCH made Quasi Modo famous…

~snip~

The economy, health care, jobs, LIES,

the messages are FINALLY STARTING TO RESONATE …

Ok… Maybe I’m an optimist; but I think Kerry will win on a
LANDSLIDE …

This campaign is also filled with delusion. A poster on Craig’s List gives Obama odds I’d like to take to Las Vegas:

Date: 2008-09-12, 12:32AM EDT
Location: new haven

He’s definitely going to win. No question.

What chances would you give him? I’d give him 100%.

3. Acceptance

The last stage is filled with sadness and recriminations.

Lentinel writes:

my heart sinks.
I lay some of the blame at Obama’s door.
As soon as he was assured of the nomination he turned South, figuratively speaking.
He voted for FISA.
He disowned public financing.
He went on preaching to evangelicals.
He waffled on his commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq.
He waffled on his commitment to the right of women to an abortion.
And, of course, he went on to treat Hillary Clinton and her supporters like dirt.

And Daily Kos’ DaveinSiliconValley has a diary titled: “Why (Sadly) Obama Will Probably Lose”

A few days ago I had a conversation with a mid-fifties nonreligious, pro-choice, Caucasian, suburban mother who thinks the Iraq war was a terrible mistake, that Bush was a terrible president, and is concerned that McCain may get us into another war, but she is “seriously thinking” about voting for McCain. I will give you a clue. She is absolutely going to vote for McCain.

I asked, given the way she feels on the issues, why isn’t she voting for Obama? She said “I don’t know.” I pressed her. She said, “I don’t trust him.” I asked why and she said “I don’t know.”

Obama can hit this lady with a thousand commercials explaining his stand on the issues and why his plans for the country are better than McCain’s plans and it will have no effect whatsoever on her vote. Zero. She is issue-proof.

What’s going on? Is it just subliminal racism? It’s not that simple.

After the 2004 election, Democrats became obsessed with psychoanalyzing the electorate. I engaged in some of this myself. Searching for answers, we read What’s the Matter with Kansas? but failed to find the answer. Believing, like DaveinSiliconvalley, that Republicans controlled the electorate with subliminal powers, we read George Lakoff’s Don’t think of an Elephant, but we found that framing issues is only one small part of winning elections. Framing can come across as patronizing, e.g., you’re pushing your agenda on the electorate instead of listening to their needs.

In 2006, as I began thinking about the next presidential cycle, I finally got around to reading Hillary’s Living History and President Clinton’s My Life. The Clintons, both policy wonks, believe that winning campaigns put forward good policies which appeal to the electorate’s aspirations. The voters do not need to be cajoled or hypnotized into voting for a candidate. The voters decide the issues and the politicians offer solutions.

The Clintons taught Democrats how to win elections. Remember, Bill Clinton was the first Democrat elected to a second term since 1936. Also, let’s not forget the magnitude of Hillary’s victories; she won Florida, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky; she won West Virginia by 40%. A few caucus states and Obama’s delegate stealing in Michigan made the difference. Let’s not pretend that Obama was the people’s choice. The primary campaign was not a decisive win by either candidate, and millions of Hillary supporters will never forgive the way she was treated by those within the Party, to say nothing of the media.

The Clintons win by offering proposals to make people’s lives better. On the campaign trail, they talk incessantly about helping working people, and they both have an unwavering commitment to the nation’s defense. The Clintons reject flowery rhetoric and use a clear communication strategy. Their strategy is effective; they know how to build winning coalitions. I have no doubt that Hillary would now be locking down battleground states on her march to the White House.

Hillary won the popular vote and nearly all the important states. She was positioned to win the General Election. Hillary, like President Clinton, built a coalition based on economic opportunity and national renewal. Obama took the nomination because he controlled much of the Party’s infrastructure: his supporters controlled the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, specifically the Rules and Bylaws Committee, and he was funded and fueled by the activist base, by groups like MoveOn.org, and he was supported by the netroots and the media.

Now that the General Election is in peril, these groups, who failed to provide the base of the Party with any reason to vote for Obama other than habit, scramble to connect with the very voters they demonized during the primary as “low information” and hopelessly bitter. No one television ad or high paid adviser can turn the tide. Let them panic.

This morning, I was greeted with the news that NARAL and Emily’s List are beginning a $30 million campaign against her and John McCain. I used to be a member of both of those organizations until they chose the worst candidate on women’s issues instead of the best. Am I glad I did – it just saves me the trouble of doing it now.

Along those lines, had the DNC actually allowed the People to speak, I seriously doubt the Republicans would have even nominated Sarah Palin to be Vice President, but the DNC didn’t, and the RNC did.

That being said, here’s the thing. Being pro-choice means RESPECTING people’s choices, even if we do not agree with them. It means I want abortions “to be safe, legal, and rare,” as Hillary Clinton always said. It means that should a woman NOT chose an abortion, that is her CHOICE. It does not mean that all unwanted/unplanned pregnancies MUST end in abortion, which is what some folks are making it sound like now.

The fact of the matter is, Governor Palin DOESsupport birth control in an effort to lessen the number of unplanned/unwanted pregnancies. That seems like a pretty good idea to me, but apparently isn’t enough for NARAL and Emily’s List. I might add, if Roe v. Wade made it through EIGHT YEARS of George W. Bush and his allegiance to the Far Right Wing, I seriously, seriously doubt it is going anywhere now. It is a manipulative tool by the DNC to try and keep us in line. I, for one, do not like for people to try and manipulate me. It pisses me off.

Then there is the whole thing about her 17 yr old daughter being pregnant. For crying out loud, this happens. It happens in good, religious families all the time. Heck, it happened in MY family! One of my nieces got pregnant before she graduated from high school, and even though her parents are divorced, BOTH sets of remarried parents are very religious, Evangelical type people. She went to church twice a week (whether she need to or not, as the saying goes). Didn’t stop HER from having sex. I’m pretty sure her exceedingly conservative church preached about these kinds of things. Sometimes, young people make bad decisions. Sometimes, there are consequences to those decisions. I mean, really – why else are there Crittendon homes if young women didn’t get pregnant? Teenagers don’t always think straight, and do things that are the opposite of what they have been taught. And that is where Bristol Palin finds herself. Just because one is in politics doesn’t make one immune from having teenagers do things with which the parents are unhappy. Kinda like how preachers’ kids are notoriously troublesome. Kids act out.

So, these are issues being touted by the DNC and its supporters. Sarah Palin is rabidly anti-choice, will singlehandledly end Roe v Wade, even though she is in Feminists for Life and supports birth control, and doesn’t have, or WON’T have, that kind of power if she become VP. Apparently, these people don’t understand how laws are made, or unmade. (Sounds like a civic review is in order!) I guess there is only one acceptable way to view “choice,” and it is their way, or the path to hell way. And her daughter is * GASP * pregnant. What is the world coming to, I ask you?! Sheesh.

To further show how incredibly clueless the DNC and its surrogates are, the day after Sarah Palin’s speech, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, characterized her speech as “shrill and sarcastic.” Ah, yes, “shrill.” It’s meaning, of course, is a “high-pitched and piercing tone“. It’s a buzzword, though, a sexist one, that is, to describe when a woman talks. It was used to describe Hillary Clinton constantly throughout the primary season. And now it is being used by the top Democrat, against the GOP VP running mate. Oh, and “sarcastic.” Goddess knows, we women folk are NOT supposed to be sarcastic. That might hurt the men-folk’s feelings, like it did Obama. Oh, no – we are supposed to be sweetness and light, quiet and demure, and just go home and shut up about all of the sexism already. That’s what they expected Hillary to do. And that’s what they expect us to do. They can bite me (that is a pastoral phrase, by the way). Nice job, there, Harry – as if we didn’t already know you were a sexist, misogynistic pig. No amount of apologies will put those words back in your mouth. Clearly, this is what, and HOW, you think. Like we didn’t already know that from the way you treat Hillary, but still. Thanks for reminding us.

But here’s the thing that has been bugging the complete and utter shit out of me: Democrats and Progressives suggesting Sarah Palin’s family would be better served if she just stayed home with the chil’un. I have to say, that just makes my blood boil. I have worked too hard, for too long, for the DEMOCRATS, of all people, to try and turn back the clock to the June Cleaver days. What the hell is the MATTER with them?!?! There is nothing wrong if a woman, or man, CHOOSES to stay home with the kids. It is hard work, to be sure. But to say that a woman who has a career outside of the home should give it up, for alleged PROGRESSIVES to be saying this crap, is obscene. Plenty of women work outside the home AND have small children. And here’s a little newsflash – men do it, too. All the time. I don’t hear any of these people saying Todd Palin should stay home. Or OBAMA should stay home, just because they have small children. This is taking us back decades. DECADES. You know, people were worried that all the race-baiting done by the Obama camp was going to inflame the race wars, thus taking us back more. I think they have. But no one seemed too concerned about the EQUALITY wars, and we have DEFINITELY gone far, far back in that regard. I still cannot get over that it is the DEMOCRATS pushing this, though. That Rudy Guilliani, or all people, is expressing OUTRAGE that Sarah Palin is being questioned about her fitness as a MOTHER because she is the governor of Alaska, and the VP choice. He said, “No one asks a man this question!” See? See what this election has done? It has made a far-left (former) Democrat quote RUDY GUILIANI!!! Ahem. But questioned she is – by members of OBAMA’S campaign. Again, this is the one NARAL and Emily’s List, along with Planned Parenthood, have endorsed. Way to go, women, you endorsed the candidate who is setting us back DECADES. Talk about your internalized misogyny…

There is an excellent piece in the Christian Science Monitor, brought to my attention by alert NQ reader MamaTx, entitled, “Sarah Palin Can Have It All: I should know. I’m a writer and the mother of 12,” by Barbara Curtis, “Monitor Opinion Editor Josh Burek talks with Barbara Curtis about Sarah Palin and working mothers.” It is an excellent article. Barbara Curtis sums up the issues beautifully, so I will close with the full text of her fine piece:

Bluemont, Va. – The five children. The newborn diagnosed with Down syndrome. The pregnant daughter. Sarah Palin’s life – chock full of challenge – confronts her opposition with some formidable challenges of its own. After decades of pushing equal rights and treatment for women, the Left is backtracking.

Suddenly motherhood – well, at least too much motherhood or too-complicated motherhood – is incompatible with executive responsibility. Fathers with little children or complex family issues – even some who cheated on their wives – have held office without having to justify their continuing careers. Yet women once again face a very different standard.

Who knew that beyond the glass ceiling feminists vowed to shatter there existed another barrier, imposed by feminists themselves? What happened to choice? To having it all? Have we had a paradigm shift since Aug. 29? What’s to stop Governor Palin from doing it all?

This debate matters a lot to me. I have 12 children, including four diagnosed with Down syndrome. Three were adopted. I’m a professional writer. And yes, some people wonder how I do it all, or if I’m doing any of it as well as I should.

The skepticism about Palin’s ability to juggle responsibilities has been punctuated with below-the-belt punches. My heart goes out to her and to every mom who soldiers on in the face of such flak. Sisterhood can be powerful, but only when we celebrate one another’s accomplishments and growth – in all our diversity.

The hardworking mother rolling up her sleeves to tackle a “man’s job” is a staple throughout American history and folklore. Think Rosie the Riveter. Think “Places in the Heart,” featuring Sally Field as a Depression-era widow succeeding against all odds. These tales of women transformed through their work – even as they transformed the culture – resonate with me. As a second-wave feminist, I recall how we turned the medical establishment on its head over childbirth.

In 1969 it was barbaric: flat on your back, bright lights and stirrups, no husband allowed. My first, Samantha Sunshine, was whisked off to the nursery, and I was forced to stay in bed without her. Just standard procedure.

When Jasmine Moondance was born at home in 1975, I was up in 20 minutes – an older and wiser counterculture mom hip to the global portrait of motherhood as part of the fabric of life, including rice-paddy moms who simply pushed out their babies, wrapped them up, and went back to work. This kind of “Sisterhood is Powerful” approach had put women in control of their birthing experience.

And our mothering experience as well. At first it was an either/or choice: stay-at-home motherhood – discredited by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and Ms. magazine – or “real work” alongside men. But as time went on and women seemed disinclined to give up their biological imperative, word came down that we could have it all – work and motherhood – and outclass men at the same time.

Think “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan” from the 1970s (and now clearly retro) Enjoli perfume commercial. Perhaps that’s not what we mean today by having it all, but it’s the confident spirit that rings a bell almost 40 years later.

That confidence took us places we never dreamed. In 2001, Jane Swift of Massachusetts became the first governor to give birth in office – to twins. Her maternity leave included a governor’s council teleconference from her hospital bed. And while Ms. Swift was rebuked for using aides to babysit her daughter, Palin’s record of eschewing the trappings of power – selling the governor’s jet on eBay, for example – suggests she wouldn’t make such mistakes. So what to make of the fire and brimstone raining down on Palin?

Is it because her choices aren’t the ones feminists anticipated? Or was it ever really about choice at all? Just because Palin’s choices skew away from abortion and toward the affirmation of life – even in difficult circumstances – does that mean they shouldn’t be accorded the same dignity as those more in line with today’s feminist party line?

“How do you do it all?” people ask me. All I can say is that my capacity has grown with each child. I’ve learned to assess situations quickly, gather information and advice, negotiate, delegate, communicate clearly, and work under great pressure and with little sleep. Put simply, motherhood is its own executive office. That’s why it’s a proving ground for political leadership.

“The personal is the political” was a feminist mantra I still believe. Which leads me to a qualification for office that sets Palin apart from her peers: Consistency.

You see, motherhood under pressure has a way of helping women become greater than they started out to be. And the fact that Palin has a baby with Down syndrome only makes me trust her more. Here’s a woman who chooses sacrifice and challenge over expediency and convenience.

I’ve seen those pictures of Palin nursing her baby as she signs a bill into law and as she pushes a grocery cart. Moms understand that those photos might well have been taken just a few hours apart. That’s the kind of life we lead.

Can she do it all? Trust me, there are lots of moms out here who know she can.

• Barbara Curtis, is the author of nine books and blogs at www.MommyLife.net .

As Americans, we expect certain liberties and rights that were granted us by our forefathers, who wrote documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “We the people” expect that these fundamental rights will always be protected. However, in the current Democratic Presidential Primary, this has not been the case. We believe that the The Democratic National Committee (DNC) made a grave error by depriving American voters of their choice of Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee. Senator Clinton, by all accounts, except caucuses, won the Primary Election and, therefore, should be the 2008 Democratic Nominee. That didn’t happen, due largely to illegitimate and illegal acts. We have interviews of many accounts from caucus states recounting threats, intimidation, lies, stolen documents, falsified documents, busing in voters in exchange for paying for “dinners,” etc. There are at least 2000 complaints, in Texas alone, of irregularities directed towards the Obama Campaign, that have lead to a very fractured and broken Democratic Party.

The preview, all 33 minutes of it, is compelling. In essence, it is a visual companion to the work of Dr. Lynette Long at Caucus Fraud and Peniel Cronin on Primaries and Caucuses (which will appear at NQ shortly). In short, it is disturbing not just how this happened, but THAT it happened in our country.

I invite you to watch the preview to this documentary, about which the authors said this:

This documentary is about the disenfranchising of American citizens by the Democratic Party and the Obama Campaign. We the People have made this film. Democrats have sent in their stories from all parts of America. We want to be heard and let the country know how our party has sanctioned the actions of what we feel are Obama campaign “Chicago Machine” dirty politics. We believe this infamous campaign of “change” from Chicago encouraged and created an army to steal caucus packets, falsify documents, change results, allow unregistered people to vote, scare and intimidate Hillary supporters, stalk them, threaten them, lock them out of their polling places, silence their voices and stop their right to vote, which is, of course, all documented in “We Will Not Be Silenced.”

This documentary contains powerful, important information. I urge you to spread the word however you are able. Now is the time.

To view, CLICK HERE.

My deepest thanks to all of those at “We Will Not Be Silenced” for your commitment to democracy, to the rights of Americans, all Americans, to vote. Thank you for your courage and integrity in getting this critical information out. And thank you for bringing the voices of these Americans out for us all to witness

Just what is the “error”?

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

It gets better, though:

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly.

Whee!!! Ten years of potentially screwed up vote counts! Wowie zowie! That instills SO much confidence in our elections, doesn’t it?

Oh, you can just SEE the ad for the GOTV campaign, can’t you – “Register to vote! It’s your right as a citizen of the United States! Aren’t we so lucky??? There is no guarantee whatsoever that your actual vote will be COUNTED, but don’t let that dissuade you from tromping down to wherever the hell your polling place is, come rain or shine, or snow, and cast that vote! Isn’t it great to be an AMERICAN?!?!”

Oh, and make sure there are all these hip looking young people in it who don’t have to worry with transportation, or ability issues, with their iPods on, swinging into their funky polling places to get out their vote. It will be sunny, of course, and some great artist will be playing in the background. The ad can be provided by Premier Election Solutions, too, just for giggles.

Ahem. Oh, but get this from their spokesman:

Riggall said he was “confident” that elections officials through the years would have realized votes had been dropped when they crosschecked their tallies to certify final elections results and would have reloaded cards so as not to lose votes. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has said no Ohio votes were lost because the nine Ohio counties that found the problem caught it before primary results were finalized.

Boy, talk about passing the buck!

As recently as May, Premier said the problem was not of its making but stemmed from anti-virus software that Ohio had installed on its machines. It also briefly said the mistakes could have come from human mistakes. Further testing by Ohio elections officials and then high volume tests by Premier uncovered the programming error.

“We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error,” Premier President Dave Byrd wrote Tuesday in a letter that was hand-delivered to Brunner. Premier and Brunner are in an ongoing court battle over the voting machines and whether Premier violated its contract with the state and warranties. Half of the Ohio’s 88 counties use the GEMS system. Brunner has been a vocal critic of electronic voting machines.

Both Brunner and Premier said that remedies to the problem will be in place for the November presidential election. A nationwide customer alert with recommended actions was issued Tuesday by Premier. Approximately 1,750 jurisdictions use the flawed system, Riggall said. Both Maryland and Virginia use it, he said, although Virginia does not relay its votes to a central counting point, which is where the problem surfaces, Riggall said. Maryland does use a central count, he said. The District of Columbia does not use the GEMS system.

Well, sure it will! And why in the world would we have reason to doubt them? Because they claimed it wasn’t their fault in the FIRST PLACE? Nah – that couldn’t be it. I am CERTAIN everything will be A-Okay by November. Cough, choke.

Here’s the thing:

The problem is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that upload multiple memory cards during counts, Riggall said. The GEMS system is supposed to save information from one card at a time to be counted in order as the cards are read by a database that Riggall described as the “mother ship.” But a logic error in the program can cause incoming votes to essentially shove aside other votes that are waiting in the electronic line before they are counted. The mistake occurs in milliseconds, Premier’s customer notice says.

The mistake is not immediately apparent, Riggall said, and would have to be caught when elections officials went to match how many memory cards they fed into a central database against how many show as being read by that database. Each card carries a unique marker.

Officials in Butler County, Ohio — north of Cincinnati — were the first to raise the issue when 150 votes from a card dropped in March. Brunner’s office originally said that 11 counties had the same problem but has since revised that to nine. Her office was not able to say how many dropped votes were discovered in those jurisdictions.

Hmmm. Well, I reckon if they cannot tell how many votes were dropped, chances are probably GOOD that they don’t know for WHOM those votes were CAST!!! Funny thing about voting. The THEORY is that it helps us to ELECT our public servants. At least that’s how it USED to work. Not so much any more, apparently. It sure answers a lot of questions for me about the past few elections, though.

But wait – it gets better:

“I can’t provide odds on whether dropped votes were not recognized” during the decade GEMS has been used, Rigall said, “but based on what we know about how our customers run their elections and reconcile counts we believe any results not uploaded on election night would have been caught when elections were being certified.”

In his letter to Ohio’s Brunner, Premier’s president said, “Voters in jurisdictions Premier serves, both in Ohio and throughout the country, can be assured that election officials employing standard canvass and crosscheck procedures will count their votes completely and accurately.”

Gee – don’t YOU feel reassured?? I know I do…NOT. These people really do think we are freakin’ morons, don’t they?? Apparently, our concerns about the sanctity of our vote were well placed. With this kind of information coming out now, in between a close Primary season and a presidential election, it raises all kinds of questions in MY mind. I must be some kind of conspiracy nut or something to think this might just have been an issue in this close race. Oh, no – surely not, not when things like the CAUCUSES ran so smoothly…I am sure it was just fine…

And just one more issue:

Unlike other software, the problem acknowledged by Premier cannot be fixed by sending out a coding fix to its customers because of federal rules for certifying election systems, Rigall said. Changes to systems must go through the Election Assistance Commission, he said, and take two years on average for certification and approval — and that is apart from whatever approvals and reviews would be needed by each elections board throughout the country.

Brunner said she appreciated “the forthrightness” of Byrd in his letter to her and commended Butler County officials “who went above and beyond the call of duty” to pursue the problem.

“FORTHRIGHTNESS”??? Are you KIDDING me??? “Beyond the call of duty?” Seriously?? Oh, wow. Maybe I have been too narrow in my thinking about our elections. I thought they were supposed to be FAIR, that every vote was supposed to be RECORDED, and that the number of VOTES determined the WINNER. Silly me. I can be so black and white in my thinking sometimes…

Well, there seems to be one little piece of “good news” in this whole matter, if you live in Maryland, that is:

“As far as I know, we have not seen that problem,” with dropped votes, said Ross Goldstein, deputy administrator for Maryland’s State Board of Elections. Maryland counties do upload results to a central system — which is what generates county vote totals on election night — but state procedures call for counties to reload every memory card the day after the election to doublecheck results, Goldstein said.

The safeguards that Premier calls for its in customer alert, he said, already are in place in Maryland.

Is now when I mention that Kenneth Blackwell, the former Secretary of State in Ohio, the one who PUSHED for these machines against the requests of REPUBLICANS in Ohio, “accidentally” invested in Diebold? Uh, yeah. Pure accident. How could he POSSIBLY have known. Not like he had any kind of information about ELECTIONS and VOTING MACHINES. Ahem.

So, as we go forward into another presidential election season, with 34 of our states using these machines, which we have been ASSURED will be fixed by then – presuming they get through the respective certifications required, we can rest easy that our votes are going to count this time. No, really! They said! So, make sure you get out there and vote – it might actually count – this time.

Viewers largely thought it was NOT racist.

Read the rest ->

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

But, you say, what did those viewers think of Obama’s response to McCain’s ad?

However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

Here’s the breakdown among whites and AAs (remember, no other ethnic/racial groups count. . . ):

Not surprisingly, the McCain ad generates significantly different perceptions along racial and ethnic lines. Most African-American voters—58%–saw the McCain ad as racist. Just 18% of white voters and 14% of all other voters shared that view.

As for Obama’s comment, 53% of white voters saw it as racist, as did 44% of African-Americans and 61% of all other voters.

It’s looking like the McCain camp called this one right. So, instead of calling this racism, I’m thinking we’ll simply hear of more “disappointment” and/or “cynicism.”

2) A poll finds Oklahoma not exactly Obama territory.

3) The WaPo tells some truth. Deborah Howell, the WaPo ombudsman, has an article saying the paper published far more pictures of Obama than of McCain. In addition, those pictures are more likely to be of Obama smiling and McCain with a serious face.

What we found: 122 photos of Obama have been published in the paper during that time to 78 for McCain, counting tiny to big. Most of those photos ran inside the paper; most on the politics page. The Page 1 photos are closer: Obama had nine to McCain’s seven. Five of Obama’s were above the fold; McCain had four. Obama also got more color photos, 72 to 49, and more large photos — mostly those that spanned three or more columns, 30 to 10.
——————————-
Ed Thiede, assistant managing editor for the news desk, said that the numbers are “eye-opening. We should be more cognizant.” Du Cille and Thiede were both surprised at the numbers. Du Cille said, “The disparity in the numbers is indeed hard to reconcile. As photojournalists, we always strive to be fair. We have tried to be balanced, but it seems that in a large operation such as ours, we need to monitor the use of political images even more closely.
———————–

Readers look at photos when they don’t read stories. But Obama leads in stories since June 4, too — 139 to 94. They were both featured in 23 stories. . .

But these kinds of discrepancies feed distrust on the part of readers, especially conservative ones, who already complain that The Post is all for Obama. Next week, I will examine the stories.

Let’s keep an eye out for this article next week. If nothing else, it should be VERY interesting.

4) Jennifer Rubin at Commentary has a very interesting take on why Obama isn’t doing better in polls. She qotes Charles Krauthammer quoting Dana Milbank, so this “presumptuous” meme is definitely making waves.

But the meat of her argument goes like this:

It is really three factors at play: Obama has gotten worse, John McCain’s campaign has gotten more aggressive in pointing out that Obama has gotten worse and Obama is no longer talking about the issues which were underpinning that huge advantage Democrats were thought to enjoy.

She adds:

It’s the last point which has liberal supporters stumped. What happened to the laser-like focus on the economy? What happened to the non-stop message that John McCain is George W. Bush’s clone? These were lost in the audacity festival in Berlin and the aftermath of the trip ( e.g. the soldier snub gaffe). But even before that, between the securing the nomination and the overseas trip, the major campaign storylines have been: Obama’s flip-flops, Wesley Clark slurring McCain, Hillary Clinton voters still upset, Obama’s repositioning (kind of ) on Iraq, the success of the surge, and the faux seal and the arrogance meme.

So Rubin says Obama isn’t driving the message. That’s assuming there is one to steer. Here at NQ we’ve said before that Obama’s policy statements have been awfully thin or clearly cribbed from other candidates. Now that’s really starting to show. When you’ve got nothing to say, it’s all about you. That can work until people begin to think the “you” ain’t so great. . .

5) Slate doesn’t like the off-shore drilling flip-flop any more than most of FL. The article calls both McCain and Obama on it, but falls a little harder on Obama for “change you can believe in.”

6) Time has a piece on “in the tank” media.

That McCain’s complaint [about Obama luv] is sometimes overstated and imprudent, however, does not mean that it is wrong. The political press corps has a problem when Jon Stewart lampoons reporters for being even more in the tank for Obama than he is.
———————–

The silver lining for McCain is that the media’s bias has sometimes backfired on liberals. . . Obama’s Reverend Wright fiasco was a case in point. Even though the two men had close ties, the press gave little scrutiny to the radical preacher for a year after Obama’s campaign began. When attention finally came, Obama gave a speech that tried to shift the focus from their relationship to the rest of the country’s racial wounds. He was rewarded with rapturous coverage. The next day, the New York Times ran a “news analysis” calling the speech “hopeful, patriotic [and] quintessentially American” and comparing him to John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. It took a few more weeks for Obama to realize that he had to take the final step and repudiate Wright.

Media bias poses only one serious danger to McCain. One of Obama’s standard tactics has been to predict that McCain would “play on our fears,” “exploit our differences” and stir up “fake controversy” to win this fall. It’s a clever move; it simultaneously paints McCain as a brute while making him think twice about hitting back–the harder McCain hits, after all, the more it will look as though he is stirring up fake controversy. Too many reporters have bought that spin, and that’s a problem. McCain doesn’t need reporters to fall out of love with Obama. But he does need to be allowed to make the case against the Democrat.

And one should be able to make a case without being called racist at every turn. Wonder if Time has read the Rasmussen poll?

7) And to the DNC rulz czars? Time to check out the undercarriage of the Obama express. No doubt you’ve heard about Obama wanting to fully seat those wayward states – Michigan and Florida – after quite the dustup earlier this year when those states’ voters were effectively disenfranchised.

Well, the caucus blog at NYT has this to say:

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s “request” to restore full voting strength to Florida and Michigan is likely to cause heartburn for party officials, who have struggled to maintain some authority over the primary calendar.

By granting Mr. Obama’s request, the party will essentially be giving a green light to other states to ignore the calendar next time because there will be no consequences.

However, I think the blog missed the mark here:

The whole subject remains a sore point with some Clinton supporters. But Mr. Obama’s letter today seems timed to try to minimize any damage, coming almost two months after Mrs. Clinton threw her support to him and after it appears unlikely that she will be his choice for vice president.

“Timed to try to minimize any damage, coming almost two months. . .” Minimize what damage? Clueless. Just another Senator Britney opportunistic flip-flop designed to show calculation before class or integrity.

8 )George Will’s piece today has a couple of interesting bits about why Obama may be slipping.

But polls taken since his trip abroad do not indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this presidential campaign: Measured against his party’s surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming.
Will attributes at least some of the slippage to eloquence ennui. Voters are simply tired of the vaulting rhetoric.

Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”

But Will also points out how that rhetoric helps Obama create the very image of him as self-absorbed and not really interested in America.

Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs — someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, Obama should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy.

And no more locutions such as “citizen of the world” and “global citizenship.” If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America’s vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism.

Will is conservative, so this column won’t get too much play. But he does make a logical argument for why Obama hasn’t “closed the deal.”

9) Fivethirtyeight, a website about polling has some notes for down-ballot Democrats.

In “Organizing Update”, fivethirtyeight covers how the political campaigns and parties are organizing offices and personnel across the states. As we’ve talked about at NQ, Obama has been taking the reins of the Democratic party by moving it to Chicago and using nearly all donations for his office run.

In Wisconsin, Obama has 15 offices open now, with 24 expected to be open by mid-August. The staffers are directly paid by Obama’s “Campaign for Change” organization. By contrast, Republicans have five party offices open that handle both McCain field work as well as the state leg. races, which somewhat dilutes the effort.

This may seem like a trivial distinction, but it’s actually a story we’re keeping an eye on. Though our idea about the timetable of campaign ramp-ups has been distorted by this nearly two-year presidential ordeal, most local races and even most congressional races are only barely beginning to coordinate their own field efforts. In this respect, it is unclear on the Obama side how the traditional coordination between presidential race field staff and downballot candidates will be carried off. The traditional vehicle is the coordinated campaign which can be funded by the national committees not subject to the same strict caps on individual contributions. This story will probably ripen post-convention when most of the other local campaigns begin to kick into gear.

I’m going to guess that down-ticket Dems may get some cash after the convention. But until then, it’s all about Obama. Well, since the generic Democrat runs quite well and Obama seems to be underperforming as a candidate, only keeping steady with McCain in a year any Republican should be relegated to sweeping confetti after the election, maybe he does need all the money.

Or maybe it costs an awful awful lot to rent that stadium in Denver.

The first post, Obama’s Flawed Race Strategy: Why the Black Vote Won’t Be Enough by iam0nly1, argues convincingly that Obama’s weakness in the Rust Belt cannot be offset by African American voters in the South:

Obama’s entire claim to redrawing the political map is based on his perceived ability to win in Southern states precisely because of African American voters. After all, this is why Hillary’s claim that she alone was capable of winning large swing states that Democrats must win, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, went unnoticed and unheeded by Dean, Pelosi and others. However, this is a severe and dangerous gamble.

Obama is in serious trouble in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, particularly, Florida. Consequently, he’s trying to expand into traditional red states, especially Virginia and Georgia in the South, and the Rocky Mountain West region.

The second post, by Charles Lemos, is a video and PowerPoint presentation by renowned pollster Douglas Schoen. On the surface, it seems to be good news for Obama. He now leads McCain, the country wants change, and a generic Democrat beats a generic Republican:

Lemos is correct that Schoen’s analysis is a snapshot of the current situation:

I think the presentation is accurate as of right now. In politics, nothing is static. Events happen but of as right now, Obama is leading and Schoen’s presentation, I think, offers reasons why.

Many commentators have referenced Michael Dukaksis’ infamous 17 point lead over George H. W. Bush in 1988 as a cautionary warning to Obama. Beware, the argument goes, summer’s highs can evaporate in the fall after the withering attacks by the Republicans.

All of this has me thinking about a more recent election. In 2004, my preferred candidate did win the Democratic nomination — and there was real unity in our Party. Iraq was spinning out of control, Americans felt shame about the horrific pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison, and the Democrats were about to nominate a genuine war hero. Looking up Democracy Corps’ polling analysis from July 22, 2004, I found that Obama’s situation is strikingly similar (if slightly weaker) compared to where John Kerry was at the same time. Karl Agne, writing for Democracy Corps, sounded even more optimistic about Democratic chances than does Schoen today:

The Kerry-Edwards ticket heads to the Democratic Convention in Boston with a great deal of momentum behind them. In a race that has been surprisingly stable and evenly divided since Kerry truly emerged as the nominee in March – characterized by small swings in either direction usually predicated by events in Iraq and in the nation’s economy – Kerry and Edwards are enjoying an undeniable shift in voter attitudes. Kerry leads Bush in every national poll released this month, reaching 50 percent in the last two surveys of likely voters.

~snip~

Virtually every poll released in the last couple weeks shows Kerry making tremendous gains in these individual states. In fact, Kerry now leads in the most recent poll in every state won by Gore in 2000 and is either winning or within the margin of error in all 11 battleground states won by Bush. In making such strong gains at this stage, Kerry has put himself in an enviable position and can now use the unparalleled exposure of the Democratic Convention to solidify these gains, reinforcing his already strong support in the Democratic base and reaching out to even more Independents and newly engaged voters.

Besides the fluctuations of polls, what’s interesting about the above statement is the reference to the battleground states. Because of our Electoral College system, national polls (as cited by Schoen) can only tell you so much, and this is where the news becomes ominous for Obama. Unless he has a huge national lead in the fall, Obama will likely be fighting for the same swing states for which Kerry fought. iam0nly1 argues that African Americans are unlikely to increase their numbers sufficiently to carry Obama in Southern states. With the South off the table, Obama will also be disadvantaged in the Rust Belt and Florida, and he will be fighting for the Rocky Mountain West:

[Obama's team] discuss the Rocky Mountain states of Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, but frankly, even if he wins those three, and Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire (all three of which will be highly competitive), if he loses Ohio and Florida, he will lose the election 267-271 (this count includes all the states Kerry won). In short, if Obama loses Ohio and Florida, the three Rocky Mountain states and Georgia and Virginia become must win states.

In short, Obama’s minuscule national lead today — prior to the expected Republican assault — will show Obama to be a map-changer, but not in the direction he hopes.

No Quarter’s Bud White had a fascinating conversation with Heidi Li Feldman and Marc Rubin of The Denver Group. It turns out that Mr. White is a real pro (sort of a likeable and more intelligent Charlie Rose) and starts he things off with:

“Keeping the Democratic Party democratic.” That’s the motto of the newly formed The Denver Group. The Denver Group’s stated goal is an open, Democratic convention, with Hillary’s name on the ballot.

Their Web site says:
“To deny Senator Clinton a rightful place on the ballot in an attempt to foster a false image of party unity based on unofficial declarations by super delegates. It will fool no one and only create more disunity. It is in everyone’s best interest, especially the Democratic Party and its chances in November, to hold an open and honest convention.”

****

We’re joined this evening by the founders of The Denver Group, Heidi Li Feldman and Marc Rubin. Good evening to both of you. Thanks for joining us…

Please take a listen and we would love to hear your thoughts on this show.

The interview runs 1 hour and 10 minutes.
-FEC recognized 527 group.
-They want to make ads to be shown in the mass media.
-They want to make sure the Democratic party stays democratic.
-They want a fair and open convention.
-Please contribute money to help this cause; $5.00–$5,000; whatever you can do.
You can visit The Denver Group at http://thedenvergroup.blogspot.com
Heidi Li Feldman’s personal blog is Heidi Li’s Potpourri at http://heidilipotpourri.blogspot.com/
Marc Rubin’s blog is Tom In Paine at http://tominpaine.blogspot.com/
No Quarter is http://noquarterusa.net