Dead bear covered with Obama signs found at school
Oct 20th, 2008 | CULLOWHEE, N.C. — Police at Western Carolina University and wildlife officials were investigating the discovery early Monday of a dead bear cub draped with a pair of Barack Obama campaign signs.
Leila Tvedt, associate vice chancellor for public relations, said Monday night that maintenance workers found the 75-pound bear cub shot to death in front of the school’s administration building at the entrance to campus. The Obama yard signs were stapled together and placed over the bear’s head, Tvedt said.
Is it a message? A direct threat? Is the bear cub supposed to represent Obama? What? I can’t begin to fathom the mindset of a person who would deliberately hurt another creature to make a political point.
While the big clunking bat of the Justice department and FBI are being aimed by a Republican administration at a legitimate voter-ed NGO that registers poor, minority (and consequently more likely Democrat) voters – 2 weeks before an election, in breach of political bias rules – it took Canada to actually arrest a Republican for vote fraud:
Ontario police arrest man in voter fraud case
By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 20, 2008
SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.
State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.
Jacoby’s arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.
The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP
Law enforcement and the media are all over ACORN like a rash, with little or no reason other than having been told to do so, yet actual fraud by the party now in power is taking place in clear daylight all over the nation and it’s barely even reported; the news of this arrest was, hidden away in the LA Times Local section.
But hearteningly it’s spreading like wildfire across the interwebs and is top of the paper’s own ‘most viewed’ story list and if you google for YPM you’ll find a host of stories from all over the place about their voterigging activities.
YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.
Even in McCain’s home state? Fancy that. YPM’s voter suprresion efforts are widespread:
It all sounds familiar to Beverly Hill, a Democrat and the former election supervisor in Florida’s Alachua County. About 200 voters — mostly college students — were unwittingly registered as Republicans there in 2004 by YPM staffers using the same tactic, Hill said.
“It is just incredible that this can keep happening election after election,” she said.
Isn’t it just. Why, you’d almost think it was planned, wouldn’t you? Typically, even while wriggling on the hook the Republicans try and smear their accusers with the very crime they themselves are accused of:
In a written statement Sunday, the state Republican Party called the charges against Jacoby “politically motivated.” The party said the charges do not support accusations from voters and Democratic officials that YPM has been duping voters into joining the GOP.
The statement accused Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who announced the arrest, of “using her office to play politics.”
The very, very honorable John McCain’s on the ground, under the media radar campaign of vicious robocalls and 3rd party funded racist scaremongering has succeeded.
It’s succeeded in siccing the ultra-right’s flying buttmonkeys of Weimar Republicanism on, of all things, a voter registration charity, ACORN.
ACORN has found itself not only investigated by the FBI and publicly accused of terrorism and anti-Americanism, but also has had its premises and staff attacked and threatened. Why? For trying to get people to exercise their constitutional right to do the very thing the country was established for, choose their own future by voting.
There’s your McCain campaign strategy in a nutshell. Attack the vote itself. Cast doubt in advance on the validity of the process of voting; focus on fraud, even though there isn’t any, thus potentially invalidating the actual election result in the mind of a sizeable proportion of the electorate even before it happens. Tell them it’s all a big conspiracy that the media is complicit in, hire dimestore fascist rabble-rousers like Palin to whip those people into a frenzy of expectant bile and better still tell them that those people – that one- are not real Americans, thus tapping into the primal fear of an immigrant-descended population, that they are not real Americans themselves.
Voila, McCain’s got the country between a rock and hard place if Obama wins. It’ll be like the preppy riots, but much bigger, much more downmarket and with more guns.
I say ‘if’ he wins; the McCain ‘clean hands’ backup plan (I think this is a fair inference to make, what with the bile and the whipping up and Palin and all the maverick, lone wolf imagery and that) appears to be the hope for the fortuitous appearance of a lone assassin. A hope which is being nudged a little bit quite a lot:
John McCain, final presidential debate:
“I’m proud of the people who come to our rallies.”
It is very important that we stay firm but calm. We need to follow Senator Obama’s example and stay cool but take action.
This assault, the vandalizing of the ACORN offices… the beyond ‘outrageous’ ground game/robocalls/mailers that McCain is using now may feed this ugly frenzy. People are believing lies and for most of them this is what is making them afraid and full of hate. We have to remember it is because they are believing ‘lies’. Lies that have been repeated over and over again until they get talked about like rumor and urban legend and seem to be true.
We can understand that they have been manipulated and are being used. We can understand that if we were believing what they were believing we might feel just like they do.
I think most of us here know that the answer is get out their and fight to win the election. As Senator Obama said when a crowd started booing McCain… we don’t need your boos… we need to VOTE. So, as ChronoSpark and many others on TPM are doing I would rather use my energy fighting to win than ‘booing’ about what they are doing!
Yes, Yes, Yes WE Can!
McCain may have some really nasty people on his side willing to do anything to win but Senator Obama has US!
Awww, bless – but I would reply, yes, very nice, Obama has ‘YOU!’. But do ‘YOU!’ have guns?
Was John McCain even tortured at all? If (underlined twice) this story is true then the central plank of his self-constructed personal mythology is rotten:
From the Corriere della Serra via this morning’s Guardian:
The Republican US presidential candidate John McCain was not tortured during his captivity in North Vietnam, the chief prison guard of the jail in which he was held has claimed.
In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were “tough, though not inhuman”. But, he added: “We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded.”
McCain, who fell into enemy hands after his plane was shot down in 1967, has frequently referred to being tortured and has cited his experiences as a reason for vigorously opposing the endorsement by the Bush administration of the use of techniques such as “water-boarding” on terrorist suspects.
Whether Tran’s story is true or not – and there’s no way to judge at this point – just as a matter of interest, how long have the Democrats been sitting on him? The timing does seem a little fortuitous, and leads me to wonder what, if anything the Dems have in reserve against McCain’s increasingly enraged and erratic campaign as it ramps up the nastiness in the final weeks. Is this story the only bombshell in the Democratic political armoury or just the first of many?
The New York Times’ Sunday magazine big feature today is indeed a big read – it’s a 9-page letter on food and agricultural policy by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, addressed to the incoming US President
It’s a lot of blocktext for sleepy eyes to wake up to but stick with it: this big epistle makes absorbing if frightening reading:
…with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.
The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet.
And what are Zimbabweans eating right now? Nothing, it seems. But the starving in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia and the Sudan are easy to ignore, as are food riots in the Phillipines and India; out of sight etc.
But food insecurity is getting closer to home all the time. I’ve been wondering what the hell the Icelanders are going to eat next year when much of their food is imported and they have no money to pay for it…
Who me, say ‘I told you so’? For the past few years I’ve been banging on about how horribly unprepared people are for the inevitable food shortages and poverty that will follow the world’s bigger nations’ disastrous policies.
I will be enjoying my coffee and bacon while I still can, but in the meantime I’m stockpiling oatmeal and potatoes and re-reading all my Marguerite Patten WWII cookbooks. Just in case.
