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Rainbow PUSH Coalition registers 2090 new voters this week

CHICAGO – With 31 days until the presidential election, Rainbow PUSH Coalition has increased its efforts to register voters. During the past week, they registered 2090 people in the Chicago area.

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., founder and president of Rainbow PUSH Coalition, opened the international broadcast of Saturday Morning Forum with a call and response chant, “Say: ‘I must register and vote’, ‘register and vote’.”

Rev. Jackson said the next president must correct the financial crisis on “your street and Wall Street.” This week the $700 billion bailout plan was passed by Congress in an attempt to get banks to start lending to each other again.

“This bailout doesn’t include a plan for the 6 million homeowners in foreclosure,” Rev. Jackson said. “When you lose your home, your neighbor’s home loses value, so really, at least 42 million homeowners are suffering. It is time to look at what happens and where we go from here. Where is the hope for the people who lose their homes?”

In his sermon, Rev. Jackson preached about the “middle class” and “working class”, referring to the terms as “buzz words.”

The Fed: The fox in America’s henhouse

Looking for the source of the current financial crisis? It came from Jekyll Island…

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” Teddy Roosevelt, 1906

On the cold Hoboken evening of November 22, 1910, Frank Vanderlip glanced warily at the group of news reporters milling around at the other end of the train platform and darted quickly on board a private railway car parked on a dark siding. The opulently furnished and well-staffed car, its curtains tightly drawn against prying public eyes, belonged to Senator Nelson Aldrich (R-Rhode Island), the presiding ‘whip’ of the Senate, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and a business partner of J.P. Morgan. The two arch rivals were joining forces for their own nefarious common interests.

Known as ‘the Wall Street Senator,’ Aldrich was head of the National

Because we fought for them my daughters have cast paper ballots

My daughters and I have cast paper ballots in the opening days of the 2008 presidential election. It was their first time voting in a presidential election.

That they have only voted with an African-American atop the Democratic ticket makes this doubly historic for them. The issue of race remains a great unknown in how things will turn out.

But so does the question of whether everyone who wants to vote can, and whether those votes will be accurately counted (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHiCFe2GBjk).

Four years ago this county tried to deny me the right to cast an absentee ballot. After four phone calls and some serious politicking, I finally did get a paper ballot, which I hand delivered to the election board. But was it counted?

My twins are now 21. On Friday, October 3, 2008, we drove to Veterans Memorial in downtown Columbus to cast our ballots under unique circumstances. For a full week, Ohio voters have been able to register and vote at the same time.

Brain busters

http://mattbors.com

Find the hidden scary thing

During the recent presidential debate (9/26/08), moderator Jim Lehrer presented the following as one of his lead questions:

Are you willing to acknowledge, both of you, that this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country as president of the United States.?

Play this one like Find the Hidden Picture in Highlights Magazine. Can you find the scary part of that question? I mean really scary, way too scary for a children's magazine. I'll give you a moment to look.

Some of you saw it right away, didn't you? It jumped right off the page (or screen) and slapped you in the face. Ouch! For the rest of you, take a couple more minutes.

Okay, time's up.

When I was watching the debate and I heard this question, I turned to my wife and asked a question of my own: 'What did he just say?' I had a follow up question too: 'Did Lehrer just say what I think he said?'

The war to promote terror

The “necessary war” in Afghanistan, which both presidential candidates support — the one, you know, that’s really about terrorists and Osama and all — raises as many troubling questions about who we are as the other war we’re fighting and losing.

Consider the details of this war. The aggregate civilian death toll, at the hands of the U.S. and NATO — between 6,800 and more than 8,000, according to economics professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire — is a start. But Herold’s about-to-be-released report on the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, “The Matrix of Death,” is a disturbing analysis not only of the collateral damage churned up by our terrorist-hunt in this broken nation, but of the attitude and rationality that are driving it. The report is subtitled: “The (Under)Valuation of an Afghan Life.”

One nation under capitalism: it’s time for a Crucifixion

Proudly surveying our kingdom from atop the capitalist pyramid, we US Americans have deluded ourselves into believing we are at the pinnacle of cultural, social, political, and economic evolution. We fancy ourselves to be so exceptional that we are entitled to a perpetual blessing from “our” Christian God.

Break out the Haldol!

We have afflicted the globe with the fatal contagions of the American Way and corporatism. And all of us, to varying degrees, are culpable. From bicycle-peddling vegans to limo riding corporados, we are each complicit in perpetuating American capitalism, a system so rotten that were it a piece of decaying meat, starving maggots would reject it.

We would have far fewer amends to make if our nation’s impact were limited by the size of our population. Were that the case, we would be a mere blemish on the face of Mother Earth. But due to our extraordinary wealth and power, insatiable avarice, hostility towards life, and obscene appetites for consumption, the United States is more akin to a cankerous fist-sized boil, oozing pus and reeking with infection.

Ohio 2008 opens with a subpoena, a surge and calls for election protection

Ohio 2008 has opened with a surge of first-time voters and the subpoena of a shadowy Bush electronic operative who may have helped steal the White House, a subpoena that may be followed by one for Karl Rove.

The presidency could again be decided here by how well what’s left of the American democratic process can be protected. So election activists are asking concerned citizens everywhere to become registration volunteers, poll workers and judges, Video the Vote observers and to conduct post-election hearings with legal standing.

In-person balloting began Tuesday, September 30, as new Ohio voters registered and voted simultaneously. Thousands crammed into county facilities throughout the state. Set to continue until October 6, the innovation came by accident in an otherwise repressive piece of legislation foisted on the state by Republican legislators after the theft of the 2004 election.

The GOP has since sued to stop this simultaneous register-and-vote process, but lost 4-3 in the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court. Thousands of new Buckeye voters have now surged into election centers, and may do so through October 6.

Power to the Cheaple!

The big advantage most conservatives have had over most progressives throughout recent American history is way more disposable income. Lots of that translates into buttloads of material crap we don't need or want, of course, but also into something far more significant:

The time, energy and resources to push their conservative agenda.

This year's economic crisis, however, levels the playing field as newly-strapped reguzzlicans face looming poverty with little, if any, of our poverty management skills.

Their SUV payments, McMansion mortgages, gold card statements and other trappings of extra-excessive excess are excessfully drowning the excessful in stinking excesspools of debt.

Aaahh, that felt good.  

But this is no time for po'boy gloating. Instead, we progressives must press the advantage by doing even better at what we do best - making do.  Now, while the rich and their surrogates are preoccupied with bankruptcy, is the time to strike back by maximizing our own purchasing power and, by extension, growing our political power as well. 

North Carolina: The new Ohio?

The old presidential political truism  "how goes Ohio, so goes the nation" will likely hold true again this year, but there are other emerging "Ohios" as well.

One such state bandied about by pundits is Virginia, straddling the Mason-Dixon line to the south in much the same way the Buckeye State straddles it to the north.  With its rapidly sprawling share of the DC megalopolis giving it an increasingly "microcosm of America" character, Virginia has everything but the delegates - 13 to Ohio's 20 - to be a true kingmaker in the convoluted matrix known as the electoral college.

A better - and more surprising - pick for state-most-likely-to-be-the-next Ohio is tri-metro North Carolina, one state deeper in the south but with a demographic that mirrors Ohio's in many key ways.  

Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem are the Tarheel State's Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, and the exurban sprawl filling in the space between Raleigh-Durham and Winston-Salem is quite like that between Cincy and Cowtown. 

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