When I clicked on the headline in today’s Seattle P-I, “Statewide primary races getting little voter attention,” and saw that it was an AP wire story, I just had to laugh.
Do ya think, maybe, the reason voters are paying so little attention to down ballot races, is that our dailies are paying so little attention to them? Hmm. It’s a plausible theory, you gotta admit.
Why would they pay attention to local races when the 6 remaining reporters in the country all work for national wire services, because no newspaper can afford to pay a staff reporter anymore? All the page makeup is outsourced to India, and the “editor” is a contract worker whose only function is to constantly monitor the ratio of advertising inches to news inches, making certain the latter is never less than 2.5:1 as to the former.
Bad news for traitors! The latest Gallup Poll is Obama 49%, McSame 40%.
Looks like the Warmonger Party’s desperate gambit of refusing Obama access to the military hospital in order to set him up for their phony accusation that he doesn’t care about wounded soldiers didn’t grow legs.
Something to see here …
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/.....index.html
The nut who killed those people in that church yesterday was angry at “the liberal movement.”
Lest we forget how 2 recent presidential elections were stolen by the corrupt Republicans who are busily transferring the middle class’s wealth to themselves, read this item from Greg Palast:
“In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.
“In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters.
“In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.
“My investigations partner spoke directly to Barack Obama about it. (When your partner is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., candidates take your phone call.) The cool, cool Senator Obama told Kennedy he was ‘concerned’ about the integrity of the vote in the Southwest in particular.
“He’s concerned. I’m sweating.”
Palast isn’t talking about 2000 or 2004, he’s talking about what’s happening right now as the Gangster Party gears up to steal yet another presidential election so they can continue lining their pockets with your money.
This anti-democracy moment is brought to you by the cheap labor conservatives who constantly bray about how “hard” they “work” for a “living.”
@3 What’s happening, of course, is that rightwing propagandists are telling their gullible audiences that the bad economy they created is the fault of liberals. This knucklehead, frustrated by his own unemployment, believed those lies and went to a church he considered “liberal” and began shooting, with the later-stated intent of continuing to kill parishioners — strangers he did not know, whose political leanings he had no knowledge of — until the police killed him. In my opinion, when he goes on trial, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk ought to be in the dock with him. Not content to murder innocent foreigners in their torture dungeons, rightwingers have now succeeded in fomenting slaughter of innocents here at home. It’s reminiscent of the 1985 murder of Seattle attorney Chuck Goldmark and his family by a neo-Nazi nut who (mistakenly) believed the Goldmarks were Jews. In case you’re wondering whether Lands Commissioner candidate Peter Goldmark is related to Chuck Goldmark, the answer is yes, Chuck was Peter’s brother.
What we now have is a specific incident of rightwing hate speech leading to indiscriminate mass murder of strangers. In a church, of all places. A rightwing hater went to a church to shoot up “liberals” — people he didn’t know who are now dead because some ignorant redneck jackass who can’t get a job in the Republican Economy needed someone to blame for a system he believes is stacked against working stiffs like him. (He was a truck driver.) It is; but I suspect this guy’s unemployment probably has more to do with his personal problems. (How often do you see signs on trucks advertising for drivers? There’s a massive shortage of truck drivers in this country, even in this jobless economy — primarily because of the lousy pay. It seems to me anyone with a CDL license who isn’t wanted in 20 states and is willing to work for 36 or 40 cents a mile ought to be able to get a truck driving job, if that’s the kind of job he wants. I mean, trucking companies are begging for drivers.) I would guess one of the reasons he wasn’t working was because when he did work he scared the shit out of the people around him. His rage probably had been festering and growing for a long time before he finally exploded.
This has been going on for years now, our local dailies with local stories covered by wire service reporters instead of the newspapers staff reporters. Maybe City Council should charge a 20 cent fee on newspapers to reduce the waste going to our landfills.
Glad to see that John Edwards is living his Two Americas dream. A cancer-stricken wife and family home on the East Coast and a mistress and bastard child on the West Coast. Ya gotta love these leftist moralists!
@8 I hope this Edwards rumor helps you get over Monica’s old blue dress stains after all these many years.
RR @ 6: Yep, you have to wonder about trucking companies that have a “permanant” help-wanted ad painted on all their trailers. They keep advertising because they want to keep cutting driver pay.
If you aren’t a Teamster, then the odds are that you are driving for free right now – most trucking companies set you up as an “independent contractor” who “leases” the truck from the company. You are supposed to pay all the costs of operating the truck out of their “per-mile” allowance – including permits and fuel. Recently a lot of truckers have chose to park their rigs rather than make runs where they end up owing more money to the company AFTER the run than they had before – a new take on the “another day older and deeper in debt” saga which came direct from the Appallachian coal mines.
My cousin told me last year that he was called in to drive a oversize rig from Florida to Seattle. When he went to pick up the load, he took one look at the tires on the trailer and refused to drive until they were all replaced. Lots of threats to have him fired, until they found somebody else to drive for him. The new driver didn’t get a couple hundred miles before he had blown out over half his tires, and he quit. The company tried to replace the tires with ones which were just as bad.
RR @4: Given the Republican efforts during the 2004 election in Ohio and Florida, and their desperate nature now, this hasn’t been entirely unexpected. Republicans have been trying to divert public attention with “driver’s license requirements” and isolated cases by alleged Democrats in order to conceal wholestale stealing of elections by Republicans in targeted states by purging the voter roles. Lots of voters in states with “mail-in ballots” won’t even know their votes are being thrown out.
Any suggestions on what we can do to counter this? Would it help for every voter to check his registration status now, and then repeatedly on a weekly basis until the November election?
Hey, Goldie, I consider you a pal, but you are a little guilty of the same thing. We’ve talked a couple of times about Randy Dorn’s hot race against 3-term incumbent Terry Bergeson for Superintendent of Public Instruction. (Disclaimer: I’m running Randy’s campaign.) But, we have over 45 current legislators endorsing Randy, we’re about even in (actual versus PDC reported) cash on hand, and KING-TV release a poll last week showing us within the margin of victory to beat her (two points only). This is a key down ballot race and it is getting too little play in the media.