policy: November 2006 Archives
Mystery of a huge undervote festers in Florida district
Almost since the time the votes were tallied here on election night, the race for Florida's 13th Congressional District has been surrounded by a contentious mystery:
Why were there no votes for Congress recorded from more than 18,000 people who chose candidates in other races?
Howard Zinn on The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism | The Progressive
HOWARD ZINN: Madison is a very special place. I always have a special feeling when I come here. I have a feeling I am in a different country. And I'm glad, you know. Some people get disgusted of the American policy, and they go to live in some other country. No. Go to Madison.
So, now I'm supposed to say something. I am glad you're there, whoever you are, and this light is shining in my eyes to wake me up.
Well, do you get the feeling sometime that you're living in an occupied country? Very often that's a feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. I think, "I'm living in an occupied country. A small group of aliens have taken over the country and are trying to do with it what they will, you know, and really are." I mean, they are alien to me. I mean, those people who are coming across the border from Mexico, they are not alien to me, you see. You know, Muslims who come to this country to live, they are not alien to me, you see. These demonstrations, these wonderful demonstrations that we have seen very recently on behalf of immigrant rights, say, and you've seen those signs saying, you know, "No human being is alien." And I think that's true. Except for the people in Washington, you see.
They've taken over the country. They've taken over the policy. They've driven us into two disastrous wars, disastrous for our country and even more disastrous for people in the Middle East. And they have sucked up the wealth of this country and given it to the rich, and given it to the multinationals, given it to Halliburton, given it to the makers of weapons. They're ruining the environment. And they're holding on to 10,000 nuclear weapons, while they want us to worry about the fact that Iran may, in ten years, get one nuclear weapon. You see, really, how mad can you be?
Subject drug war to the Iraq War test - 11/19/06 - The Detroit News Online
Now that Washington is awash in rare bipartisan logic about evaluating the goals and strategies of the Iraq War, the same reasoning should apply to the other conflict America is hopelessly mired in: the war on drugs.
The parallel between the two is undeniable.
Like Iraq, the drug war has been pressing ahead at enormous cost and destruction without a pause for an honest assessment of whether the tactics are working, or will ever work.
Yet while it only took three years for the American people to lose patience with the Iraq War, the drug war has been dragging on virtually unchallenged for three decades.
Demand Coverage of GOP 'Robocall' Deception
In closely contested districts across the country, voters report getting automated calls that begin, "Hi, I'm calling with information about [name of Democratic candidate]." If you listen to the rest of the message, you hear a litany of negative claims about the candidate. If you hang up--as do many voters, overwhelmed by so-called robocalls this election season--you're left with the impression that the Democrat has just called you. And unless you listen to the entire call, the machine calls you back again and again, giving you the impression that the Democrat is harassing you (Talking Points Memo, 11/6/06).
These ads are organized and paid for--as you find out at the very end of the ad, contrary to federal regulations (Associated Press, 11/1/06)--by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which coordinates the GOP's campaign to keep control of the House of Representatives. The NRCC's head of opposition research is Terry Nelson, who in 2002 was deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee; Nelson was the supervisor of Jim Tobin, the RNC's New England political director, who was convicted of illegally jamming Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire (AlterNet, 11/6/06).
