LOUISVILLE /JEFFERSON COUNTY

DEMOCRATIC PARTY NEWSLETTER

Week of October 17, 2008

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Updated on a regular basis

The Louisville/Jefferson County Democratic Executive Committee meets the 4th Wednesday of every month at 5:00 pm at Democratic Headquarters,           

640 Barret Avenue .

 

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The Truth About Voter Fraud

 

As the 2008 election process draws near -- and with early voting in many states having already begun -- conservatives are raising a great hue and cry about the threat of voter fraud. Attacks have centered on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the "nation's largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people," whose workers have registered 1.3 million new voters this year. Conservatives like Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) and former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell have seized on reports of improperly filled-out forms as evidence of "lawlessness" and "voting fraud," which will lead to "the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane." But mass voter fraud is just a conservative myth used to justify increasing the difficulty of the voting process. In an interview with Salon, Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College who investigated allegations of widespread voter fraud, explained, "From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident ... Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls."
 

COMPLEX AND ONEROUS RULES: Although the United States has a long and dark history of voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression, recent laws passed at the state and federal level have focused instead on the vaporous threat of voter fraud. These laws particularly discourage the poor and the young. Because voting, even for federal elections, is regulated by state law and administered at the local level, there is no consistent standard for voting machines, ballot design, the counting of provisional ballots, or voter identification. The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that "any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election" must provide a form of ID.  But "twenty-four states have broader voter identification requirements than what HAVA mandates" -- seven require photo ID for all voters, and 17 more require some form of ID. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's draconian photo ID law that could disenfranchise as many as 400,000 voters, although Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita "conceded the state has never presented a case of 'voter impersonation.'" In his dissent, Justice David Souter compared Indiana's unjustified regulations to a poll tax, "because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise." 
 

MASS DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND INTIMIDATION: Last week, the New York Times reported that "[t]ens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law." Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing order Wednesday "lambasting the Montana Republican Party for challenging the registrations of thousands of Montana voters," writing, "The timing of these challenges is so transparent that it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery." On Sunday, the Ohio Republican Party "requested information on voters who registered to vote and cast an early ballot on the same day," not long after Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer requested registration information -- including driver's license and Social Security numbers -- "for the 302 voters who took advantage of the window in that county, which has five colleges and universities, including two historically black colleges." In Indiana, state NAACP president Barbara Bolling said voters in three northern cities "are being disenfranchised each day they can't cast ballots at their local clerk's offices," after "two Republicans on the Lake County Election Board voted against the sites last month, contending in-person absentee voting makes vote fraud easier." In Colorado, the El Paso county clerk Bob Balink has engaged in an "emerging and consistent pattern" of purging voter rolls and challenging inaccurate registration information as "election fraud." 
 

ROVE'S FINGERPRINTS: The Department of Justice, whose responsibilities include ensuring the right to fair elections, was subverted by the Bush administration to pursue the false threat of voter fraud. In 2002, former attorney general John Ashcroft announced an initiative that required "all components of the Department" to "place a high priority on the investigation and prosecution of election fraud." The 2006 purge of eight U.S. attorneys -- all lifelong Republicans -- at the behest of the Bush White House exposed the depths of this politicization. The White House justified the dismissals by telling reporters, "President Bush mentioned to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had heard complaints from Congress that some federal prosecutors were lax in pursuing voter fraud." As the Washington Post reported last year, "Nearly half the U.S. attorneys slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of Republican complaints that they were lax on voter fraud, including efforts by presidential adviser Karl Rove to encourage more prosecutions of election-law violations," Rove has made it his specialty to raise the specter of vote fraud throughout his political career, from his days working on state races in Alabama.

 

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THE MAN BEHIND THE WHISPERS ABOUT OBAMA, By:  Jim Ruttenberg

 

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

 

That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

 

The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.

 

Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

 

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

 

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

 

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

 

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

 

Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.

“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”

 

As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”

 

When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.

 

It was not Mr. Martin’s first turn on national television. The CBS News program “48 Hours” in 1993 devoted an hourlong program to what it called his prolific filing of frivolous lawsuits. He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

 

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

 

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.

 

His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack — updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases — amazes those from his past.

“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, whom Mr. Martin sued for refusing to support him. Mr. Slade said Mr. Martin was driven like “a run-over dog, but he’s fearless.”

 

Given Mr. Obama’s unusual background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.

 

Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years, Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as loosely following a liberal Islam.

 

Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

 

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.

 

“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”

 

Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahhabi schools. Wahhabism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”

 

Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions, where he was taught about the Koran.

 

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate.” Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

 

Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.

 

 

In his original press release, Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “it may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel.” He added, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”

 

Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

 

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

 

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

 

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

 

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”

 

He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”

 

In discussing the denial of his admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he had clashed with.

 

Mr. Martin, who says he is from a well-off banking and farming family, is clearly pleased with his newfound attention. But, he said, others have added to his work in “scary” ways.

 

“They Google ‘Islam’ and ‘Obama’ and my stuff comes up and they take that and kind of use that — like a Christmas tree, and they decorate it,” he said. For instance, he said, he did not necessarily ascribe to a widely circulated e-mail message from the Israeli right-wing activist Ruth Matar, which includes the false assertion, “If Obama were elected, he would be the first Arab-American president.”

 

He said he had at least come to “accept” Mr. Obama’s word that he had found Jesus Christ. His intent, he said, was only to educate.

 

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Let Them Eat Pedicures  by Tula Connell

How appropriate Sen. John McCain didn’t mention the words “middle class” in this week’s presidential debate—or in the first presidential debate.

Because as a proponent of and heir to the greedy, corrupt, rich-first regime of the past eight years, McCain and the conservative ideologues, who he’s trying to distance himself from to win the election, are reaping the rotten fruits of policies that have systematically devastated the sound financial foundations of America’s working families.

Just to note a few: Tax policies that encourage corporations to ship family-supporting U.S. jobs overseas. Payoffs to the CEO class and their country club buddies through massive tax cuts for the wealthy—excessive expenditures that provide reactionaries a convenient excuse for shortchanging programs for children’s health coverage or affordable prescription medication for seniors or an expanded safety net for the growing numbers of unemployed workers. Chaos and destruction in the financial world that may mean few of us get pensions. The recent financial debacle has wiped out $2 trillion in our pension savings in the past 15 months. Rather than retire at age 65, many of us will be forced to work until we die, repeating variations of:

Welcome to Big Burger. How can I help you?

The Bush regime has fostered more than a “culture” of corporate excess. When AIG executives went to a luxury resort and spent nearly $500,000 on manicures, facials, pedicures and massages one week after accepting an $85 billion bailout by U.S. taxpayers—whose funds the Treasury Department used to save the corporation destroyed by CEO greed—that’s a culture of hate. Hate for the millions of America’s working families whose American Dream has been clipped along with the pedicured toes of multibillionaire CEOs.

Hate fostered by a reactionary vision of government that shuns civic citizenship in favor of corporate cronyism. Because rather than punish AIG for its egregious display of contempt for middle-class taxpayers, the Bush Treasury Department ideologues hand the company another $38 billion. And in another demonstration of total disdain for the country, the economy and the people on whose backs AIG is treading, the corporation had planned another luxury retreat next week, before backing down. 

We are less than 30 days away from an election that will determine whether the middle class survives—and with it, the nation. As he often does, Glenn Greenwald pithily identifies the current political milieu when he describes the worldview gulf between the Republican punditocracy and America’s voters:

What’s happening in this country, and in this election, is rather simple and easy to see: (1) the country is in total shambles—possibly far worse than what people even realize; (2) we have lived for the last eight years under virtually absolute GOP rule; (3) the public knows this; (4) the Republican President and his party are therefore intensely—historically—unpopular; and (5) the voting public doesn’t want to continue living under the rule of the same faction and same political party that has driven the country into the ground.

Some cynics have said disasters like the Bush administration are the risks of democracy. But a populace force-fed incessant media spin by talking heads who back corporate puppet-presidents is not the informed democracy essential for clear decisions at the ballot box.

This election, no amount of mainstream media bias can gloss over the failed state of the nation. And along with the union movement’s massive get out the vote effort, and all the outreach and candidate fundraising by the progressive community, now is the time we, the people, can take back America from reactionary ideologues.

In the hours before Tuesday’s debate, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews relentlessly greased the wheels for Republican pundits to pontificate on the key question for the insider clique: What must McCain do to win the debate?

Later, Matthews went outside the TV studio to interview people in the Nashville, Tenn., crowd. As one after another expressed support for Sen. Barack Obama and opposition to Bush/McCain, his irritation visibly grew, until he finally spit out what he was thinking:

Where are the McCain supporters?

A man in the crowd answered:

It’s like Michigan. McCain supporters are all gone.

The people speak.

 

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McCain Transition Head Lobbied For Saddam Hussein

 

Back in August, John McCain tried to make an issue out of the fact that one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, had attended a legal conference in Damascus in July. The attempt never went anywhere — in addition to being a total non-story charge, the geniuses working for McCain fumbled the press call by hanging up on a reporter who was asking inconvenient questions about the lobbying work of various McCain staffers and surrogates.

 

Today, the Huffington Post’s Murray Waas reports that one of those staffers, William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist heading up McCain’s presidential transition team, “aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime“:

 

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.

 

During the same period beginning in 1992, Timmons worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.

 

Timmons’ activities occurred in the years following the first Gulf War, when Washington considered Iraq to be a rogue enemy state and a sponsor of terrorism.

 

Waas also reports that “proposals that Timmons himself circulated to U.S. officials as part of the effort were written with the assistance of…Iraqi officials, and were also sent ahead of time with Timmons’ approval to [Saddam Hussein’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq] Aziz.” Interestingly, a few years after Timmons worked with Iraqi officials to implement U.S. legislation to ease sanctions on Saddam Hussein, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann worked with Iraqi exiles to implement U.S. legislation to remove Saddam Hussein. Now that’s diversity!

 

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Record number eligible to vote in Ky. By Tom Loftus

 

A record number of Kentuckians are registered to vote in the Nov. 4 election, Secretary of State Trey Grayson said today.

Grayson said in a news release that 2,906,809 Kentuckians are registered — an increase of 49,578, or 1.7 percent, from the 2,857,231 voters registered for the primary election last spring.

The current number of registered voters is an increase of 112,523, or 4 percent, over the 2004 presidential election, according to the news release.

“These healthy registration figures are an indication of a potentially strong turnout on election day,” Grayson stated in the news release.
Of those registered to vote next month, 53 percent are female, 47 percent are male, according to the release.

And 57.2 percent are Democrats and 36.3 percent are Republicans, with the others independent or affiliated with other groups.

The Democratic Party showed a larger gain in registration than the GOP since the primary. Democrats gained 32,248 registered voters, or 2 percent, since the primary. Republicans saw 13,433 more registered voters since the primary, a gain of 1.3 percent.
Since the primary, those registering without affiliation to either major party grew by 3,897, or by 2.1 percent.

Since the last presidential election, in 2004, the Republican Party has seen larger gains in registered voters in the state. During that time Republican registration has grown by 57,208, or 5.7 percent. Democratic registration has grown by 46,744, or 2.9 percent, and registration for others has grown by 8,571, or 4.7 percent.

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McCain Would Slash Medicare by Seth Michaels

This week, in the midst of Sen. John McCain’s misleading assaults on Sen. Barack Obama, his campaign let slip yet another revelation of exactly where their priorities are. One of McCain’s top advisers this week said that as president, McCain would cut $1.3 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid.

That’s “trillion.” With a “T.”

More than 10 years, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin told the Wall Street Journal, McCain would pay for the high costs of his health care proposal by taking a hatchet to health care coverage for the elderly, people with disabilities and lower-income families. A Center for American Progress study finds that McCain’s plan would force big cuts in benefits or eligibility for these vulnerable populations.

McCain’s call for radical cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will undermine their vital role in our health care system, putting affordable health care out of reach for millions of seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income families, and driving up the cost of health insurance for everyone else. 

And why does the McCain campaign support undermining this pillar of retirement security? To pay for a “tax credit” in McCain’s health care plan that amounts to a subsidy for big insurance companies. (Maybe McCain thinks the $2 billion in tax cuts he would give the insurance companies isn’t enough.)

Ed Coyle, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, calls McCain’s Medicare plans “terrible news” for seniors already beset by rising costs and economic anxiety.

Medicare, like Social Security, is one of our nation’s greatest success stories. Generations of seniors have been able to better afford their doctor visits and prescription drugs. Medicare works, and as part of national health care reform, we need to strengthen Medicare—not decimate it. As the McCain health care plan would also cause many employers to drop retiree health care, a stronger Medicare program would be needed more than ever. 

This major threat to Medicare is the dirty little secret John McCain and his team of lobbyists didn’t want us to know about. 

When it comes to retirement security and health care, McCain’s plans are as bafflingly out of touch as his Senate voting record. He wants to put retirement at risk by gambling Social Security in volatile markets. He opposes expanding health care for children and has opposed enabling Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. He wants to create a new health care tax that could push millions out of their benefits, and his so-called tax credit would cover less than half of what an average family premium would cost. And McCain wants to pay for it all by demolishing the health coverage millions of retirees depend on. 

In contrast, Obama has a strong record of protecting retirees and their health care, and he’s pledged to fight benefit cuts in Social Security and Medicare. He’s proposed a health care plan that cuts costs for families and gives more people access to affordable, high-quality coverage.  

It’s clear that Obama understands that in tough economic times, we need to keep working families and retirees secure by making sure we have a strong and stable health care system. McCain thinks the right answer is to push more and more people out of their current coverage and leave them, young and old alike, at the mercy of the insurance companies. 

He just doesn’t get it.

Comments:  

DAILY GRILL

"I'm not sure if I were in the Congress I could vote against it." -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, 9/29/08, on the bailout
 

VERSUS

"If Senator McCain is not prepared to separate himself from the Bush-Paulson economic program, he has no opportunity to win."
-- Gingrich, 10/8/08

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"Rove also mentioned the [actor's] use of the f-word, which Rove said he can't remember ever hearing from Bush in 35 years."
-- Wall Street Journal, 10/10/08, on Karl Rove's criticism of the new film "W."
 

VERSUS

"F___ Saddam. we're taking him out." -- Bush, March 2002

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GLENN BECK: How long has it taken us to go to a $10 trillion [debt]? ... How many years? 

MOORE: It took us, you know, 200 years to get to this situation. -- Walll Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Moore, 10/14/08

VERSUS
 

"On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That's a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush's watch." -- CBS News, 9/29/08

Quotes of the Day   

TOP     

Recent Senate Votes 

NOT IN SESSION

Recent House Votes 

NOT IN SESSION

TOP

HUMOR    

"Yesterday at the White House -- you know, George Bush is still our President for a couple of more months -- and yesterday down in Washington in the White House, he met with Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, but Bush kept calling him Boy-R-Dee. It was awful." --David Letterman

"Russia apparently has test-fired long-range ballistic missiles. At least that's what Sarah Palin says she saw from her house." --David Letterman

"They're saying that when Sarah Palin is speaking, she blinks her eyes. People believe that those are coded messages, and I'm a conspiracy nut. So I got a hold of a tape of a recent campaign appearance, and I slowed it down. And if you translate the blinks to Morse code, sure enough, right there it says, 'Vote for Grandpa.'" --David Letterman

"Did you hear what happened at a rally yesterday? Sarah Palin mistook some of her supporters for hecklers. You know, confusion happens in all walks of life. For example, a few weeks ago, John McCain mistook her for a legitimate candidate. It happens." --David Letterman

"Tomorrow night is the final presidential debate, and John McCain is going to take this opportunity to unveil his new campaign persona, his new campaign personality, to really energize the last couple of weeks of the campaign: Fighting underdog. And if that doesn't work, then he's going to go to sadistic yard bull." --David Letterman

"I'll tell you one thing about John McCain, the guy is an optimist. He sees the glass as half full of his teeth." --David Letterman

"That's awful, isn't it? How about this? Barack Obama, what a guy. He is actually going door to door, knocking on doors in a neighborhood, asking people if they'll vote for him. Coincidentally, John McCain is also going door to door, except when he knocks on a door, he says, 'Do I live here?'" --David Letterman

"Levi Johnston, the boyfriend of Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter, is back in the news. He gave an interview in which he says that at first, he was nervous attending the Republican convention with the Palins, but then he was like, 'Whatever.' Yeah, he also admitted that he writes Sarah Palin's speeches." --Conan O'Brien

"Speaking of politics, a group linked to Democrats is now being investigated because they've been accused of falsifying voter registration forms, including a form for Mickey Mouse. Yeah, President Bush was furious when he heard this, because he thought Mickey Mouse was a Republican." --Conan O'Brien

"President Bush announced today he is going to have the Federal government put $250 billion into US banks. Yeah. Bush also said if he's putting that much money into a bank, they'd better give him a big-ass toaster." --Conan O'Brien

"This week on the campaign trail, John McCain made some news. He talked about his next debate with Barack Obama, and he said, “I'm going to whip his you-know-what.' Then, McCain vowed to 'hit Obama in the whatchamacallit' and 'kick him in the thingamajig.'" --Conan O'Brien

"According to a group of Nobel prize-winning scientists, because of the economic crisis, the planet might actually improve from the damage of global warming, because we're using less fossil fuel and we're saving energy. See, this shows the brilliance of President Bush's plan. He was killing the economy, yeah, but to save the planet! The man is a genius!" --Jay Leno

"I think the economy is starting to turn around. In fact today, instead of just shooting animals for food, Sarah Palin is back shooting them for fun again." --Jay Leno

"Barack Obama also says that both men and women should have to register for the draft. What do you think of that? The first woman he wants signed up? Sarah Palin." --Jay Leno

"The biggest newspaper in Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News, says that Sarah Palin's reaction to this Troopergate report, you know where she was found guilty, was either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian. To which Sarah Palin said, 'Do I have to pick one now, or can I get back to ya?'" --Jay Leno

"They began filming a porno movie this week called 'Nalin' Palin.' They've hired a woman who looks like Governor Palin to star in this porn movie. It's called 'Nalin' Palin,' and they expect a lot of guys to go see it. The porn movie nobody wants to see? 'Ridin' Biden.'" --Jay Leno

"The last presidential debate is tomorrow night. The debate is gonna be sponsored in part by Anheuser Busch. I guess they were thinking the first two debates were so boring, people need to get good and liquored up before they watch it." --Jay Leno

"More charges of voter registration fraud with this group ACORN. Have you heard about this? This is turning into a huge scandal. Apparently, this group has charged with on putting phony names on voter registration cards, including Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse was registered to vote in Florida. Is that so bad? I mean, Goofy has been president for the last eight years." --Jay Leno

"This economy is crazy. Are you with me on that one? This is what I saw today. I saw a Lehman Brothers executive walking around town wearing a sign that read, will work for a seven-figure bonus." --Jay Leno

"Two big wildfires are burning. Apparently an ember hit the state liposuction fat reserve, and before they knew it, the whole place went up in flames. Right now emergency teams are trying to contain the fires, or at least drive them towards homes that have already been foreclosed on." --Jimmy Kimmel

"So far, more than 10,000 acres have been burned. Yesterday, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a state of emergency to be declared. Or he might have ordered a steak with burgundy and an eclair. It's hard to tell. It's times like these when we think twice about electing a former bodybuilder from the black forest. Last time we had a big fire - he tried to slather it with baby oil." --Jimmy Kimmel

 

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ECONOMY --  PERINO CONFIRMS WHITE HOUSE WON'T EXTEND JOBLESS BENEFITS, SAYS PEOPLE SHOULD JUST FIND A JOB: During a White House press briefing yesterday, Press Secretary Dana Perino suggested that the Bush administration would oppose any effort to extend jobless benefits, a stance that the White House has taken before. She explained this position by saying, "[W]e want people to be able to return to the workplace as soon as possible" and concluded that "the best way to help" the economy and unemployed people is for the unemployed to start "getting back to work." However, eight years of Bushonomics has resulted in significant job loss and the slashing of safety nets for laid-off workers. The Department of Labor reported last week that the country shed 159,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate has increased to its highest level in five years. The Washington Post reported that "unemployment claims are at a seven-year high, and factory orders are sharply down." And while the federal government is refusing to extend benefits, state unemployment funds are drying up, with "such funds in at least 10 states facing insolvency in 2009."
 
POVERTY -- STUDY: MORE THAN HALF OF AMERICANS LIVING IN POVERTY ARE WOMEN: A study released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) yesterday, "The Straight Facts on Women in Poverty," has found that in every racial and ethnic group, women in America are more likely to be poor than men. "Over half of the 37 million Americans living in poverty today are women," and "the gap in poverty rates between men and women is wider in America than anywhere else in the Western world," the brief states. There are a number of factors contributing to the high proportion of women living in poverty. Women are paid less than men, segregated into low paying jobs, and are more likely to bear child care costs. Moreover, pregnancy affects women's work and educational opportunities more than men's and domestic and sexual violence can push women into a cycle of poverty. The report recommends "a range of decent employment opportunities with a network of social services that support healthy families, such as quality health care, child care, and housing support."
 

A LONG-RUNNING CAMPAIGN: Last Friday, conservative members of Congress "sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting the Department of Justice ensure that the actions of ACORN did not violate federal laws." But conservatives have gone down this road before, only to find nothing. In 2004, ACORN faced three lawsuits pertaining to alleged voter fraud, all of which were dismissed. As noted at the time, "several politically motivated law firms brought baseless charges of voter registration fraud against ACORN in an effort to inhibit its work to register low-income and minority voters." But the Bush administration was so intent on furthering these trumped-up charges of voter fraud that in 2006 attorneys from the Department of Justice -- including New Mexico's David Iglesias -- were fired for not pursuing fraud cases "to the satisfaction of their bosses." Revealing the shallowness of the conservative outrage though, the New York Times reported last week that "tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law." This has garnered scant attention compared to the uproar surrounding ACORN

ADMINISTRATION -- GELLMAN: CHENEY WOULD SEE BAILOUT AS OPPORTUNITY TO REINFORCE UNITARY EXECUTIVE: Vice President Cheney has virtually disappeared from the public spotlight since last month's economic collapse. Although he has given seven public speeches since September 1, none were devoted to the economy. Cheney's absence is puzzling considering his major role in crafting economic policy during the first term. Late last week, The Progress Report asked the Washington Post's Barton Gellman, author of the new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, about Cheney's disappearance. Gellman suggested Cheney has become a less influential figure in the White House and Congress, handicapped by his abysmal approval ratings. Gellman cautioned, however, that Cheney "probably is involved behind the scenes in shaping the policy because there hasn't been many massive policies that he hasn't helped shape." In reference to the original Wall Street bailout plan, which would have given the Treasury enormous powers with no oversight, Gellman noted that Cheney may have viewed the bailout as an "opportunity" to expand executive power. "He would certainly also see [the financial crisis] as an opportunity to demonstrate and reinforce that the executive needs to be supreme on big consequential national policy," Gellman said.

CONGRESS -- BIPARTISAN HOUSE REPORT FINDS BUSH MADE 'INAPPROPRIATE' USE OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE: Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released a bipartisan report finding that President Bush made a "legally unprecedented and an inappropriate use of executive privilege" when the administration withheld Patrick Fitzgerald's interview with Vice President Cheney on the CIA leak scandal. Attorney General Michael Mukasey had previously told the committee "that Bush's refusal to release the Cheney interview was within the president's authority, under executive privilege, to keep his discussions with advisers private." But the report, which was signed by Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and ranking Republican Tom Davis (R-VA), argued that "there is no reason to believe that the special counsel's interview with the vice president" relates to "presidential decision-making about foreign policy or national security." White House spokesman Tony Fratto dismissed the report as a "campaign attack." The committee also released a separate report criticizing Bush's assertion of executive privilege regarding his recent climate change and Clean Air Act decisions, saying that they were "wrong and an abuse of the privilege."

Think Fast  

A draft version of the new National Intelligence Estimate "concludes that Afghanistan is in a 'downward spiral' and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there." The CIA has documented the worsening violence for nearly 2 years and “some in the agency say they believe that it has taken the White House too long to respond to the warnings."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday recommended a new $150 billion economic stimulus plan and said "she may call the House into session after the election to pass it." Pelosi said "the stock market meltdown...was a factor in her recommendation."

Delivering "a sharp blow" to the prosecution's case against Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), a judge threw out two key pieces of evidence against Stevens yesterday. The judge presiding over the case faulted prosecutors for knowingly introducing false documents relating to work done on Stevens home. "There’s just no excuse for that whatsoever," he said.

“Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law," the New York Times reports today. The blocked voters "are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law."

Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-FL) -- who replaced former congressman Mark Foley (R) -- "is facing scandalous allegations of his own." ABC News reports Mahoney paid $121,000 to "a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him." He has called on the House ethics committee to investigate his own behavior.

Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-FL), "who faces accusations that he had an affair with a former aide and paid her to keep quiet about it," was also reportedly "having an affair with a second woman around the same time, a person close to his campaign told The Associated Press on Tuesday."

A record 91 percent of Americans are "dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States," according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll. Another 84 percent of those polled "predict the economy is going to get worse." 

"House Democrats are contemplating a huge infusion of public cash -- as much as $300 billion -- to stoke economic growth by creating public jobs and padding the wallets of struggling consumers." The spending package “would be nearly twice as big as the stimulus measure President Bush signed in February."

The number of U.S. jobs paying a poverty-level wage increased by 4.7 million between 2002 and 2006, according to a new report by The Working Poor Families Project. "The alarming news is that both the number and percentage of low-income families increased during this period," said Brandon Roberts, co-author of the report. "This was a time when we had solid and robust economic growth."

Bush administration officials, in their last weeks in office, "are pushing to rewrite a wide array of federal rules with changes or additions that could block product-safety lawsuits by consumers and states." The language is "aimed at pre-empting product-liability litigation into 50 rules governing everything from motorcycle brakes to pain medicine."

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