DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/

from the Progressive Review website: (scroll down to find it)

HOW CLINTON AND OBAMA ARE ALIKE

• Their positions are often barely distinguishable from that of the Republicans
  
• They have built their campaigns around genetic identity rather than on political principles and issues.
  
• “I would be stunned to find an anti-business [Supreme Court] appointee from either of them,” Cass Sunstein, who is a constitutional adviser to Obama, told me. “There’s not a strong interest on the part of Obama or Clinton in demonizing business, and you wouldn’t expect to see that in their Supreme Court nominees.” - Jeffrey Rosen, NY Times
  
• They take multiple positions on individual issues such as NAFTA
  
• They have produced no interesting new ideas nor promised to fight for any important new programs
  
• They have offered no good idea about how to handle the current economic crisis
  
• They have gone about their campaigns as though they were leading a cult rather than a political movement
  
• Clinton hangs out with a covert group of right wing GOP Christians; Obama would name some of them to his cabinet.
  
• They have similar voting records with Progressive Punch ranking Obama 24th and Clinton 19h in Senate
• more

and yes, Sam Smith does talk about their differences…f’rinstance:

• Clinton would continue the 28 year old Reagan - Bush - Clinton - Bush era; Obama would probably end it.
  
• While both have misled voters, Clinton has by far the worst record, witness the cattle futures, Whitewater, travel office and similar scandals as well as the fact that five of her fundraisers have been convicted of, or pleaded no contest to, crimes and one fled the country after being indicted on charges related to raising money.
  
• While they both have had seamy friends, so far only one has surfaced for Obama - Rezko - as opposed to a lengthy list for Clinton that begins with three close business partners who ended up in prison.
  
• Obama, unlike Clinton, has never been almost indicted.
  
• Obama, unlike Clinton, has never been mentioned 35 times in a criminal indictment.
  
• Obama, unlike Clinton, has been involved in a resort land scam with in which about half the purchasers, many of them seniors, lost their property.
  
• Obama, unlike Clinton, is not currently being sued in a case involving an allegedly massive misreporting of campaign contributions.
  
• Obama, unlike Clinton, did not support the appointment of the now indicted Bernie Kerick to be head of Homeland Security

more

sometimes displays “video no longer available” when it’s available–check link below….

It’s all over but the shouting in the New Hampshire recount, and the results, I would have to say, are mixed at best. On one hand, Hillary Clinton won fair and square, and there were not major inaccuracies in the count. On the other hand, the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office reportedly treated the recount request, and the ballots themselves, in such an offhand manner that it was hard for observers (biased ones, admittedly) to believe they weren’t trying to hide something.

Electronic memory cards were missing. Ballots were kept in open boxes. Gee, I always thought of New Englanders as neat by nature, but according to the accounts I’m reading, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a very prim-looking guy, was treating the cornerstones of democracy the way a distracted teenager treats his homework. I’m surprised we didn’t hear the line, “the dog ate my ballot.”

Meanwhile, we have Brad Friedman of Bradblog and Bev Harris of BlackboxVoting.org straining hard to find voting machine problems, but ultimately having to admit that “Most of the big reports are election administration failures. Administration failures are those failures that cannot be blamed on voting machines or the voters or poll workers. They are those failures that fall directly in the laps of clerks or registrars or boards of elections. Not enough paper ballots at the precinct is an administrative failure.”

One of the administrative failures was ballots in California that seemed rigged to cause independents to disqualify themselves from voting in the Democratic primary by failure to mark the right box on the ballot. Also in California, many people who intended to register as “Independent” were instead registered by the Board of Elections as “American Independent,” which is George Wallace’s old party, and were thus barred from voting in the Democratic primary. Another was that, in Green Party primaries, conducted by Republican and Democratic officials, there were (somewhat predictably) major glitches that may have been negligence and may have been malice–like ballots not being sent to rural counties in Arkansas, or Illinois’ decision to print a green stripe on Democratic ballots and a brown stripe on Green Party ballots, and fail to inform polling officials of the Green Party ballots’ existence, so that many Green Party voters were given green ballots instead of Green Party ballots.

Hey, guys, everybody knows the Dems are the ones with the brown stripe! But seriously, until we have a Green Party hefty enough to have representatives in the Board of Elections, we are not going to get any respect from the big guys. They are so insecure, and with such good reason…By the way, in case you hadn’t heard, the Greens are splitting between Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader like the Dems are splitting over Hillary and Barak.
But there have been no reports of weird results from the voting machines, no complaints of voter intimidation. Of course, it is just a primary, but would Diebold really skew their machines for Hillary? Considering the amount of attention that’s on this issue right now, the odds and consequences for getting caught probably look unacceptably high.

Here in Tennessee, we had faith-based voting, which is what you have to call voting on touch-screen machines. This may be our last video poker election, though! More on that in a minute.

Faith-based voting brought a big win for the faith-based candidate, Mike Huckabee, who wants to put Jesus in the Constitution, just like they did in The Handmaid’s Tale. He hasn’t said if he wants to change the name of the country to The Republic of Gilead. Tennessee also went for Hillary Clinton, in a pattern that I find very disturbing.

Obama won big in all the urban counties, including Williamson, which is usually considered a conservative hotbed–I guess what Dems there are around Franklin are liberal ones. In rural, redneck Tennessee, however he rarely polled more than 20% of the vote, and there were counties in which John Edwards did better than Obama.

Couldn’t have been because he’s white, now, could it?

What I infer from this is that racism is not dead in Tennessee, and I don’t think that bodes well for Obama’s chances should he win the nomination. If he doesn’t get the nomination, I’m not sure Hillary will be able to win the election, because she’s going to have to squash a lot of people’s hopes to prevail.
Here’s a couple of numbers for you: so far, approximately 17 million people have voted for Democratic candidates in the primaries, and only 11 million have voted for Republicans. I’m sure that if the Dems try hard enough, they can blow that lead.

And of course, John McCain is now the Republican front-runner, and the buzz on him is that a lot of conservatives and evangelicals won’t vote for him, so he can’t win, either. This is kind of a backwards way of arriving at the conclusion that the 2008 Presidential election is a no-win situation, but really it is. Whoever wins the election is inheriting a bankrupt, spendthrift country that can’t get out of a war it has no moral justification in pursuing and no money to pay for, a country that almost singlehandedly (through our prostitution of China and widespread promotion of “the American way of life” is pushing the planet into a heatwave the likes of which have not been felt since there were crocodiles in Greenland.

Phew….let’s not talk about that now…it’s almost too horrendous to contemplate…can we have a little good news? Even if it’s just a little?

OK, how’s this…as I said earlier, it looks like Tennessee is going to be able to dump its touchscreen voting machines, hopefully by next fall’s election, if the feds co-operate. (Downside: more toxic high-tech junk!) In spite of tremendous, almost inexplicable resistance by Tennessee Election Commissioner Riley Darnell, who acts like his salary gets paid by Diebold rather than Tennessee taxpayers–and hey, maybe it is, how would we know? In spite of resistance from the state’s election officials, and the same goes for them, a small group of committed citizens talked to enough legislators and got enough other citizens to talk to their legislators to get a bipartisan bill to the floor of the Tennessee House that calls for Tennessee to switch over to optical scan voting machines by 2010 at the latest, and this year if the feds come up with the funds. New Jersey Representative Rush Holt is pushing a bill through that will make funds available to states to switch back from the touchscreen machines mandated by Bush’s Helping America Vote Republican Act of a few years past. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement that, hopefully, can be improved upon.

Speaking of improving on the improvements, the next step after verifiable voting in Tennessee is getting somebody on the ballot who’s worth voting for. Current ballot laws in the state map out a tortuous and unlikely pathway for third parties to get a named ballot line–that is, for candidates to be identified on the ballot as being members of the Green Party, just for example, rather than as “independent.” A recent court case in Ohio ended with the Federal Sixth Circuit Court declaring that Ohio’s law, which is quite similar to Tennessee’s, is in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Green Party of Tennessee has joined with the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party to initiate a lawsuit to overturn Tennessee’s ballot roadblock, and we have every reason to believe that the decision will be handed down in time for the November election.

It’s a little step, but it’s the first one we can take, and whatever we do, we can only do it one step, one day at a time. I hardly even see how it connects with changing the big picture, considering the resistance even a relative lightweight like Barak Obama met out in the hustings of Tennessee.

Perhaps all that’s left for us at this point is to meet the coming catastrophe as gracefully as we can, because it’s becoming obvious that politics-as-usual is going to prevail in the short run, and politics as usual is as capable of dealing with what’s headed our way as the Polish cavalary was capable of stopping the blitzkreig. And we, with our scattered little Green Party here in Tennessee, are metaphorically even more powerless than the Polish Cavalry. But we have a vision, and a call to live that vision–so what else can we do?

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “Milk and Honey”

I recently received an email communique from Tennessee Rep. Gary Odom, touting the legislature’s achievements this year. He didn’t mention my favorite, which was a state resolution opposing the Real ID Act. That passed back in June and was sponsored by my State Representative, Gary Moore, and I am quite proud of him for that. Hey, it was a bipartisan agreement–even Lamar Alexander came out against it. Lamar’s opposition is not enough to make me proud of him, however, for a wide variety of reasons. He does get a Truth In Strange Places nomination, though, for saying,

“We have just assumed that every single State will want to ante up, turn its driver’s licenses examiners into CIA agents, and pay hundreds of millions of dollars to do an almost impossible task over the next 3 years.

“We did that without any recognition in this legislation that we are not the state government, we are the federal government, and, if we want a national ID card, we should be creating a federal ID card. “

And that’s something Lamar thinks we need. Maybe after this term in the Senate, he’ll be nominated for a position in the Supreme Soviet. May I see your papers?

(After I wrote this, Homeland Sekurity Reichsfuhrer Michael Jerkoff announced that they have set the compliance date back to 2014, which gives a possibly saner Congress the chance to repeal the mess.  The junta never admits it’s flat-out wrong about anything, but this is probably as close as we’re going to get.)

Well, opposition to Bush junta policies is probably a little edgy for Mr. Odom, who, as the Majority Leader in the Tennessee House, has got to keep himself firmly in the mainstream.

And the mainstream achievements Mr. Odom is proudest of are: more funding for education out of the lottery revenue stream, continued funding for highways in the state, and a tougher crime package.

Ah, the lottery revenue stream. A lottery is OK, but an income tax is unmentionable…lottery participation is voluntary, but an income tax in Tennessee will mostly come out of the pockets of the wealthy, which is why the anti-tax demonstrations we had here a few years ago consisted of well-dressed, mostly overweight people stopping traffic around the State Capitol while they honked the horns of their SUVs.

Lottery ticket buyers, on the other hand, tend to be under-educated, low-income, and black. Not a political force to be reckoned with, y’know? There is something strangely ironic about having the least-educated members of society fund improvements to the educational system that are unlikely to ever be of any benefit to them–unless they’ve got four-year olds, which, come to think of it, is a good possibility, since ignorance breeds children. But how many of those children will ever make it into college?

The Nashville Scene recently wrote an editorial chiding the Democrats for moral laxity over the Tennessee Waltz convictions and a couple of other incidents of lawmaker misbehavior. The Republicans, they seemed to imply, held the high moral ground in this state. As a Green, I’m not about to carry water for the Democrats, but the Repugs certainly have done their share of sinning. After all, the Tennessee Waltz entrapment was schemed up by a politicized Republican Justice Department that was out to make the Democrats look bad. How moral is that? And how moral is it to completely demonize the idea of a progressive income tax in Tennessee, leaving us with a sales tax system that burdens the poor much more than the wealthy? All these so-called pious Christians don’t seem to have much regard for the Jesus who frequently warned against the dangers of too much material accumulation, or for the early Christian community described in Acts, in which believers pooled their belongings and gave to each person as he or she had need. But I digress. I am not advocating turning Tennessee into a Christian Communist state!

Back to Rep. Odom and his list of achievements…he was happy to report that state highway funding will continue, hand in hand with efforts to produce ethanol from non-food crops here in the state. both of which indicate a determination to carry on with things just as they are for as long as we possibly can rather than look for serious alternatives like mass transit that works, redesigning our infrastructure to lessen the need for commuting, or widespread local solar power generation (which, among other things, could power electric cars). These bold moves were not made.

The legislature “got tough on crime” by creating more DA’s and public defenders and making gun crime penalties harsher. Well, from a certain perspective, this approach has worked. Between 1994 and 2004, the crime rate in Tennessee dropped about 4%, but the number of people incarcerated went up 58%. “Getting tough on crime” is now a for-profit industry, with prisons replacing factories as the economic engine that drives some counties in our state. This is not a healthy development, and I don’t think that pushing people through the court system faster and mandating longer sentences is a good answer. A courageous criminal justice program would end the death penalty, outlaw private prisons, decriminalize or at least abolish jail time for victimless crimes, and put more money into educational and psychological services for violent or large-property criminals. Let’s be clear: by “psychological services” I don’t mean putting them on meds! And white-collar criminals? Let ‘em chop cotton and break rocks! But seriously, it’s a scare tactic to keep the public focussed on violent crime and the occasional twisted child molester while our environment is raped and plundered, corporate thievery is rampant, and elected officials steal elections and vandalize the Constitution.

Speaking of stolen elections, Tennessee does appear to be on the verge of dumping its touchscreen voting machines and working with optical scan equipment. There has been a lot of citizen pressure on this issue which seems to have helped move it along–state legislators don’t get the volume of mail that national legislators receive, so it’s easier to influence them, which is a good thing. Votesafetn.org has a website set up that makes it easy to contact the committee members.

The legislature did allocate money to improve broadband internet access in rural parts of the state. This is a good thing. Some of us are on the information superhighway, and some of us are following mud ruts to town. With physical travel due to get a lot more difficult as the price of gas, or ethanol, or whatever, continues to spiral on up, we need to do what we can to expedite the flow of information and communication. The four million they put into broadband should have been forty million.

In a sop to low-income Tennesseans, the legislature cut the sales tax on food by a half of one percent. That’s fifty cents less taxes on every hundred dollars worth of groceries. Whoopie! How magnanamous!

Other key issues that saw no action from the legislature, from my “deep green perspective,” are questions of land use planning and forest preservation and regeneration and promotion of local agriculture and industry that might return a measure of self-sufficiency to a state that has to import just about everything that it uses. A century ago, Tennessee was a poor but self-reliant state; the current widespread ownership of automobiles, electronic devices, fancy kitchen appliances, and central heat and air systems would certainly appear lavish to a traveller from the past, as would the proliferation of supermarkets and big box stores.

But with oil, consumer credit, and our whole economy sliding down the tubes, we may soon be asking ourselves if we really are better off than our horse-drawn, wood-heated, dirt farming predecessors. If I were a state legislator, I would be thinking about that. Judging by Rep. Odom’s report, they’re not.

music: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Civilization”

This just in from New Hampshire: Dennis Kucinich and Albert Howard, a minor Republican candidate, have asked for a recount of the machine-tabulated ballots due to statistical irregularities in the way the vote broke down. Here’s the deal:

Just as in Ohio in 2004, where exit polls indicated a Kerry victory but the votes came in to give the state to Bush, Obama led in the exit polls but lost in the vote–but only in precincts that were machine counted. These were primarily more urban precincts where Obama should have done well. He won in most of the precincts that were hand-counted, which were more rural, conservative areas where Ms. Clinton would be expected to do better.

The machines that did this automatic counting were made by Diebold, the same company that provided the voting machines that Ohio’s new, Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, says were rigged to throw votes to Bush.

If this really was a fix, the question is, whodunnit and why? Some people say that the powers behind the throne want Hillary, not Barak, to be our next President because she’s more with their program than he is. After all, it was her husband Bill who failed to pursue criminal investigations of the Reagan and Papa Bush administrations that set up the Cheney-Bush Junta. If the Iran-Contra and other inquiries had been pursued, many key players in our current ruling elite would now be in prison instead of power, and Hillary seems to be signalling that, as President, she would do the same. And hey, if Bill, on his way out the door, would pardon Marc Rich but not Leonard Pelletier, you know their hearts are not in the right place.

Others say that the Republicans think HIllary would be easier to beat than Obama, and that’s why Diebold, a major Republican campaign contributor, would throw the election to Ms. Clinton.

Why didn’t Obama complain? Maybe he didn’t want to look like a sore loser, since the media are trying to play Ms. Clinton as being picked on by the guys in the race. Hey, they’re not picking on her because she’s a woman. They’re picking on her ’cause she’s wrong!

If you’re more paranoid, maybe Obama is in on the fix. A Clinton-Obama ticket would lend her some much-needed charisma and set him up to run when she retires. And maybe everything was fine, but it starts the election season with questions about the integrity of the process, and that’s something we need to be vigilant about right through to the end. More on this as it develops.

music: Jackson Browne, “Lives in the Balance”

My friend Bernie is making trouble again.  No, he’s not having to be a marijuana martyr, thank goodness.  The DOJ appears to be too tied up in knots over Mr. Gonzalez’ departure to trifle with small change like Bernie at this point, especially since it’s starting to emerge that their prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was directed by Karl Rove. Siegelman was taken from the courtroom in chains and is being kept in prison pending his appeal, which is highly unusual in political bribery cases.  Both these directives came from the benches of Bush-appointed judges, and the whole thing appears to be a politically motivated slapdown of an up-and-coming Democratic politician, especially since the DOJ ignored much larger illegal contributions to Alabama Republicans.  Gee, I thought they only jailed opposition politicians in dictatorships…..but, I digress.

Bernie, although deprived of his right to vote due to his marijuana conviction, is working to make sure that those of us who can vote get our votes counted right.  To this end, he wrote the following letter to the Nashville Tennessean on August 20, which I will take the liberty of quoting in its entirety, because it’s so well written.  Apparently, Nashville’s newspaper of record had been asking its readers for story ideas.  Here’s Bernie’s letter:

Mr. Silverman,

All of us appreciate your willingness to solicit comments and suggestions from your readership regarding issues of government improprieties, inefficiencies and insufferable ignorance that require immediate remedies. I am writing to reiterate a concern that many of us have written the Tennessean about for the past 2+ years, a concern that has only deepened in that time. The concern has to do with the inordinate influence over our election officials that electronic voting machine vendors hold and (most likely as a result) why the national concerns over the sanctity and security of our voting systems have obtained no traction here with our TN officials.  Again, this is certainly not a new issue but it is one that is heating up nationally and placing Tennessee in the worst possible light. We need relief and your paper’s attention to the relationship between vendors and our election officials is one way to pursue that relief.

Here are some of our concerns:

1) Brook Thompson, the TN State Election Coordinator, is the only state election official serving on the Board of Directors of the Election Center, a group founded with start-up funding by the voting machine companies which continues to promote nonverifiable voting systems that are now being rejected nationally. As other states have returned to more verifiable voting systems and/or have initiated ethics requirements for their public officials, those states’ officials have either voluntarily severed their involvement with the Election Center or have been forced to do so. Not so with Tennessee. Indeed, Mr. Thompson requires that our county election officials attend an indoctrination session run by the Election Center as part of their certification process and he has invited R. Doug Lewis, the Election Center director, to speak at many meetings of the TN Association of County Election Officials (TACEO).

2) TACEO itself deserves serious investigation. This organization is ostensibly composed of county and state election officials, but it also includes members from the voting machine companies, has its meetings heavily underwritten by those vendors and generally discourages citizens from attending their meetings where entirely public business (the business of administering our elections) is discussed. When a group of us asked to attend the TACEO meeting in Memphis two years ago, we had to pay over $2,500 to attend. While there, we witnessed the vendors wining and dining our election officials shamelessly, and we heard (from the podium) statements that these officials could accept anything the vendors had to offer re: gifts without violating state ethics rules since these county election officials are appointed and not elected.

3) As I mentioned in the heading to this message, Tennessee is now considered to be one of the eight states whose elections are most insecure and most unverifiable as a result of the decisions (heavily pushed by Brook Thompson) to invest the $25 million in federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds that Tennessee received for touch-screen machines without any sort of paper record of the votes cast. At present, 93 of Tennessee’s 95 counties use nonverifiable touch-screen machines. In the 2006 election, our group documented problems in about one in every six TN counties related to this equipment.

However, a current effort by the U.S. Congress to amend HAVA to require voter-verified paper ballots — an effort that would provide federal funds for TN to correct our serious mistakes in judgment the first time around — is being aggressively opposed by Brook Thompson and his boss, Riley Darnell (as they also oppose bills in our own state legislature to require voter-verified paper ballots). If TN is considered nationally to be one of the eight worst states for voting security AND the feds are willing to give us money to correct our mistakes, why on earth would our state election officials oppose that? (The reason they say they oppose this effort — that there would not be enough time for our counties to purchase new equipment before the 2008 election — is patent nonsense since these same officials gave our counties less time to purchase equipment in 2006 with HAVA funds than is still available before the 2008 elections, a delay in 2006 that we think helped support the push to encourage purchases of nonverifiable voting equipment.)

While our election officials continue to stone-wall any remediation of the serious errors which they are responsible for creating, what new evidence has emerged to support the Tennessean taking on this battle alongside the scores of TN voters concerned about the safety of our franchise? Here are a few things you should know about:

1) A recent analysis by computer scientists at Florida State University of the ES&S iVotronic voting equipment has revealed a serious security problem that would allow a single person to introduce a virus that would change the outcome of elections conducted with this equipment. Seventeen TN counties (including Davidson) use this ES&S equipment, but we have been unable to get our local and state officials to pursue any action to remedy this security issue.

2.The California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, has recently de-certified all nonverifiable voting equipment in that state and has imposed a series of stringent requirements that must be put into place before this equipment can be considered for re-certification.

3) A review of the business practices and ethics of voting machine companies conducted by the state of New York has determined that these companies lack the basic business performance track record and professional ethics required to do business with that state. Consequently, New York has opted to continue with its existing voting systems rather than use federal HAVA funds that would coerce them to do business with voting machine companies which do not meet that state’s standards.

4) As a result of the California action, the Attorney General of the State of Kentucky has ordered that our neighboring state’s decision to purchase nonverifiable voting systems be re-examined and he is considering bringing legal action against those companies.

5) At least two California counties are now considering action to demand their money back from the voting machine companies because of false and misleading representations of that equipment.

6) Finally, when Davidson County decided to purchase the ES&S iVotronic equipment, our county election commission was assured that this equipment was made in America. A recent investigative report by Dan Rather showed that this equipment is manufactured in the Philippines and that the primary quality control method used there was to shake the equipment to see if any loose screws could be detected bouncing around inside the equipment.

SO, what should the Tennessean do from here? Our first suggestion would be to send a reporter to tomorrow’s monthly meeting of the State Election Commission.  We will be there to discuss all of the issues listed above and we think that you will learn a great deal about why we are in the precarious position we are in by observing the actions of this commission. We would also be happy to discuss our concerns with your reporter after tomorrow’s meeting or at any time that is convenient for you.

These issues continue to illustrate the most important concerns we have for the sanctity and security of how our state–how our nation–transfers the “consent of the governed” through elections to create the legitimate underpinnings for all our governmental systems. Continuing to allow our state’s election officials to both share a bed with the voting machine companies and to dictate how we should conduct our elections from that cozy platform is a recipe for disaster.

We sincerely hope that the Tennessean will take this issue on. There is more than enough “dirt” to fill any investigative series that you decide to pursue. Thank you for your attention.

Bernie Ellis

Well, gee, he just about wrote a series for the reporter, didn’t he?  What kind of response did he get?  Zip.  No reply, no reporter at the state election commission meeting,   Guess it just didn’t have that multiracial, feel-good thang that Gannett believes sells papers.  But hey, Bernie, citing Dan Rather?  Everybody knows he’s been discredited.  Just like Don Siegelman.  And you.  Good job, Karl!

The meeting, held in the absence of the Dark Lords Brook Thompson and Riley Darnell, actually went pretty well, Bernie tells me.  He’s not the only one concerned about the accuracy of our voting procedures.   But, without the Tennessean there, it was all under the public radar. So, Bernie wrote another letter, and here it is:

Dear Mr. Silverman,
I sent (you a letter) almost two weeks ago, and have received no response. Since sending you this memo, more states (Colorado, Ohio and others) have put a halt on any purchases of new voting equipment and are demanding answers from the voting machine vendors about the security and verifiability of their equipment. Meantime, we here in Tennessee sit under shade trees and spit watermelon seeds at our bare feet. Ah yes, ignorance (nurtured by a quiescent media) is surely bliss. Until it isn’t.

We continue to meet with state legislators working to pass a bill requiring a voter-verified paper ballot in Tennessee, and they say that media attention to this issue would be very helpful. They are embarrassed that TN is considered to be one of the eight stupidest states in the US for squandering over $25 million in HAVA funds for nonverifiable touch-screen machines made in the Phillippines and “inspected” by shaking the equipment vigorously to hear if there are any loose screws inside. I keep reassuring the legislators that TN still does have a functioning media. Am I right or just suffering from nostalgia for the country (and the Fourth Estate)I once knew and loved?

That’s for you to know and the rest of us to find out. Soon, I hope. Please respond to this second mailing, one way or the other.   Bernie Ellis, Organizer, Gathering To Save Our Democracy

And what did Bernie get back from this plea?  I will quote you Mr. Silverman’s response in its entirety:
“We will take a look at the issues you raise in the email.  Thanks”

What enthusiasm, eh?  Leads me to suspect that if one were to shake the Tennessean vigorously, or even Mr. Silverman himself, one might hear the sound of quite a few loose screws.  Or maybe he was just being terse, like Ernest Hemingway.  I’m waiting to find out.  But I’m not holding my breath.

music:  Will Kimbrough, “Act Like Nothing’s Wrong”

Well, the election results are in, and, as has often been the case in Tennessee, it wasn’t easy being Green. The best percentage of the vote received was the race run by Green fellow traveler Jon Davidson, who garnered 20% of the vote in State House District 52 against well known liberal Democrat Rob Briley—yeah, the family they named the parkway for. Talk about being part of the establishment…. Twenty percent! Over twenty-two hundred votes, nearly as many as statewide candidates Howard Switzer pulled in the governor’s race (2600) or Chris Lugo in the Senate race (2500). Well, at least the Dems can’t call us spoilers. Harold Ford lost it more or less fair and square, probably snowed under by the boobs who turned out to make their religion’s idea of marriage a part of the Tennessee Constitution. All these people so scared of homosexuality…you know, there have been tests done that show that the people who are most homophobic are the ones who are repressing the fact that they have those feelings…as the misadventures of Tom Foley and Ted Haggard have recently demonstrated. The queer tidal wave that all those people are afraid of is—them. The vote in Tennesee demonstrates that we are surrounded by a seething sea of repressed homosexuals! Well, as one of my teachers sarcastically commented, “If you can’t control yourself, control someone else!”

But, I digress….in U.S. House races, Katie Culver and Robert Smith also received better percentages than our statewide candidates, Katie with 1800 votes and Robert with 1,000—if Howard and Chris had done as well as either of them, they would have won about 18,000 votes, still not enough to change the election or even get our party name on the ballot, but I think it would have left them feeling more satisfied. I’m surprised they didn’t do better, especially Howard, since it was obvious Phil Bredesen was going to win in a walk. Howard campaigned intensively among those who have been dumped by Bredesen’s Tenncare purge. He should have done better.

Commenting on the election, Switzer said, “I think the main thing is we don’t have an extensive enough network to get the word out about our candidates. … We have to become more vocal advocates for who (we are) and what we want, pass the word and expand our networks. But, with (electronic voting machines) who knows what the vote tally really was? Our votes are counted in secret in an electronic box we are supposed to have unwavering faith in. “

The biggest kinda-Green vote getter in the state was Ginny Welsch, who won about 3600 votes in Nashville, where conservative Democrat Jim Cooper had no problem retaining his seat. Ginny explored running as an out-and-out Green but backed away when she discovered how much antipathy the label can ignite among ignorant, reactive Democrats, who are, after all, a major voting bloc that any serious candidate somehow needs to cultivate.

I talked with Jon Davidson, who was disappointed in his showing—a friend of his in the state legislature told him that just having his name on the ballot in an otherwise uncontested race should get him about a third of the votes. Jon tested this by spending “only about $100” and not doing any campaigning beyond putting up a website and getting a 45-minute interview from the Tennessean—which, alas, only appeared on their website. Neither Senate candidate Chris Lugo nor gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer got even that much of a nod from Nashville’s newspaper of record.

Jon noted that his district, according to who votes in the primaries, is about 90% Democratic—he thinks a lot of people just voted the straight Democratic ticket—but he found it gratifying that, in the neighborhood he used to live in, he got 40% of the vote. “And I got 38% of the absentee vote,” he added–”but I don’t know if that was from my friends in the touring music community or from pissed-off Republican soldiers in Iraq.” Jon also noted that turnout in his district was no higher than it had been for the 2002 midterm elections, in spite of all the publicity about how crucial this election was going to be. Nationwide, the turnout was a disappointing 40%.

Some of the best news for Tennesseans was Steve Cohen’s easy win over Harold Ford’s cousin and a Republican for the U.S. House seat from Memphis. Steve has long been the most sensible person in the Tennessee Senate, and he will be sorely missed there, but I look forward to his influence at the national level.

Someone he won’t be seeing in Washington is Richard Pombo, head of the House Environmental Resources Committee, a California representative who went down to defeat. Pombo’s name had become synonymous with putting human greed ahead of the welfare of the planet. He has been replaced by wind turbine entrepreneur Jerry McNerney. Thank you, California.

Tammy Duckworth lost to a Republican. In case you don’t remember, the National Democratic Party literally moved her in from out of state to compete in a race where Christine Cegalis, a fairly radical anti-war candidate was already in place, because they didn’t think Ms. Cegalis could win. Maybe she wouldn’t have won, but neither did Ms. Duckworth. Did Rahm Emmanuel and the Democratic Campaign Committee learn anything from that? Somehow I doubt it.

And I’m not that upset about Harold Ford losing here in Tennessee. Unlike Ford, Bob Corker is honest enough to admit he’s a Republican. We didn’t need to advance the career of a so-called Democrat who wanted to privatize Social Security, who supported anti-environmentalists like Richard Pombo, and who voted for the Patriot Act and the Torture-is-not-torture (Military Commisions) Act. Hint to Harold: try taking Jesse Jackson for a role model instead of Colin Powell.

In general, as I look over national Green Party results, I see the same thing we find in Tennessee: the more local the race, the better the Green Party did. And, while I love tilting at windmills as much as the next old hippie, I think the lesson is clear: we need to follow our own philosophy and act as locally as we can. We need to be working on school boards, zoning boards, county commissions, and the like—we could see our long-term strategy as moving up to winning mayoral races and then state legislature positions. That’s the route individual politicians take, and I think there’s a reason for it: you have to prove your worth at a lower level of responsibility before people will trust you with a higher one. It’s slow, it’s not glamorous, and time is short; but I think it’s the path we have to follow. It’s all about taking care of the details.

That seems to be how the rest of the party sees it.

In a “campaign wrapup letter,” Chris Lugo said:

“Although my ultimate goal would be campaign finance reform,

in the meantime, the practical reality is that progressive candidates in Tennessee

are going to need to do fundraising to get their message out.  Even though we are

going to continue to lose in Tennessee for some time to come, we won't even

register in the eyes of most Tennesseans until we start doing some serious fundraising.

Regarding running Greens locally versus statewide, I think we need to continue to do

both.  In Knoxville (we) are running Greens locally and even though they are losing,

they are continuing to build, having received thirty five percent in one recent Knoxville

 election. I think running candidates for statewide office is very important though, because

that puts (our) voice into the election, which is ground (zero) for the body politic.  There

 is no time when people are more concerned about politics or what is happening in the

 country than during an election, and that is exactly when we need to make sure that we

are being included.”And, as I already said, Statehouse candidate Jon Davidson got 40% of the vote in a

neighborhood where he was known personally without doing any campaigning at all.

So that's what we as Greens will be working on:  networking, fundraising, and local,

 local issues.

The Democrats got themselves elected as part of a national spasm of revulsion.

 They have no coherent plan, and all too many of them have no clue either.

John Conyers, who waxed so eloquently about the sins of the Republican administration,

 now joins Nancy Pelosi in saying “impeachment is off the table.”

 Perhaps this is just a diplomatic move.  Perhaps impeachment will be on the table again

 in the Spring, if the White House sticks to its guns and starts stonewalling Congressional

 attempts at oversight.  But if the Dems stick to form and get all namby-pamby, I believe

the country will neither forgive them nor return to the Republican fold.  Winston Churchill

remarked that “America will always do the right thing, but not until they've tried everything

else.”  The Republicans haven't worked; the Democrats won't work.

There is a Green dawn glowing on the horizon.

(and I don't know why this bottom part got all funny looking!)

music: Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”

I was gratified to see the lead editorial in this week’s Nashville Scene devoted to the dearth of differences between Demopublican Howard Ford, Jr., and Republicrat Bob Corker. Which would you prefer—an anti-abortion, anti-immigration, pro-war Democrat, or an anti-abortion, anti-immigration, pro-war Republican? Oh, wait—Ford is in favor of letting big pharma play with stem cells for fun and profit, while Corker’s agin it. What a difference!

It is sad and embarrassing to see so many of my “liberal”friends lining up behind Ford—I guess they think it would be uncouth not to support him ’cause he’s black, kind of. Ford voted for the bankruptcy revocation act and supported privatization of social security, both of which are totally against the interests of his supposed constituents. The guy is almost as much of an embarrassment as Ken Blackwell. Can you say, “Uncle Tom,” boys and girls? Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave.

That we should be faced with such a non-choice is indicative of the bankruptcy of the American political process, especially since there is a candidate who offers a genuine alternative to the failed policies shared by Ford and Corker. But it is for just that reason that Green Party Senate candidate Chris Lugo gets no traction in the media. Gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer has the same problem—running against a Dempopublican incumbent who’s slashed health care and a Republicrat who wants to cut it even further, his “health care for all” campaign deserves far more attention that it’s getting.

It’s a dilemma—anyone who is a corporate whore isn’t worth voting for, but anyone who’s not a corporate whore can’t get elected because the corporate media won’t pay any attention to them. Hey, it’s simple self-preservation. If enough people who were not beholden to the corporate overlords got in positions of power, we might reverse the doctrine of corporate personhood and put the corporate structure back in its proper place, as our servant. Somehow, I doubt that the Democrats will ever do that.

Meanwhile, for the benefit of those who yearn for the return of the Democratic party, let me remind you of some details of the good cop party’s activities:

Bill Clinton tried to pass an anti-terrorism bill very similar to what Bush has put in place; conservative Republicans shot it down as being a threat to civil liberties—and the freedom of companies like Enron to launder money just like Al Qaeda.

Mike McCurry, Bubba Bill’s former chief of staff, is now with the lobbying firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc., where he serves as head of the astroturf group, Hands off the Internet, which wants the government to get its hands off the internet so that private companies can take it over and turn it into the moral equivalent of cable TV. You know, one underfunded, closely monitored, little-watched public access channel, with the rest of it reserved for big boys with money. They are perilously close to succeeding.

Jack Quinn was Al Gore’s chief of staff for a while, then became Clinton’s chief legal counsel. Since leaving the White House, Quinn has formed a lobbying firm, Quinn-Gillespie, with former Republican National committee chairman Ed Gillespie, a friend and supporter of Tom Delay. OK, that’s guilt by association, but here are some of the lobbying activities Quinn has undertaken:

He’s worked for Enron. I hardly need to say more, but…he’s worked to lift bans on offshore oil drilling, subvert tighter regulation of nursing homes, weaken consumer credit protection laws, keep unhealthy food in school lunch programs, and lower corporate taxes still further.

Mark Penn, one of Clinton’s principal pollsters, still associated with that great Demopublican hope, Hillary Clinton, has lobbied against tighter smoking regulations, against allowing obesity-related lawsuits against fast-food restaurant chains, and on behalf of big pharma, Shell Oil, and the Iraqi National Congress-which, in case you’ve forgotten, was basically a vehicle for scamming money from the CIA. Oh, and he’s also argued against holding Dow/Union Carbide responsible for the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Victims of that corporate crime, the ones that are still alive over twenty years later, still have not seen any compensation from the corporate person that killed their families or left them crippled for life. We would not put up with such irresponsibility from an individual. The capital punishment crew would be howling for blood; but when there’s no blood, just money, they’re strangely silent.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can read the rest of the story at The Real News Project.org, where it is listed under the title “25 Democratic Consultants.” Twenty five. And yes, I know that consultants aren’t legislators, but they’re the brains, mouths, arms and legs of legislators. If a legislator hires a whore for sex, it’s a scandal; if a legislator hires a whore for the corporate agenda, that’s just business as usual.

And even when grassroots Democrats get it right, their leadership does its best to shut them down. In California, the predominantly Democratic state legislature has passed a bill establishing universal public health care in the state. Although the bill passed by a wide margin, the Democratic candidate for governor won’t support it, calling instead for mandatory enrollment in private health care a la Massachusetts. That’s like mandating that everyone pay protection money to the mafia—sure, it’ll make things more peaceful for most people, but at what price?

Business as usual politics, although it’s the only kind that can get any airplay, is approaching the end of the line. Whether it’s business as usual in health care or business as usual in energy and conservation policy, soon we will be far from the realm of the usual, like it or not, prepared or not. The Green Party seems to be the only political entity in the country that is willing to fully acknowledge this.

music: Bob Marley, “Top Rankin“

I confess: I flaked out. I voted electronically—and on a Diebold machine. I asked for a paper ballot, tentatively, “Can I still get a paper ballot?”, and they said they couldn’t give me one, and I decided not to make a fuss. I had just enough time to vote quickly before my dentist appointment if I didn’t make a fuss. I really wanted to get to my dentist appointment…..yeah, right! Well, I did…consider the alternative…ouch! Whoa, I’m digressing already….

I did ask if there was a paper trail, to which the election officials cheerfully replied, “no!” Well, this was not an election that anybody was likely to jack—the only close statewide race was the Republican Senate campaign, where two foaming-at-the mouth fascists, Bryant and Hilleary, were unable to stop the Lamar-Alexander-clone smoothtalking fascist, Bob Corker, from winning. It wasn’t even close, since the two foaming fascists were unable to curb their egos and figure out who should step aside to go one-on-one with Corker. Together they outpolled him by a slight margin. Maybe this is an opening to get Republicans to back instant runoff voting? Anyway, nobody was complaining about the validity of that election, and I’m sure they would have kvetched if they thought it would do them any good. I hear there was a local race out in East Tennessee where it appears that in some precincts every single voter turned out, and, guess what! most of them voted for the incumbent! With no paper trail to back the voting machine’s assertions, it is going to be difficult to figure that one out, although the 100% turnout in a local/primary election has been labelled “statistically unlikely.”

In one local state house race, longtime Tennessee House member Edith Taylor Langster was unseated by metro councilwoman Brenda Gilmore. That was in the district next door to mine, and the election was not even close, so it was probably honest, eh? Brenda campaigned on a platform of more economic development in her district, which makes me uneasy for the green spaces left in my quarter of Nashville.

The good news/bad news was that the “Memphis meltdown” didn’t occur; many anti-electronic voting machine campaigners were hoping that the twelve-page ballot would combine with Harold Ford’s popularity in Memphis to create long lines and lots of complaints, but no such luck.

The twelve page ballot was kind of a joke. There were very few choices to make, truth be told. Most races were uncontested, and many asked for a yes or no vote on appointing some guy I didn’t know anything about to a job whose description was unclear to me. I like to think I’m better informed than the average citizen, but nowhere in my normal perusal of the news had I encountered most of the names I was being asked to judge. I mean, I hadn’t even seen their campaign literature. Actually, I probably voted against my own best interests in many of those cases, because I voted to approve a whole flock of judges and I am reasonably certain that every one of those judges would not think twice about enforcing laws against victimless crimes that could in theory be applied against me. But, I digress. Again.

One of the Terrible Things About Russia that was drilled into my head as a child was that there, they had choiceless elections, because dissent was brutally suppressed. Wow—we’ve managed to do the same thing here just by creating widespread apathy—although police drug raids involving officers with concussion grenades, body armour, and automatic weapons might count in some quarters as brutal suppression of dissent—but not in any court in Tennessee, you can just about bet. And there I was, blithely voting for judges who would put me away and think “good riddance.” I embarrass myself at times.

Well, the cavalry is sounding their trumpets in the distance. What a racist metaphor! How ’bout, there’s help on the way? Paradise waits, yeah….

Bobby Kennedy, Jr. has filed the lawsuits he promised, but for legal reasons it’s all being kept very hush-hush, officially. Unofficially, Bradblog claims that Kennedy has filed fraud lawsuits against Diebold—not about the results of any election, nothing partisan, no, simply claiming that the machines did not perform as advertised. And what was it they did? Well, it seems you could program them so that when someone pushed a button that was supposed to vote the straight Democratic ticket, the machine would record a vote for every Democratic candidate but the President. You could also program them so that any vote for a third party presidential candidate would be recorded as a vote for Bush.

OK, you Democrats, you were right. A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. At least on some voting machines. But on other machines—maybe some of the same ones–a vote for Gore or Kerry was a vote for Bush, too.

Bobby is reputed to have insiders at Diebold who are willing to testify on these issues, and I’m sure that’s some of why this case is so shrouded. I would be very, very nervous if I were one of those Diebold insiders. They could have Karen Silkwood-type accidents.

So, Bobby isn’t swinging for the fences, as I trumpeted last month—or rather, he doesn’t appear to be. It’s just a little ol’ bunt down the third base line….just pulling one string that’s going to start the whole fabric of the American political landscape unraveling.

Meanwhile, down in Mexico, with no electronic voting whatsoever, they’ve had a stolen election and millions of people are out in the streets—demonstrating peacefully, so far, thank goodness. Many American writers are praising the Mexicans’ spirit, saying things like, “not only are they showing us how to work, they’re showing us how to be concerned citizens of a democracy.” Everybody wonders why you can’t get a million and a half concerned Democrats converging on Washington.

I’ll tell you why—it’s because we Americans are too chained to our treadmills to peel off and put our asses on the line, and because the Mexicans are already out on the street anyway. Know what I mean?

Too many of us (and I mean us, me included) are too sucked into our paycheck-to-payment lives, running as hard as we can to stay in our middle-class place, to go sit down en masse in Washington and demand that those in charge quit padding their own nests and do something to pull the planet out of its nosedive. Let’s face it–we’re all afraid of the financial mess we’d come home to if we dropped what we are doing and embarked on an indefinite political demonstration, even if in some way we succeeded in our political goals.

Mexicans, especially Lopez Obrador’s supporters, have already lost that middle-class place, if they ever had it to begin with. NAFTA has destroyed the low end of the Mexican economy, leaving millions of people with a choice between street peddling, heading for el Norte, or raising hell. “When ya ain’t got nothin’, ya got nothin’ to lose,” if I may quote Bob Dylan, far from his original context. So—camp out in downtown Mexico City for a few weeks—or months? no problemo—might as well be homeless there as anywhere, eh?

So, maybe we’ve still got it too good to raise a fuss in this country….I do, anyway. Maybe some day, I—and we—will rise to the challenge.

(music: Robyn Hitchcock, “Filthy Bird”)

Comments

Every eight years, we are invited to vote Yes or No on appointed Supreme Court Justices and Appellate Court Judges. (Not sure what parts of those titles were unclear to you.) The reason you didn’t see any campaigning from them is that these positions do not campaign for office. The judicial retention system (called “The Tennessee System”) is not typical around the country. Most appointed judges never have to face voters in any way. Our high court judges have the chance of being voted out, though it has rarely happened.
Posted by Joe Lance on 08/14/2006 02:50:16 AM

thanks for the clarification–there were also a bunch of democratic party committee posts and things like that…how does one keep track of these judges? thanks again m
Posted by brothermartin on 08/15/2006 01:18:41 AM