Uppity Wisconsin

Knowledge ... I have a lust for the kinds of things that help me appreciate life. Do you? Share them! (h/t Kos)

Update: Voting-rights activists cut a deal with Colorado's secretary of state late Wednesday that will ensure some 20,000 voters removed from state rolls will get to cast a ballot.

Colorado is in play with a slight and growing Obama lead, and together with a Virginia win for Obama would all but guarantee a victory for the Democratic nominee.

The GOP is trying suppress voters en masse, courtesy of Colorado's Katherine Harris: Secretary of State Mike Coffman.

Fortunately, the judge hearing the case is Judge John L. Kane, a rule-of-law judge with an honest reputation.

From the Brennan Center for Justice's Susan Lehman:

Colorado may have illegally purged 27,000 voters from the state's voter registration lists.

Incredible! Bush wants the US DOJ to look into the GOP's proposed Ohio vote suppression scheme using HAVA, seeking forced provisional voting that suppresses legal voters.

After being shot down by the US Supreme Court on using the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for the purpose of declaring eligible voters to be tentatively ineligible because of database mismatches - a purpose that the text of HAVA expressively forbids - Bush and the Republicans will not give up.

As the Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association write in their amicus brief in the Van Hollen v. GAB Wisconsin case, provisional voting is inherently suppressive, and many provisional voters will not be able to come back the next day to corroborate their legal voting status, and leave the voting process with questions about whether their votes counted.

The movie Groundhog Day was a gentle comedy in which the hero finally makes the right choices and gets the girl in a crowd-pleasing happy ending. But in 2008, Groundhog Day has become a national nightmare in which we, the heroes, may have only one chance to get it right. Each day we wake up hoping to find a leader who has the intelligence to understand how best to navigate our current crises and the discipline to hold a steady course through our economic perfect storm that is wracking Wisconsin and the rest of the nation. But again and again, rational deliberations are drowned out by voices that tell us to fear those who are not like us, because Joe Sixpack and all those hockey moms have what it takes to preserve the freedom and greatness that we inherited from our founding fathers: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, just your ordinary kind of guys. On November fourth, the alarm clock will awaken us for what may be our last best shot at preserving Wisconsin's economy and making the twenty-first century an American century. After eight years of shooting ourselves in the foot, how can we avoid shooting ourselves in the head?

Hey you Republicans in Waukesha and Milwaukee, guess who thinks you're a fool for living where you do?

via mal contends - Wisconsin is ground zero, along with some seven other states, in the 2008 presidential election.

Small-time (by marketing standards) Milwaukee and Green Bay are two of nation's top four markets for presidential ads, and the state ranks sixth among the key battlegrounds in TV spending (Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).

How do we know that? We know through the work of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which compiles statistical data on political spending in broadcast media around the country, including this latest report (for which I cannot find a link): Nearly 100 percent of the McCain campaign's recent advertisements are negative.

And the Wisconsin Advertising Project is not alone in its contributions to political knowledge.

Hitting back hard at John McCain's last-minute smears and lies, Barack Obama's campaign is releasing a documentary detailing John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal.

From the AP: "Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat and Obama supporter, warned against McCain's strategy. 'If we are going to go down this road, you know, Barack Obama was eight years old, somehow responsible for Bill Ayers,' he said. 'At 58, John McCain was associating with Charles Keating.'"

Emanuel is known as Rahmbo for his aggressive style that vis a vis Karl Rove uses facts against his political enemies.

These guys fight back. To paraphrase Sidney Blumenthal: Barack is from the toughest neighborhood in New York: Chicago.

Before the bailout crisis dominated the political and financial news, a high-circulation political newsletter, CounterPunch, continued its breaking analyses and exclusives on its free website, sounding alarms to which we all should have listened.

Prominent among CounterPunch writers is Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and former contributing editor of National Review.

Roberts has been warning for years that America is hollowing out its labor force, and is in clear and present danger of a market crash with clearly dangerous ramifications vectoring like a killer virus.

Writes Roberts:

Now that McCain and Palin have draped themselves in Obama’s mantle of change, the crucial question has become: change to what? Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin all claim to feel the pain of hard working Americans who seem to be falling behind rather than getting ahead. All envision a bright tomorrow in which every American will be safe and prosperous. But there is a stark contrast between the Obama-Biden and the McCain-Palin vision for America. And nowhere is this contrast starker than in their competing plans for health care reform.

It’s easy for candidates to advocate a “free market” for health insurance, but my background as a cardiologist, the founder of a small but quite successful national consulting firm, a recognized expert on measuring clinical quality and cost-effectiveness, a developer of analytic tools to support coordinated, effective, efficient health care markets, and a Medicare beneficiary who once enjoyed rather good private health insurance permits me to look under the hoods and see how the engines will run, where they will take us, and what they tell us about two very different visions of America’s future.

It's being reported that McCain is conceding Michigan and transferring staff to more competitive states like Wisconsin. This is a huge development.

Man, he was getting his hat handed to him in Michigan. Way to show McCain the door, you good Midwesterners!

Things here in Scony are a little tighter ... but not by as much as you might think.

Wisconsinites put Obama at 49 percent to McCain's 40 percent when it comes to who's strategic vision for America we trust more (and yeah polls are an iffy way to moderate what's going on. Ya can't depend solely on them, I know).

Seems McCain made a mistake in his VP choice, but he almost got it right...

This content is making the email rounds today. It deftly outlines the double standards that are causing cognitive dissonance in the 2008 presidential election. No idea who the author is, but the points are well made!

If you're a minority and you're selected for a job over more qualified candidates, you're a 'token hire.'
If you're a conservative and you're selected for a job over more qualified candidates, you're a 'game changer.'

Black teen pregnancies? A 'crisis' in black America .
White teen pregnancies? A 'blessed event.'

If you grow up in Hawaii , you're 'exotic.'
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you're the quintessential 'American story.'

K Street Washington lobbyist, GOP corruption king, and all-around sleezy guy, Jack Abramoff was sentenced to four more years in prison today.

He was shown some leniency for cooperating with the FBI to take down other corrupt GOPers like former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles and many top Capitol Hill assistants.

And like a good jailbird, he's gonna sing! Jackie boy's forthcoming book is due for publication later this month.

The title?

"The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff."

My, oh my.

UPDATE: A warning, the book could be written to make McCain look like a savior, a fighter of lobbyist corruption. That would make Rovian sense. I have written the publisher to request an advance copy for reporting purposes. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Author Gary Chafetz's response to a request for an advance copy of his book:

My, oh my, this says it all.