Uppity Wisconsin

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

Clerical errors in voter registrations are not examples of voter fraud, as Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen and the GOP continue to propose. Comparing information across computer databases that were never intended for such use is not voter fraud.

Too bad Wisconsin elected officials, and others across the nation, are trying desperately to disenfranchise voters with this nonsense. Van Hollen may not get his way this November, but this issue will not be going away.

So, why is information about voters and voter name comparisons among incompatible computer database systems being sought by GOP operatives? The easy answer is because they're freaking out about their impending loses.

Because there are only two time-tested ways to win elections - 1) Register more voters than the other guys 2) Suppress voting rights and disenfranchise people voting for the other guys as much as possible.

Obama is doing #1. The GOP is banking on #2.

Meanwhile, here are real examples of voter fraud:

Here's an example of real voter fraud folks - Republicans misrepresenting an issue, standing in front of a grocery store asking people to sign a petition to strengthen child molestation laws when what they're really signing is a sheet to register as a Republican.

(hat tip America Blog)

UPDATE: This republican has been arrested for real voter fraud. Holy cow.

WTF is going on?

I thought the GOP brownshirts, generally young people, would begin to incite violence, but no.

Elderly women at a GOP rally assaulted Obama supporters, and gave one person two black eyes.

And reporters are being assaulted.

Cheney and others in the GOP, those HI-Larious pranksters, are claiming China is drilling for oil 50 miles off the coast of Florida.

But hey, when you put the words "Iraq" and "9-11" together in the same sentence enough times, you get 70% of the U.S. public to believe the two are connected, so why not roll with that technique?

With apologies to Electric Kool-Aid Acid and Ken Kesey ...

Sometimes a lesson in contrast is the best way to explain what a “brand’ is and how it resonates value and meaning.

Today, parts of the world responded to the Obama "brand" and here's what they had to say:

"He has a very appealing persona—elegant, fluent, strings lots of sentences together into paragraphs."    - Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics

“Obama's mixture of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy very attractive."    - Karsten Voigt, Germany’s gov’t coordinator on U.S. relations.

Obama's campaign "has rekindled America's faith in its prodigious powers of reinvention—and the world's admiration for America."    - The Times London news headline.

One of the few positive things that can be said of President Bush’s 2009 budget is that it reveals the outrageous priorities of the Republican Party as America dashes through the high-stakes 2008 campaign.

The GOP candidate(s) are going to have to decide whether to use the dead-on-arrival Bush budget as a punching bag or an embarrassing political imprecation from which they should run at full speed.

The Bush budget is devoid of commitment to the public welfare, revealing an ideologue’s mind-set to slash at anything that collectively advances human concerns.

From today’s NYT: