Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

This chaos was totally avoidable.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

No one could have predicted…

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

You are here: Home / Archives for Elections / Election 2011

Election 2011

Too much voting going on, apparently

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Why aren’t our friends on the other side of the aisle democracy enthusiasts?

County boards of election must stop early in-person voting as of 6 p.m. Friday, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has advised, prompting Democrats to cry foul. This occurs as a number of counties are reporting higher-than-usual absentee mail-in and early in-person voting for an off-year election, perhaps driven by interest in high-profile ballot issues such as Issue 2, which affects collective bargaining.
The early voting issue was created by a voter referendum effort on a controversial overhaul of state election law, House Bill 194, that had a spillover effect on separate legislation, House Bill 224, containing some similar language. The referendum effort has placed House Bill 194 on hold indefinitely, but the latter law passed unanimously and took effect last week.

As a result, Mr. Husted, a Republican, issued an advisory to boards of election in mid-October that early voting is prohibited during the last three days before Tuesday’s election. The Lucas County Board of Elections had scheduled business hours for Saturday and Sunday but canceled them to comply with last month’s advisory. Democrats, however, contend Mr. Husted based his advisory on a law dealing primarily with military ballots that had its legs cut out from under it by the referendum on the first law.

In Lucas County, roughly half of 16,150 absentee ballots requested as of yesterday had been returned. Elections Director Ben Roberts reported the board has received them at the pace of roughly 170 per day, up from an average of 123 at about the same time before the November, 2010, election. “We expect a deluge in the last two days,” he said.

Briefly, Democrats and allies gathered half a million signatures to delay a voter suppression law passed by the Ohio GOP. Now Republicans are using a different law to shut down early voting in some areas, because Democrats have gotten better at “banking votes”, or, getting our voters out prior to election day so it isn’t as crazy on election day.

I don’t know if we’re going to defeat John Kasich’s union-busting law, a law that was loudly endorsed last week by each and every GOP candidate for President, but I think this tactic will backfire. People love early voting, and they love convenient hours for voting, because those things make sense.

One really does have to wonder about a US political party who get all creative with directives and start putting the hammer down when people vote. Too much voting going on here, peons. Cut that out. This must be another brand-new, bed-rock principle of the ever-evolving Conservative Movement.

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The tri-corner hat crowd write some law

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I went to a local cancer survivor support group the other night to talk about the three ballot issues in Ohio. It wasn’t like that: they invited me and they also know I’m not a cancer survivor. I have some standards.

We talked about the big marquee issue, Issue Two, an issue I refer to exclusively as Vote No On Two, over and over and over, but I had some trouble holding their attention on Issue Three.

Issue Three in Ohio is a Tea Party sponsored constitutional amendment that seeks to nullify the federal health care law. You’re going to be hearing about it next week. I think it will pass because the ballot language is very favorable to the Tea Party:

TO PRESERVE THE FREEDOM OF OHIOANS TO CHOOSE THEIR HEALTH CARE AND HEALTH CARE COVERAGE

To talk about Issue Three one has to discuss the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

People weren’t interested in that. They might have been, but I stupidly responded to a states’ rights question at the outset of the Issue Three portion, started babbling about the Supremacy Clause, got all worked up, veered off into states’ rights, and civil rights and somehow ended up bogged down in a (The) Civil War, so I just gave up and went to the cookie and cider table.

I’ve since had a chance to think about how the Tea Party amendment, what we’ll call No On Issue Three, might adversely affect one part of Ohio law: medical support orders. Medical support orders are a child support provision that applies to all non-custodial unmarried parents of minor children, and they are in effect in one or another version in all 50 states. Medical support orders began evolving at the federal level in 1993, and were expanded and nationally standardized further under former President Bush in the summer of 2008.

This is Ohio Issue Three (pdf):

1. In Ohio, no law or rule shall compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in a health care system.
2. In Ohio, no law or rule shall prohibit the purchase or sale of health care or health
Insurance.
3. In Ohio, no law or rule shall impose a penalty or fine for the sale or purchase of health care or health insurance.

This is (basically) how Medical Support Orders work in Ohio: an unmarried non-custodial parent must either purchase health insurance for their child, reimburse the state for some portion of state-provided health insurance if the child is covered under a state program and the family is over 150% of poverty level, or pay “cash medical support”. Medical support orders are, among other things, a health insurance mandate.

Now, the Tea Party will tell you that this portion of their sloppily drafted law will “save” existing law:

The proposed amendment would not:
1. Affect laws or rules in effect as of March 19, 2010

I don’t agree. I think the Tea Party amendment freezes Ohio health care law as of March 19, 2010 and any change in existing law, no matter how slight, may trigger a challenge to the many, many Ohio health care laws we all know and love.

For comparison, here’s the relevant portions of the Virginia nullification law, which was completely politically motivated and offered in bad faith BUT was drafted by someone other than Frank Luntz:

…except as required by a court or the Department of Social Services where an individual is named a party in a judicial or administrative proceeding.
…This section shall not apply to individuals
voluntarily applying for coverage under a state-administered program pursuant to Title XIX or Title XXI of the Social Security Act.
…This section shall not apply to students being required by an institution of higher education to obtain and maintain health insurance as a condition of enrollment.

See the exceptions? The Tea Party-drafted constitutional amendment in Ohio doesn’t have those. Oops. No On Issue Three will probably pass and it will be portrayed as a huge win for the Tea Party. It’s a gimmick that might get serious, a purely political ploy that might turn into the Full Employment Act for lawyers. I think that’s why no elected Republican in Ohio has explicitly endorsed it.

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Good news for voting enthusiasts

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From cautious optimism:

Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. John Kasich® signed a sweeping bill intended to make it harder to vote in his states’ elections. Kasich’s anti-voter law drastically cuts back on early voting and erects new barriers for absentee and even for election day voters. Today, however, opponents of Kasich’s war on voting will submit over 300,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office — well over the 231,000 signatures necessary to suspend the law until it can be challenged in a referendum in November of 2012. If enough of the signatures are deemed valid, the practical effect of this petition will be that Kasich’s law will not be in effect during the 2012 presidential elections when Republicans hoped the law would weaken President Obama’s efforts to turn out early voters who support his reelection.

The number was 318,000, and that’s too close for comfort, because a lot of signatures will get thrown out as invalid. However, people who think legally registered voters should be permitted to vote no matter their net worth or wholly subjective degree of “real americanism” had two weeks to continue to gather signatures after submitting the initial petitions, and they did that.

Probably a done deal:

Last week, it was reported that the Ohio GOP had filed public-records requests of numerous boards of election across the state, apparently hoping to find irregularities to disqualify HB 194 (voter suppression) repeal petitions after 318,000 signatures were turned in to try to meet the requirement of just over 231,000 valid signatures Now that number probably would have done it, but it was a little close for comfort. And clearly, the Republicans were looking into anything they could to squeeze some signatures and petitions out of contention. But the repeal proponents had another two and a half weeks to gather signatures, and it appears they’ve hit this one well out of the iffy range — and probably out of range of any GOP challenge. Friday the Ohio Democratic Party announced that another 150,000 signatures were collected in that additional time period.
With almost 480,000 signatures — more than double the number needed — you’d need exceptionally sloppy petition circulators to get enough invalid signatures to block the repeal from the ballot. So it looks like we’ll be voting on this come November 2012.

This move puts the law’s provisions on hold for the 2011 and 2012 election cycles. The voter suppression law won’t be operative in Ohio for the 2011 election or the 2012 election, because we’ll be voting on whether to repeal it.

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No one knows why he went to the phone bank. Maybe he was lost?

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This is really a lot of fun:

@PeterHambyCNN
Peter Hamby
Incredible moments in politics: Romney visits OH GOP phone bank to rally troops opposing SB5 repeal, but refuses to take a position on SB5

It doesn’t matter what he says. Romney has already come out in favor of race-to-the-bottom “Right To Work”, although no one has asked him in the last twenty minutes, so who the hell knows. Even Mitch Daniels wasn’t stupid enough to keep pushing that (publicly, anyway) after he discovered his statehouse was filled with outraged working people.

So far, so good:

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Ohioans now oppose Issue 2 by a margin of 57% to 32%–a whopping twenty-five point margin two weeks out from the election, essentially back to where Quinnipiac showed the campaign in July before the ad wars and campaigning began in earnest. In September, the margin was thirteen points, meaning opposition has nearly doubled as Kasich has taken to the road and campaigned across the State on behalf of Issue 2.

If you’re in Ohio, vote.

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I’m sure he’s already booked on Morning Joe

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Fox News personality and former governor Mike Huckabee parachuted into Ohio yesterday to kick off the campaign to support former Fox News personality and governor John Kasich.

Governor Kasich has a long and profitable relationship with Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, and the news channel promoted his bid for governor, so I’m not surprised they’re again pulling out all the stops in my state.

Watch this if you’d like to see my governor stammering and stuttering as he presents an emotional defense of his former employer. It’s cringe-worthy.

Preacher Huckabee is either lying or uninformed on the state law he’s lecturing on, but, as we discovered in the health care debate, asking a conservative leader to read a law before he opens his mouth to opine on it is asking too much.

Huckabee defended SB 5 as a “reasonable, common sense” approach to Ohio’s budget woes while deflecting criticism that it is anti-union.

Nope.

In many ways Senate Bill 5 goes further than the antibargaining law that Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature enacted in March over the protests of tens of thousands of union supporters. Ohio’s law allows only limited bargaining: If management and union do not reach a settlement, then city councils and school boards can impose their side’s final contract offer unilaterally. The Ohio law bans binding arbitration and bargaining on health coverage, pensions or staffing levels.

Huckabee continues:

“In every state and in every municipality in this country, there is a huge crisis going on. In Ohio, an 8 billion dollar one. And that has to be made up somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know how many Ohioans you’re willing to put out of work in order to fund a bigger and bigger and bigger government.”

Ohio does not now and never had an 8 billion dollar deficit. Governor Kasich’s budget director admitted it, months ago.

I know facts and preparation don’t matter when a millionaire media personality is opining on a law he hasn’t read and a budget he doesn’t understand in a state he doesn’t live in, but I am curious about how he earns that huge paycheck he receives.

Maybe Huckabee earns the big bucks at Fox for telling jokes like this:

“Make a list… Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done.”

Is one or another police agency investigating the now-weekly allegations of criminality and corruption around Rupert Murdoch, or do I have to listen to his mouthpieces conduct yet another political campaign in my state?

I’m sure he’s already booked on Morning JoePost + Comments (50)

Defeat the radicals, and restore tradition

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We talked about how shameful it is that conservative elected leaders in Tennessee are working hard to deny this person the right to vote:

Dorothy Cooper is 96 but she can remember only one election when she’s been eligible to vote but hasn’t. The retired domestic worker was born in a small North Georgia town before women had the right to vote. She began casting ballots in her 20s after moving to Chattanooga for work. She missed voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because a move to Nashville prevented her from registering in time. So when she learned last month at a community meeting that under a new state law she’d need a photo ID to vote next year, she talked with a volunteer about how to get to a state Driver Service Center to get her free ID. But when she got there Monday with an envelope full of documents, a clerk denied her request.

She just wants to be able to vote. In her decades of going to the polls, “I never had any problems,” she said, not even before the Voting Rights Act passed in the 1960s. In her 50-plus years working for the same family, she never learned to drive so she never needed a license. She retired in 1993 and returned to Chattanooga from Nashville. Now, on occasion, one of her bank’s tellers or a grocery store clerk will ask for photo ID when she writes or cashes a check, Cooper said. “I’ve been banking at SunTrust for a long time,” she said. “Sometimes they’ll say, well, do you have a Social Security card?” And she shows it to them. She also has a photo ID issued by the Chattanooga Police Department to all seniors who live in the Boynton Terrace public housing complex, but that won’t qualify for voting.

And we talked about how democracy enthusiasts in Tennessee were fighting back:

In Nashville on Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of organizations announced an effort to repeal the law. Groups such as the ACLU of Tennessee, various chapters of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and Tennessee Citizen Action announced a petition drive and get-out-the-vote effort.
“This is a nonpartisan issue. It’s a fair voting issue,” said Mary Mancini, executive director of Citizen Action, in a phone interview. “It’s all about the legislators seeing that the people of Tennessee don’t want this law.”

Mary Mancini sent us a thank you:

Thank you so much for covering the story of Dorothy Cooper. It’s funny, I had a call from the Lt. Governor’s office to tell me that the state Dept. of Safety was bending over backwards to help Ms. Cooper and that she would get her ID. I told them that was great but there are thousands of Mrs. Cooper’s across the state and then asked, what’s being done about them? There was a very long pause on other end of the phone.
Tennessee Citizen Action and other groups have formed a coalition and are getting signatures on a petition to repeal. More info is at http://www.tnca.org
Thank you again for your coverage of this issue.
Mary
Mary Mancini
Executive Director, Tennessee Citizen Action

If you’re in Tennessee and are a supporter of the traditional US view that Dorothy Cooper holds, and you believe eligible citizens have a right to vote whether they have a driver’s license or not, here is where you can go to help to restore that old-fashioned idea in Tennessee.

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An Odd Omission

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I’m doing some telephone canvassing (not enough) for the No On Two campaign in Ohio and I’m finding out something that is extraordinary to me.

None of the people I’m talking to know that many, many charter schools in Ohio are run by for-profit operators. They don’t know this because I live in a low-income rural area, where we still have traditional public schools, where the schools are run by elected (not appointed) boards and are “operated” by public employees who live, pay taxes and spend their money here. “School reform” in terms of privatization hasn’t reached us yet. Don’t come, corporate reformers. This is not an invitation or a plea for help. It’s simply an observation. We’ll manage.

This is from 2009:

By Ohio law, charter schools are nonprofits. But about half the charter schools are managed by for-profit companies which pay the bills and pocket any profits. For-profit charter school managers took in $291 million in state funds last year, according to an Ohio Education Association study. The biggest charter manager in Ohio, [David Brennan’s] White Hat Management Co. of Akron, received $84 million for its Ohio schools, which include its Life Skills Centers and Riverside Academy in the Cincinnati region.

This to me seems like an outrageous omission by school reform proponents, and of course, there are plenty of liberal school reform proponents.
Should taxpayers really not know that they’re transferring public funds to private for-profit operators? I don’t remember deciding that “public” schools should be for-profit. I remember a lot of touchy-feely talk about neighborhood schools, and parental control, and “freedom” from those lazy, thuggish greedy teachers and their incessant demands for a seat at the table when their salary is determined. When did we decide schools were an “industry”?

When we talk about charter schools, and teachers unions, isn’t it only fair to inform taxpayers that there are non-profit charter schools and for-profit charter schools, and Ohio conservatives have gone for-profit charter schools in a big way? About half for-profit operators, in 2009, in Ohio. 80% for-profit operators, today, in Michigan. Isn’t it only fair to inform taxpayers that with the teachers unions out of the way, upon passage of Issue 2 in Ohio, we’re deregulating public schools even further than they already are in Ohio?

This is Diane Ravitch, who is, of course, the former charter school and deregulation advocate who is (now) appalled at what’s happened, and screaming “STOP!”:

There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector. Waiting for “Superman” is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the “free market” and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.

Well, yeah. I think that’s an understatement, but agreed. But let’s talk about the money. Does a school reformer/union buster want to tell my why I want my tax dollars flowing out of my district and into shareholder pockets? What happens to the “savings” when we take from teachers and other public school employees? Because if my Fabulous Projected Savings are slated to go to outfits like this, I think we need to talk about that. With teachers unions out of the way, who, pray tell, is going to lobby for public education? Where’s my organized, effective defense from the for-profit operators? Are we really going to kid ourselves and say that this “fundamental right and vital public service” argument is going to carry the day in my state legislature when up against for-profit operators and their lobbying dollars, once teachers unions are gone?

between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service

Please. We know better. We won’t stand a chance.

An Odd OmissionPost + Comments (33)