__
I wish the Tank McNamara strips were better archived on-line (www.gocomics.com only goes back to 1998) because over the years Millar & Hinds have done better real-world commentary than at least 67% of our avowedly “political” cartoonists.
Election 2010
An Update on the Ohio Governor’s Race
A week ago, Quinnipiac had the Ohio Governor’s race at 49% to 43% Kasich, and I don’t think anything of note has happened since then, so take this information as reliable, or don’t.
The Ohio Governor’s race is a dead heat with Republican John Kasich getting 47 percent of likely voters to 46 percent for Democratic incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.
We’ll be phone banking here this afternoon, as planned, polls or no polls.
I will say this. National media calling this race over in August was yet another obstacle we had to overcome, locally. People don’t vote or volunteer when they’re told repeatedly that the race is over, so thanks for that, professional punditry.
If national political professionals are going to jump into governor’s races, I have a suggestion. They should acknowledge that state races are often volatile, and the numbers move a lot. Once they’re in, and pontificating on state races, they really have a duty to follow those changes daily, and update. If they don’t, they’re helping to decide the outcome. Either do the work properly or don’t weigh in.
That Kasich was a member of that same national media for the nine years that he was on the Fox News payroll is barely mentioned, which is inexplicable to me. He’s a step-brother at their sister network, Fox News. Maybe he’s the daddy. I’m not clear on these familial relationships, but I think it’s relevant and important that we’re potentially hiring a FOX News host-reporter-whatever as Governor of our state, and I don’t know why it wasn’t raised.
In Ohio, former Fox News host and contributor John Kasich is running for governor after spending nine years on Fox News, which paid him $265,000 in 2008. Despite his announced intention, Kasich continued to appear on-air as a Fox News contributor and host. Between March 28, 2008, and June 1, 2009, Kasich was a regular fixture on Fox News’ primetime programming, especially as a guest-host for cable’s top rated news show, The O’Reilly Factor. According to a Nexis search, Kasich guest-hosted or appeared as a guest on Fox News at least 123 times. Indeed, the day after the March 2008 Dispatch article, Kasich guest-hosted for O’Reilly.
During those appearances, Kasich regularly spoke about his own background and accomplishments, and the home of his potential voters, Ohio.
Hannity repeatedly referred to Kasich as “governor” and “soon-to-be governor,” and reportedly held a pricey fundraiser for him last October. Kasich received two $10,000 contributions from Fox-parent News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch and his wife, while News Corp. gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which helps elect candidates like Kasich.
On The O’Reilly Factor, while Kasich made a fundraising appeal, Fox News put the URL for Kasich’s website onscreen. Hannity, meanwhile, told Kasich on July 8, 2009: “You do me a favor. Go get elected governor, although why you would ever want that job, you’re out of your mind, but good luck. And I’m supporting you in the effort.”
Anyway, if you’re in Ohio, email this poll to your list, and ask them to vote.
What Al said…
Back in 2007 and 2008 there were two people who seemed consistently correct in their pre-election analysis in the long primary season and then the General. One of them was Nate Silver and his 538, but his analysis was (and is) mostly about the numbers and very little about the why. The better analysis to me always came from Al Giordano over at The Field.
Perhaps it is his time living outside of the US that gives his work insights that most folks just miss as they get swept up in CW gasbag talking points. Or maybe it is his work as an organizer. Whatever the reason, he is just a hell of a reporter, observer and analyst of our political system.
A couple of days ago he had a solid post that should be required reading. Al gets straight to the massive uncertainty, why it is happening and who will be at fault if the massive GOP wave comes to past:
Just Some Friendly Voting Advice, In With Your Paycheck
The media are calling this “voting advice” remarkably and disturbingly uniformly. Every single news article I looked at uses that misleading overly-mild phrase.
There’s a state statute that specifically disallows this form of coercion, so it’s not just friendly “advice”, according to the Ohio legislature, despite the attempt to minimize it:
A handful of McDonald’s employees in northeastern Ohio received handbills in their most recent paychecks suggesting they vote for three Republican candidates.
“If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels,” the insert said. “If others are elected we will not.”
The handbill with a simple McDonald’s logo at the top recommended votes for Republicans John Kasich for governor, Rob Portman for U.S. Senate, and Jim Renacci for Ohio’s 16th congressional district. A Renacci campaign flier was also included.
Allen Schulman, an attorney representing one of the employees, said Friday he had forwarded the paycheck insert to Canton’s city law director, citing state and federal laws against corporate advocacy in elections.
Brunner said her office would investigate the letter and hand off findings to the state attorney general. “Voter intimidation is a form of voter fraud. It is a serious offense requiring a strong response,” she said in a statement.
What’s interesting, in light of Citizens is how McDonalds, the corporate entity, can’t run away fast enough from this franchisee, understandably, because shilling for the GOP alienates at least half of their customers.
Which is why the names of corporate donors should be revealed, so potential customers can make informed choices on where to eat and shop.
I’m off to phone bank for Ted Strickland, so I can’t respond to comments or questions.
Just Some Friendly Voting Advice, In With Your PaycheckPost + Comments (51)
Voting While Black Is Fraud
Just a quick update while working on something longer — but this from TPM caught my eye as the Republican campaign in microcosm:
Two middle-aged white Republican activists in Texas allegedly harassed and intimidated at least seven elderly African-American voters at their homes in eastern Texas, according to a complaint filed with the Justice Department on Thursday.
Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, submitted a report to DOJ alleging that two unidentified women visited elderly African-American voters at their homes in Bowie County and questioned them about their mail-in ballot applications, Mother Jones first reported.
The women allegedly showed up to 78-year-old Willard Wherry’s home and asked him who had helped him fill in his mail-in ballot. “We are just trying to be sure no one is trying to coax someone to vote,” one of the woman allegedly told Willard. Other individuals who were allegedly visited by the women were also listed on the complaint.
It’s been repeated so often that it’s a truism that Democrats are doing much better in polls of registered voters than in ones with likely voter screens in place.
It’s also true that a longer view of the American electorate paints an even worse picture for the GOP: their core voters are older and whiter than those of the Democrats, and there are already fewer of them than those associated with what may loosely be called the Democratic coalition — but the groups that favor the Dems have historically tended to vote in smaller percentages.
So far so nothing to see here, folks. This is all old news. Except, of course, the one thing the GOP has decided to do as demographics tilt ever more heavily against it is exactly what you’d expect from the Confederate Party. When in doubt, don’t try to expand the tent; instead, restrict the franchise.
Remember: the form of democracy can long outlive its substance. We’ve got only one real weapon against the at least occasionally violent opposition: Vote by or on Tuesday, and make damn sure all your friends do too. I don’t care how bored you are with politics…or even how justifiably cynical you are about the odds for major change. If all else fails to motivate you and yours, try this: you want to let craptacular specimens like these crow over the results Wed.?
Didn’t think so.
Image: Poster for D. W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation, 1915
Grading On A Curve
Jean Schmidt delivers Republican campaign message to 1st graders at a Catholic school:
Parents of Cincinnati elementary school students are upset over remarks made by U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt. She reportedly brought up the abortion issue in front of children as young as 6. The school’s principal sent a letter home to parents on that same day informing them that the topic of abortion came up during Schmidt’s appearance.
Here’s part of the apology letter the school sent parents after Mean Jean turned a civics forum into a stealth campaign event:
I do not recall the exact words she used, but she paused towards the end of her speech and stated that this would be the only time when she would be ‘political’ in her address. She defined abortion as the taking of a child’s life in the mother’s womb. She indicated that abortion involves the killing of a child before it is born. She was not graphic or any more detailed in this regard. Later, when a child asked about it, she indicated that an abortion is something that a doctor does when a mother requests this.
The school’s principal asked that parents keep the incident within the parent community to avoid the school becoming “embroiled in any sort of political controversy during an election season.”
Reading the school’s letter, it’s clear Schmidt carefully and deliberately inserted the anti-abortion speech, because she actually prefaced it with an announcement she was now going to be “political” and a child asked a question on abortion only “later”, after she delivered her stump speech.
Schmidt is a war-mongering clown, so I’m not surprised she’s blatantly pushing the GOP political agenda on 1st graders in the week before an election but the incident brought this particularly brutal and cruel media-generated “controversy” to mind:
President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.
The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out of lending the president an ear.
It was complete bullshit, of course. Reagan and Bush I did the same thing, and no one batted an eyelash. FOX News promoted the lie, mainstream media picked it up and it was treated it as a legitimate controversy. Complete bullshit, ginned up by conservative activists and treated as fact.
There have been tens of false charges leveled against Obama in the last two years but this one hit me hard. It was so clearly malicious and mean-spirited. It was about barring the schoolhouse door not to The President, but to this President. It was about denying his legitimacy as President, but it went further. It was about assuming he had the absolute worst intentions, and insisting he prove he didn’t. It was about questioning his character with not a shred of evidence to back up the allegation, and making him sit for a test that has been applied to no other President in my memory, but one that this President, uniquely, has been forced to take again and again.
“Did President Obama set out to indoctrinate 1st graders? Perhaps! Discuss”.
“Will President Obama seat a death panel to deny senior citizens medical care? Perhaps! Discuss.”
President Obama passed the school entrance test that conservative activists insisted that national media administer. He was grudgingly and with great reluctance permitted to address school children, where he urged them to work hard and stay in school.
That national media went along with this blatantly race-based nonsense and gave him a test prior to admission that no other public figure in my memory has been forced to take is something I won’t forget, or forgive.
B. Yung: “I am tired.”
Why are you voting?
It’s been two years since Obama took office. Two years after 8 years of full-frontal tomfoolery and I am tired. I am tired of arguing with folks on the left. I am through arguing with folks on the right. I’m tired of the pundits and the “enthusiasm gap.” I’m tired of pounding furiously on keyboards and touch screens. I’m tired of forcing myself to forego reading the comment sections of most blogs because the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sheer stupidity bottles my mind. All of it makes my pituitary tumor go bananas, which, in turn makes my hormones go bananas, which, in turn makes ME go bananas.
Despite my weariness, I am fired up about voting on Tuesday. I like voting on election day. I know some of you out there like to vote early. I like voting with the masses, and then I like sitting at home watching the results. I remember staying up as long as I could in 2000, and finally dragging myself to bed, hoping and wishing that when I woke up in the morning, Al Gore would be president.
I remember election night, 2008 like it was yesterday. I remember taking the day off from work because I wanted to sit and watch the east coast results pour in. I remember being pissed off that, after calling the No on H8 headquarters multiple times to figure out where I could go and what I could do to make sure that abomination of a proposition did not pass, I never received a call back. I remember sitting at home checking Nate Silver’s blog; using it as whisky for my election anxiety; “PleasenoPalinPleasenoPalin” was running like ticker tape through my mind.
I remember crying when Obama won. I remember drinking when Obama won. I remember crying when Proposition 8 passed. I remember drinking when Proposition 8 passed.
As tired as I am, however, I’m not as tired as the millions of Americans who are looking to us to make sure the Republicans don’t get the keys back (even if some of those Americans don’t understand that the Republicans shouldn’t get the keys back because those Americans have been glamoured by all the crap flowing from the Tea Party, or Republicans, or Fox News, or “manic progressives.”)
This is no longer about “I love Obama!” or “I hate Obama!” or “Obama? Meh.” It’s not even about me (so troll away if you must). I’ll be fine, with or without Obama and the Democrats. In fact, I’ll be better, actually–in terms of material wealth–if the Republicans take over. But I don’t want to be better financially. It’s not about me. It’s about people like B. Yung. It’s about people who have risen above the short stick they drew at birth, and it’s about all those people who have yet to achieve their potential.
That’s why I’m voting.
Why are you voting?