Celebrating the Obama Victory, Harvard Yard Style

Hackers and Spending Sprees: Secrets of the 2008 Campaign

Full Newsweek Article Here

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

... McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin during the campaign, and aides kept him in the dark about the details of her spending on clothes because they were sure he would be offended. Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech Tuesday night, but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.

Hoosier Daddy?!

1) Indiana is officially called for OBAMA, BABY!

There will most definitely be some celebratory euchre this weekend here in honor of it.

2) Dallas County was 60% BLUE, and McCain won the state of Texas by LESS than a 10% margin, which is awesome. And for a while there, the state of Texas was BLUE on my computer screen:

3) New ObamaBats font already released.

4) My boy Clive says "ROOOOOOOOOOOO" in support of Massachusetts' vote to BAN greyhound racing!

5) Though I am very saddened that it seems California will pass Prop 8, I am also very happy that the state passed Prop 2 to provide humane conditions and rights to factory farm animals.

Yes We Can?

YES WE DID!!

kleptomaniacs!

Will Obama's Grandmother's Absentee Vote Count?

Will Madelyn Dunham’s Vote Count?

I was talking with a coworker earlier today about how sad it was for Barack Obama’s grandmother to have died on the day before the election. My coworker took the sadness one step further, wondering if Madelyn Dunham’s vote (she voted by early absentee ballot) would now not be counted.
Not knowing the answer, I called the Office of Elections in Hawaii. Kevin Cronin, chief election officer for the state, just got back to me. Here’s what he said:

Ms. Dunham’s absentee mail ballot was received and reviewed under the Hawaii standards for processing absentee mail ballots… She was alive at that time. Her ballot will be opened tomorrow, and it will be counted in the same way that all absentee voters would be treated under our law.

The key point appears to be that Ms. Dunham was alive at the time her absentee ballot was received and reviewed, and that it met the standards for review at that time.
Madelyn Dunham’s vote will count, even if she is not here to learn the final tally.

Please Don't Undo Everything They Fought For

Public Service Announcement RE: My House

This is my house:




This is my house on Obama:




Any questions?

Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?

A few weeks before she [Sarah Palin] was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”
__________________________________________________________________

Comment
Like, Socialism
by Hendrik Hertzberg November 3, 2008

Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)

As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”

On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain and Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie evidence of Obama’s unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . . MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦

Because We Know In Our Souls That We're Gonna Stand Up

Obama '08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.


Get the widget!
mcyogi.com/widget

With the 2008 presidential election, Americans face a pivotal choice between not just two candidates, but two paradigms. We need someone who understands the complexity of our time. Someone who believes in investing in renewable energy, in education, in women's rights, in civil rights, in healthcare for Americans. Someone who believes in dealing with global issues with diplomacy so we can restore our respect in the world. Barack Obama represents the change we need and can lead us into a brighter future.

“Vote For Hope” was written to encourage and inspire the hip hop generation—and everyone—to get involved, and contribute their time, energy, creativity, and other resources to be the change they want to see in the world. We have been inspired by the artistic and musical contributions that have been pouring out accross the nation in support of Barack Obama's campaign. Vote for Hope is our offering to this creative movement. It is our way of adding our small voice to the collective voice of millions of Americans calling for a change.

To see what we mean, check out this great speech from a worthy leader: youtube.com/watch?v=cM79CxHGhlY

Make sure to Vote on November 4th!
Here is where you can register: VoteforChange.com

MC Yogi has just released a new album, Elephant Power!
amazon.com/gp/product/B001CISIKI/

For other music by MC Yogi, check out mcyogi.com

"Vote for Hope" was written by M.C. Yogi and produced by Robin Livingston. The "Vote for Hope" video was created at Ursa Minor Arts and Media in San Rafael, CA with chief animator James Curtis, using designs and direction from M.C. Yogi. Video funded and supported by grassroots donations.

I Have Caught Many Republicans Laughing At It

Leapin' Liars, Batman!!

"I believe McCain...errr...The Penguin... will lead of the debate."

My Thoughts Exactly

THE FINAL DEBATE

"Joe the Plumber"

-My name is not Joe, I am not a plumber, and thanks to Republicans, I cannot afford a six pack.



"Well, Americans have gotten to know Sarah Palin. They know that she's a role model to women..."

head...swelling...face...burning...might...explode!!!
If Sarah Palin is a strong role model for women, then this must be 1890. Sarah Palin does not represent me or any of my friends.

-I do not believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth 5,000 years ago.

-I do not believe that religions other than Christianity are witchcraft and sorcery.

-I do not believe that a 12-year-old girl who is raped by her father should be forced to have his child, a baby that would be both her son and her brother.

-I do not believe that polar bears (or beluga whales) should be removed from the endangered species list just so that drilling for oil will be easier in Alaska.

-I do not believe that people should use their power in an elected office to seek revenge on others because of personal vendettas.

-I do not believe in banning books, or even inquiring about it.

-I do not believe that folksy anecdotes or winking belong in a political race; they only reinforce her lack of experience and knowledge, and prove that she has to lower herself to flirting to get the job, something that is the most anti-feminist thing she could do. Feminism is about equality, not using your sex appeal to seem more "relatable." Would you wink in a job interview? How about a job interview with an entire country?

Don't Mess With Dallas

Just because Bush is from Texas and is moving to my city doesn't mean that the citizens want him here...trust me (the irony of a Bush Presidential Library is far from lost on us). And just because Sarah Palin has the same reproductive organs that I do doesn't mean that she's good for women. Well, unless you want to rewind history about 40 years.

Most people outside of Texas seem to view Dallasites as confederate-flag-loving, gun-toting, good ol' boy idiot carbon copies of our current world leader, but that simply isn't so. Sure, some of those people exist (most of them in the suburbs, outside of the county line, thank God). But Dallas county went DEMOCRATIC in the primary, and is a battleground county right now.

As much as I wanted to attend the anti-Palin protest (she spoke downtown at the Fairmont) held in Dallas this past week, my schedule would not allow it. Thankfully, 300 people showed up to protest this folksy, backward, winky-dinky, secessionist, anti-feminist candidate, who does NOT represent the ideals, morals, and values of any modern women. She is basically just another Bush in a skirt, but scarily in some respects is worse than Bush, and is of course, just a heartbeat away from the presidency if McCain is elected.

Anti-Palin protect in Dallas, 300 strong:

Pillow Fight

If only this demographic would get as excited about the upcoming election as they are about Facebook.
*sigh*

Liar Liar Pants on FIRE!

For the people out there who "can't decide who to vote for" (that's a direct quote from someone I know, ahem, very well)...how about you vote for the one whose pants aren't on fire?

#1)





#2) Tiiiiimes is on my siiiiide:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Truthiness Stages a Comeback

By FRANK RICH

NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.

Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.

For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.

But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.

Your Voting Rights in Texas!

"The employee is allowed reasonable time off to vote if polls are not open two consecutive hours outside the employee’s regular shift. This time off is paid. In addition, Texas law states that an employee must be permitted to attend a precinct convention of a political party in which the employee is eligible to participate. Texas law also states that an employee must be permitted to attend a county, district, or state convention to which the employee is a delegate."

"A Texas employee must be allowed time to vote – time off paid for by his or her employer – unless the employee has two consecutive, non-working hours during polling hours. The law has been understood as giving the employer the right to specify the hours that an employee may take to vote. Nevertheless, employers must pay the normal employee wages for the time taken."

If your employer does not follow these laws they face a fine up to $2,000.

sources:
http://www.complianceposter.com/state-voting-laws.aspx
http://hrheroblogs.com/theword/2008/02/26/time-off-to-vote-for-employees-a-state-by-state-survey/
http://texaspolitics.laits.utexas.edu/html/vce/0502.html

hillobamccain 08

I take voting very seriously. It's my vote and no one else's. I take it seriously during years when it doesn't really "matter" and I know it won't change the outcome of an election, and I take it seriously during more exciting years like this one when voting in the primary on March 4th does matter. I vote as often as I can, in nationwide elections, state elections, and city elections. I watch the debates, read the articles, and do my research. And due to my line of work, I know what's going on, not just in Texas, but in dozens of other cities (NY, LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Columbus...the list goes on).

My vote is a very personal decision that I don't take lightly. Therefor, it doesn't just annoy me, it offends me when people send me emails actually telling me who to vote for. As if I am so casual with my vote, so uneducated in my decision, so complacent and unquestioning, that I would vote for a candidate simply because someone tells me to.

So next time you decide to send out a mass email about who you want me to vote for, remove my name before clicking the "send" button. I am not your naïve voting pawn. Besides, if you knew me at all, you'd know that telling me what to do pretty much assures that I won't do it.

on the fence

Not sure who to vote for in the Texas primary on March 4?

Why not answer 36 questions and let a website tell you which candidate has views closest to yours.

That way you don't have to watch any pesky debates, read any boring articles, or think for yourself about who you want to lead this country and get us out of this mess.