What is Victory? One of the most important questions that could be asked by Jim Lehrer is not being asked: “What exactly is victory in Iraq?” Since the candidates can talk to each other, perhaps Senator Obama will ask the question?…Every time John McCain says “my friends” I can’t help thinking of Joe Franklin. I think they’re both 192 years old so maybe it’s a generational thing…The height of North Koreans versus South Koreans? I don’t get it…John McCain is very well traveled. I guess he doesn’t understand that we can now communicate over long distances by other means……Hey! John McCain isn’t wearing a flag pin! Where is Charlie Gibson when you need him?…Another opportunity to ask what victory in Iraq is exactly. Anyone?…Anyone? John McCain just said he resolved the POW/MIA issue. History disagrees:
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
You can put lipstick on a lie, but it’s still a lie.
Reports of “Voter Caging” by the McCain campaign are popping up all over the country, and now we have our first report of an incident in Tennessee. Caging is diabolical, anti-democratic, and wholly un-American. John McCain continues to run a dishonorable campaign - and now he’s cheating to win.
Voter caging is a practice of sending mass direct mailings to registered voters by non-forwardable mail, then compiling lists of voters, called “caging lists,” from the returned mail in order to formally challenge their right to vote on that basis alone. Other methods, such as database matching, have been used more recently to compile voter caging lists.
From North Carolina Verified Voting:
Reports from around the country advise that John McCain’s campaign has sent confusing or incorrect absentee ballot request forms to voters in ten states at least. Affected so far are Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon (reported by blogger, not confirmed) Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin so far. In each state, the mailers have a different error, in any of these cases, the voter could be disenfranchised by the error. In at least one state a voter could disqualify themselves or be vulnerable to election challenges if they mailed these forms in. Mailers sent to Wisconsin voters are encouraging voters to send their applications to clerks in communities where they do not live. If you receive an absentee ballot request form from the McCain campaign ( or any private entity) and you do want to vote absentee, then instead check with your County Board of Elections to get the correct information.
Tennessee.
“Tennessee Democrat: why did GOP sent him Florida absentee ballot request?,” The Florida Republican Party mailed an absentee ballot request (for a Sarasota Florida ballot) to a Democrat in Murfreesboro Tennessee. The form has one name, Mr. William R. “X” with the person having two addresses, one in Tennessee, and one in Sarasota Florida. In actuality, these are two different men with the same first and last name. They both use the same middle initial, but upon further research, they have different middle names. The Mr. X in Tennessee is William Randy X . The Mr. X in Florida is William Rob X. Ms. “X” in Tennessee wondered if this was a scheme to somehow void voter registrations for some people. (Last name and street addresses redacted for privacy.).
Florida.
Florida Voter Caging Warning. McCain mailer w/absentee ballot requests: McCain mailers are sending people unsolicited absentee ballot requests.
Iowa.
Fraudulent Absentee Ballot Requests in Iowa? (Fri Sep 12, 2008) (blog, not confirmed independently)
Several days ago, I recieved [sic] an interesting piece of mail from John McCain 2008. It was a vote-by-mail application, which I thought was curious because I have never registered as a Republican or donated money to his campaign…
Michigan.
Rove tricks? McCain absentee ballots raise questions, (9/13/08) “I received my absentee ballot from John McCain just last week (see photo of the mailer) and although I called to verify that unsolicited ballots were legal, I’d never looked at an absentee ballot before in my life, so I had no idea of the problems being caused across the country by McCain’s absentee ballot forms….
Minnesota.
John McCain’s Literature Bundled With Absentee Ballot Request Forms (September 14th, 2008) A friend showed me one that his step-daughter received in Minneapolis from an Arlington, Virginia address containing a Colorado absentee ballot request form. The addressee wasn’t ever registered to vote in Colorado and only lived there briefly to work a seasonal job. It didn’t apply to her whatsoever and she was not clear why she received it.
Missouri and Nationally.
“McCain Campaign Accused Of Mailing Incorrect Absentee Ballots To Democratic Voters,” More than a million registered voters in at least a dozen states have received unsolicited absentee ballots from the McCain campaign. The problem? Many of them seem to have wrong info on them, which would in many cases lead to the ballots being thrown out or disallowed by local election officials.
North Carolina.
“McCain Confusing NC Republican Voters. ” The Campaign of John McCain has begun sending out misleading information to North Carolina voters about absentee voting. ……The critically missing piece information is the date of birth…
Ohio.
“Ballot snafu endangers votes,” (Sept 9, 2008). …In Ohio, the McCain campaign printed and sent out about a million of these. The campaign made a mistake: the form included an unnecessary located the question asking if the voter was eligible to vote at the top of the form where it was missed by many voters. If the voter failed to check the box by the question, he or she is stating that he or she is not eligible and the application has to be rejected by law.
Oregon.
“My McCain Absentee Ballots,” by weazley (a DKos blog), (Sep 05, 2008)
…I found it funny they were including my “Vote-by-Mail” application when all Oregon elections are done by mail. Then I looked closer at the instructions: “Request your absentee ballot in 3 simple steps” and the address on the two “Absentee Ballot Request” Cards: “Director of Elections, 420 Holmes St, Bellefonte, PA 16823″. It appears John McCain would like me to register to vote in Pennsylvania, presumably knowing (they had to get my current address somehow) that I’ve registered and voted 3 or 4 times since I last lived in Pennsylvania (2002-ish) in two different states (Washington and Oregon) at four different addresses.
Pennsylvania.
“Election fliers confuse some,” BY DAVID SINGLETON STAFF WRITER Sunday, (September 14, 2008)…Some county residents recently received a mailer from Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain with a pair of absentee ballot applications already addressed to Ms. Young’s office attached. The flier includes the appeal, Vote early by mail - it’ s as easy as 1-2-3.
“McCain’s mailer creates controversy,” By MARK PITSCH. The state elections agency is investigating complaints about a massive campaign mailing Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has directed toward Wisconsin Democrats and other voters…. in some cases, the incorrect clerk’s address is printed on the application, leading some Democrats to wonder if the Arizona senator’s campaign is deliberately trying to get them to apply for absentee ballots in places where they aren’t eligible to vote….The campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain has dispatched a mass mailing to Wisconsin voters — including many Democrats and liberals who are not likely to be McCain backers — that encourages eligible voters to send their applications for absentee ballots to clerks in communities where they do not reside.
Captain James J. Yee is a former US Army Chaplain and graduate of West Point who served as the Muslim Chaplain for the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that would become controversial for its treatment of detainees designated as “enemy combatants” by the U.S. government. While ministering to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Captain Yee advised the commanders of the camp on detainee religious practices and objected to the cruel and degrading abuses to which the prisoners were subjected.
Living in a university town is a treat. Without paying tuition (but occasionally a nominal entry fee), one frequently gets the opportunity to see speakers from far and wide speaking on important topics. Tonight was a night with such an opportunity at Vanderbilt University. The Speakers Committee brought Captain James Yee to campus.
After being officially recognized twice for outstanding performance, Captain Yee was arrested and imprisoned in a Naval brig for 76 days in September 2003 while being falsely accused of spying, espionage, and aiding the alleged Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners. He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to the same sensory deprivation techniques that had been used against the prisoners in Cuba that he had been ministering to.
Hearing Yee’s personal story in person is much different and much more impressive than reading it from the printed page. He speaks with passion and with justifiable bitterness. But his is not an empty bitterness of victimization; he speaks with intent. He speaks with a fierce patriotism and willingness to defend his Constitution and his country.
After months of government investigation, all criminal charges were dropped. With his record wiped clean, Chaplain Yee was reinstated to full duty. He tendered his resignation from the U.S. Army and received an Honorable Discharge in 2005. Upon separation he was awarded with a second Army Commendation for “exceptionally meritorious service.”
During the Q&A, Yee revealed that he had received no reparations or compensation for his wrongful detention. In fact, he hadn’t received so much as an apology from anyone involved in the proceedings. He never learned why the charges were brought, although he offered some potential reasons:
He is a Muslim. The extensive disrespect of faith shown to detainees in Guantanamo revealed to him more than tactics and techniques.
He is ethnically Chinese. At one point, his counter-investigation revealed that someone involved in a review of him referred to him as a “Chinese Taliban.” He said this indicated that his ethnicity was an issue that compounded his faith.
Despite all this, Yee was wearing an American flag lapel pin, and it was clear he wore it proudly. Not as a jingoistic car-magnet style offering, but as a truly patriotic device. When asked by the last questioner what was the greatest country on Earth, he offered frankly and forthrightly: America. As for why? Because our Constitutional protections of various freedoms: of religion (of particular importance to Yee), of speech, of the press, (allegedly) from unlawful search and seizure, etc.
Part of Yee’s stated mission in lecturing is to get his audiences, particularly students, the future leaders of tomorrow, to think about where we are as a country and how we got here. He concluded with a slideshow portraying the real Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He pointed out how the military is careful to call the inhabitants “detainees,” never “prisoners,” in order to allow them to remain “enemy combatants” and thus outside the realm of law. His concern for the state of our civil liberties, the rule of law, and our willingness to torture could not have been more poignantly expressed.
I recently read a snarky semi-review of the book by Clive Crook in an analysis of one of the book’s most damning revelations: that the Bush administration forged an intelligence document from a former Iraqi intelligence chief who, in the reality-based community, had told the White House that there were no WMD in Iraq. The forged document fabricated a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda as directed by our White House. Unfortunately, Crook, whom I imagine regards himself as an intellectual, dispenses with the luxuries the book takes in contemporary cultural examination, and seems to have wanted instead a breathless 500-word exposé of a single fact among the many supplied by the book. I’m not dismissing the importance of this or similar and singular facts in the book. Indeed, they make me aghast at how poor our notion of ethics and accountability has become.
For my part, though, I much prefer the view into the life of an Afghan teen participant in a program of the American Councils for International Education; an opportunity to witness the last days of Benazir Bhutto; and the intelligence-community optimism of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who recognizes better than anyone in the Bush administration the urgent need to work on non-proliferation. America’s quest to reduce our information to ideologically isolated tweets is causing us to do ourselves and the world a disservice. Every narrative explored by Suskind here is critical to the “human progress” he presents in the sibling tension between two Pakistanis coming to grips with their relationships with each other and with Islam.
The world presented by Suskind in his two most recent books is one with dark, dark clouds casting a shadow across America and the Middle East. In the end, though, I can’t help but read optimism between his urgent and fact-laden lines. I have had a hard time not living with a quiet fear after having read The One Percent Doctrine, which ends ominously. None of the narratives of The Way of the World end happily, in my opinion, but somehow the book itself sounds a hopeful note as it closes. And finishing it on the virtual eve of possibly the most critical election of my lifetime causes me to look to Election Day for a better understanding of how I’ll see the world in a few short months: with hope or fear.
I can’t recommend Suskind’s writing highly enough. If you ever get the opportunity to see him speak in person, avail yourself of it. The only modern narrator of the complex issues of our times I have read and admire with the same capacity is Paul Berman, whose A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 was a fascinating analysis of a world and era I can never know, the 1960s, and its connection to the world I inhabit today.
Suskind’s personal website is a nice repository of supplements to his journalistic efforts in book form. His elaboration on the events of the 21st century thus far is the sort of thing that makes the sensationalism splayed across the entry ways to modern bookstores simply depressing. Suskind is a journalist’s journalist, and Tim Russert’s recent death in advance of the audacity of the McCain-Palin media strategy, makes me realize just how rare such individuals are in our era.
The chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers’, is calling on the John McCain campaign to “immediately halt Republican vote suppression efforts,” as seen recently in Michigan — where a county GOP chair announced his intention to use home foreclosure lists to challenge voter eligibility at the polls on Election Day — and elsewhere.
Conyers has announced hearings on these issues, and is calling on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to launch an immediate “full scale investigation” into these matters. He has sent letters both to McCain [PDF] and to Mukasey [PDF] (the latter signed by 23 members of Congress) to that effect, as well as issuing the following statement today…
More of the same…hubris. Much to the consternation of historians everywhere, Palin switches the order of the ticket. Miss Manners is none too pleased either.
Stay tuned for the “Palin/Palin Administration.” (I see you, Todd, eyeing that Oval Office…)
So, if being dismissive of Sarah Palin’s accomplishments or “substance” is “sexist,” does that mean that being dismissive of Obama’s accomplishments is racist? If so, then the entire GOP convention was one racist orgy of racially offensive racism.
Excellent point. And while we’re thinking about racism. Let’s take in Tim Wise’s latest, which strains the last two weeks of election coverage through his white privilege filter:
White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”
….
White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.
…
White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.
…
White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.
Posted by Liberadio(!) on September 14, 2008 under Uncategorized | 2 Comments to Read
Summary: Our guest is Ken Whitehouse, political writer for NashvillePost.com.
Part 1 with Ken Whitehouse - Inside scoop and learned commentary from the Republican National Convention with NashvillePost.com’s Ken “Punk Rock in the” Whitehouse. Will Freddie be able to keep Mary and Ken from coming to blows? (31:30 50.5MB)
Part 3 Listeners weigh in on Sarah Palin, the Republican call for “change,” and the hypocrisy of GOP attack dogs. (18:54 30.3MB)
Part 4 The Daily Show is not afraid of Karl Rove. Are you listening those of you in the real news media? Or will you show the “deference” required of you by the McCain campaign? (15:40 25.1MB)
Part 5 - More listener calls…Cosmology is dead! And if you put lipstick on a bad economy, it’s still a bad economy, stupid. (19:58 32MB)
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The first event was a panel discussion, in which my co-panelists were Rep. Beth Harwell, Larry Woods, and Eric Stansell. I knew all three pretty well, having challenged Rep. Harwell for her seat (unsuccessfully) in 2002, having befriended Larry’s son Allen years ago when we worked a summer job together, and having followed closely Eric Stansell’s campaign–reminding me very much of my own–against Mike Stewart to succeed Rob Briley.
The panel was challenged to offer responses to the following questions:
What exactly does it look like to have debate and dissent on local issues?
Where are some local forums for debate?
How have you seen debate/dissent change over the years?
How did your educational life prepare you for “on the job” debate/dissent?
What impact have web technologies had on local debates?
How does disagreement and dissent affect relationships?
We probably most thoroughly addressed item 4, with some attention given to items 1, 2, and 3. We didn’t have time to cover the final two, based on the flow of the conversation.
Three of us on the panel had run for public office, one was a current officeholder, and one was a frequent campaign adviser, and there was some very interesting discussion of the process of politics. Much of the discussion focused on the pernicious influence of money in politics, with Rep. Harwell surprising me (and probably others in the room) by supporting some form of public financing of elections. “I’m a Republican. I believe you should be able to be as successful and wealthy as you possibly can be. To buy all the homes and widgets you could want. But you shouldn’t be able to buy a politician.” She talked about how she was safe in her seat for as long as she wanted to be because of her “war chest” and ability to raise money quickly. She railed against recent Supreme Court decisions that have curtailed some of the meaningful elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform and suggested that campaign contributions are not a right granted by the 1st amendment. I was surprised both by her departure from her party’s orthodoxy and by the amount of attention she gave the issue, including leaving early to go to a Common Cause discussion at Vanderbilt.
I was similarly surprised by Larry Woods’s later omission that he did not support public financing of elections, arguing that then you get “neonazis” running for office with his tax dollars. So, Eric Stansell, Beth Harwell, and I wound up on the opposite side of the issue from Larry Woods.
I put an emphasis on local politics, where the influence of money is a little less pernicious, and the opportunities for politically-minded activists are greater, even if they can’t win elected office.
Most of the panel participants expressed a pretty cynical outlook on the political process. Larry and Beth both talked about the efficacy and necessity (for a winning candidate) of negative advertising. Their take was somewhat different from the one we’ve heard from John Geer, who suggests that negative campaigning can have the positive impact of letting us know information about candidates we wouldn’t necessarily learn in all-positive campaigns. Beth and Larry suggested that it happens because it works. I think we could’ve continued to explore this issue, including where or whether any lines of propriety should be drawn.
I asked Eric to describe the process of attempting to distinguish oneself in a mostly positive race where two candidates are competing for the brand of “progressive Democrat”. He admitted that it was difficult and lamented the superficiality of the media and moderators and voters themselves, who don’t push candidates hard enough to elaborate on issues of judgment.
I asked all the panelists to assess the quality of forums in town, stating that I missed Teddy Bart’s Round Table and wondered whether lots of campaign debates were a good thing and whether empty town hall meetings were a good thing. Larry said that “67 debates” were abusive in last year’s mayoral race but pointed out that Beth would probably listen to even a dozen voters at a poorly attended town hall if they were all saying the same thing.
As for the discussion I led, my presentation was Extra Terrestrial: The Outsized Influence of Talk Radio in America’s Political Discussion. I basically talked about the structural imbalance of political ideologies represented in the landscape of radio and how that bolsters a biased echo chamber from think tank to network (FOX News). I expressed hope for a landscape that was not necessarily more balanced ideologically but rather a less ideological landscape altogether that asked more of each of us in terms of critical thinking but offered more in return.
3 Comments to Read 
. Captain Yee has certainly demonstrated grace under fire.
, and it is most assuredly a must-read. The layering of the narrative is absorbing, and, like its predecessor, 
it reads like a suspense thriller. The most frightening part is reaching the end and realizing that Suskind is a purveyor of fact, not fiction.
was a fascinating analysis of a world and era I can never know, the 1960s, and its connection to the world I inhabit today.