Boscos at Gunpoint

On May 30, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

First, from the AP via Kleinheider, the Tennessee Firearms Association exhibits their true beliefs – they only value your personal liberty if it matches exactly their personal vision of said liberty:

The Tennessee Firearms Association is seeking to publicly identify each law enforcement officer and prosecutor who attended Gov. Phil Bredesen’s veto of a bill to allow people with handgun carry permits to take their weapons into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

And now, Tennessee Gun Owners want to punish a small-business owner for operating his business the way he sees fit. Andy Feinstone, co-owner of Bosco’s (Nashville, Cool Springs, Memphis), posted signs in all his restaurants banning handguns, because, you know, it’s his business and he has that right and the freedom to make that choice. “I think it’s great that the governor vetoed it, and hopefully it doesn’t get overridden,” Feinstone told The Leaf Chronicle.

But “his business, his decision” is a tenant that doesn’t sit too well with the TGO organizers, who want to force Mr. Firestone to operate on their terms:

So I am curious. How many of you would participate in a lawful, peacful protest in front of the Hillsboro Village location of Boscos restaurant following the presumed Tennessee House & Senate override of Governor Bredesen’s veto?

…

The goals of this would be to:

* Put these restaurant owners on notice that not only will they lose our business as pro-personal protection consumers, but they will also have unwanted attention drawn to their practice.

* Inspire restaurant owners to reconsider their decisions and remove their individual ban on being able to protect ourselves while dining in their establishments.

* By dressing nicely, having intelligently worded signs and flyers, and conducting ourselves peacefully and with tact and decorum, show that gun owners are not all neanderthal redneck backwoods hicks as the media paints us so broadly.

In other words, you have the personal freedom to operate your business the way you wish until we don’t like what you’re doing. The Party of Personal Freedom? FAIL

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I Want a Recount!

On May 29, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

“Tennessee’s Elections are Screwed” Friday continues with a trip in the way back machine.

It’s the year 2000, and Microvote, the company that provides paperless electronic voting machines to more than 45 counties in Tennessee, describes the miracle that is their products’ recount feature:

Counting the ballots is as simple as pulling the memory cartridge out of the unit (it’s a smart card in the new Infinity) and inserting it into a reader hooked up to the PC handling the vote tally. Recounting can be just as simple; MicroVote maintains that the Florida recounts that dragged on for days could be done in a morning on a MicroVote system.

What’s most important about the recounts: “We’ve had many recounts up here in Lake County, but nothing where the machine vote ever changed,” Fajman says [Michelle Fajman, supervisor of elections in Lake County]. Unlike the much-maligned punch-card ballots used in much of Florida (and a fair amount of Indiana), MicroVote’s machines have no use for “chad,” the little ballot tidbits that caused such a stink in November. And they don’t allow “overvoting,” picking more than one candidate.

That’s right! The recount from the machine never changes. And lady, let me tell ya, that’s not a good thing considering we have no idea if the voter’s intent was correctly recorded by the machines’s software in the first place. And if the voters intent was not recorded correctly – either because of malicious software or poorly calibrated machines or a mistake in the code – we will never know because we can’t see inside the machines to check.

The Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (the paper ballot bill), which was passed almost unanimously in 2008 by both the House and Senate and which Tennessee Republicans are looking to now repeal, would allow us to vote on paper ballots thereby capturing the actual intent of the voter. Optical scan machines would then count the paper ballots. In case of a recount, the paper ballot would become the ballot of record and it would be recounted (and yeah, you might actually get a different total when recounted – but it would be a more accurate total!).

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Everybody Knows How Bad Tennessee’s Voting Machines are Except the Dude Running Our Elections

On May 29, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

“Tennessee Elections are in Trouble” Friday continues with Mark Goins, Tennessee’s Election Coordinator, who says he is comfortable with the paperless electronic voting machines Tennesseans use to vote in 93 out of 95 counties.

He’s so comfortable with these machines, in fact, that he is spearheading the push to delay the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act – also known as the paper ballot bill that was passed almost unanimously in the Tennessee General Assembly in 2008 – until 2012.

Coordinator Goins: I don’t think the DREs [paperless electronic voting machines]…I’m comfortable with the machines we have. Obviously, you aren’t.

Which means…

  • Tennessee State Election Coordinator Mark Goins doesn’t care that a 2006 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, condemned paperless electronic voting machines because they they are not secure and don’t “allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software.”
  • He doesn’t care that the same report stated that “a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election.”
  • He doesn’t see anything wrong that in a close election his office would not be able to perform a meaningful recount.
  • He doesn’t see anything wrong with machines programmed with secret proprietary vote counting software that he is unable to study, which therefore violates the “vote in private, count in public” axiom.
  • He doesn’t care that paperless electronic voting machines totals can be manipulated in the source code or by introducing a virus in one of the unsecure data ports.
  • He doesn’t care that when a paperless electronic voting machines crashes or malfunctions, as computers are prone to do, votes can be irretrievably lost.
  • He doesn’t have a problem with paperless electronic voting machines malfuntioning by flipping votes from one candidate to another (the machines used in the West Virginia counties where flipping occurred are the same ones used in Davidson County).
  • He doesn’t care that its actually cheaper for Tennessee counties to run an paper ballot election than it is to run a paperless electronic voting machines elections.
  • He doesn’t care that when a Tennessean votes on a paperless electronic voting machines there is no guarantee that their vote will be counted, let alone counted as cast.

Mark Goins, the man in charge of Tennessee’s elections does not care about the integrity of Tennessee’s elections.

Also, just as an FYI after you watch the video, Coordinator Goins’ assertion that buying optical scan machines to count paper ballots would be a waste of money because they would be obsolete is false. 49 States currently use optical scan machines certified to 2002 standards, including Tennessee (in Pickett and Hamilton counties).

(The man in the video who slaps his head in disbelief is Gathering to Save Our Democracy’s Bernis Ellis, who is an expert on voting technology and has been working tirelessly for 5 years to pass the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act and bring secure and verifiable elections to Tennessee.)

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Tennessee Elections are in Trouble Friday

On May 29, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Yeah, yeah. Friday is supposed to all about the “feel good.” And believe me, I’ll be posting some gems from the Cute Overload as the day progresses. They’ll be sort of like a palate cleanser between courses.

But first, let’s look at a press release by the Tennessee Republican Party celebrating the Republican takeover of the state election commission as well as a recent discussion going on in the comments section of a recent Liberadio.com blog post (“Oh, Well, if Rep. Mumpower Says it’s Fair“).

The TNGOP insists that the Republican takeover of the state election election commission was them just following the law. But the law is conflicting, so yeah, no, they’re not. Conveniently, they leave out the part about the law dictating the terms of the commission:

2-11-104. Election of members. —
(a) All members shall be elected for a term of four (4) years, beginning on the first Monday in May 1979.

So not so clear and not so straightforward. And in the comments of yesterday’s post pointing out as such, were these questions and statements from “Storm”:

“Please explain to me why this is a GOP assault on the election process?”

and

“I think the verified paper ballot trail is a great idea , but now it is known that the counties cannot afford this process and the state doesn’t have the money. Please be practical. Many Republicans sponsored this legislation originally and then Rep. Gary Moore stole it from them and passed it. Except I don’t think he realized his version was going to have this unintended price tag for the local governments.”

and

“The GOP wants honest, fair elections. That is why they are for voter photo ID and proof of citizendship to register. I don’t know if you are from Tennessee, but you should check out the book “The Hopewell Box” it is out of print but you can check it out at the library. This will give you a history on the rampant, blatant voter fraud in Davidson County by Democrats in the Hopewell box in Old Hickory. Everybody–both sides in politics in Middle Tennessee knows about the Hopewell Box. It is legend.”

Dear Storm (and Bill Hobbs), Thank you for the history lesson and for telling me what I would do if the situation were reversed. And I read The Secrets of the Hopewell Box (I believe Book Man Book Woman in Hillsboro Village still has copies). It’s one of my favorite books and a whale of a cautionary tale.

I know that those who count the ballots control the outcome of elections and so I also know that you are missing my point.

House Republicans could have waited until the natural terms of state election commissioners were over. They already controlled the county election commissions, so why not, right? But no, they resorted to threats and blackmail so they could – prior to the 2010 Gubernatorial election – control everything related to elections in Tennessee.

They have control of the Secretary of State’s office, the State Election Coordinator, the State Election Commission, and the county election commissions.

So you have to ask yourself, why the urgency to control it all? Again, why not allow the State Commissioners to finish out their terms?

And when they first started out this session the bill to “delay” the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (the paper ballot bill) was a bill to repeal it. And when that didn’t fly they came up with the delay bill (which, in effect, kills it). The Secretary of State and State Election Coordinator only became concerned about the cost after trying 3 or 4 other excuses to gain traction for what they wanted to do with the bill and found that this was the only issue that would stick in the mind of the legislators who were fighting to keep the paper ballot bill intact.

Now, I’ve seen the numbers and it is cheaper to run a paper ballot election than one with the machines we are using now. One obvious way to view this is that each precinct only needs one machine to count paper ballots instead of 4, 6, 8, 10, 20 of the machines we are using know to vote on. That means fewer maintenance contracts and lower storage costs.

Ah…fewer maintenance contracts. Now we may be getting somewhere. Because you can’t seriously believe that printing and storing paper ballots and building privacy screens would be more expensive than the maintenance contracts of, oh let’s say, all the Microvote paperless electronic voting machines that are used in voting precints of at least 45 counties in the state, can you?

Ok, so let’s tally this up again.

1) Republicans control every office connected to our elections – the Secretary of State’s office, the State Election Coordinator, the State Election Commission, and the county election commissions.

2) They want to repeal the paper ballot bill – a less expensive and more fraud proof way to conduct an election. WIth the machines we use now there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount and even more damaging is that using these machines manufacture long lines which go a long way to suppressing the vote (It takes less time to vote on paper than on the machines we use now which would eliminate long lines and the hours-long waits that discourage participation in the process. Manufactured long lines are a tried and true voter suppression tactic.)

3) They attempted to also suppress the vote by introducing photo ID laws and proof of citizenship requirements which, contrary to what you believe, do nothing to combat “voter fraud” because “voter fraud” doesn’t exist. What these laws do, instead, is suppress the vote of the elderly, the indigent, and the disabled.

Doesn’t this all seem a bit suspect to you? Especially after reading The Secrets of the Hopewell Box? Apparently your friends on the Hill read it as well – and are using it as a textbook.

No matter your party or your ideology, we need to all be vigilant about elections. I mean, really, do you want to win by cheating?

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Guns N’ Radio

On May 28, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Today, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, vetoed legislation that would have allowed guns in bars, stating:

In recognition of this basic principle of firearm safety, Tennessee state law has long prohibited the possession of firearms in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol. House Bill 962 would remove this protection in a manner that I, along with many law enforcement officers, believe to be reckless and lacking basic safeguards to ensure public safety. The notion that this bill would permit one to carry a concealed weapon into a crowded bar at midnight on a Saturday night defies common sense, and I cannot sign such a measure into law. As you consider this veto, I respectfully ask the legislature to rethink this issue.

We agree with Governor Bredesen. And despite what the TNGOP would have you believe, so do most Tennesseans, as we found out during our last show when we opened up the phone lines to talk about guns and guns in bars.

We spoke to a lawyer, a mother, a serviceman, and several citizens (one of who wonders out loud if he feels safer knowing that his Roane County representatives are packing heat) about it all – if there is a Constitutional right to be safe in your person, what specific rights are being taken away from gun owners (if any), does alcohol makes you less likely to follow the law, does the public have a right to know the names of gun permit holders, what is the responsibility of bar owners and bartenders and why didn’t anyone ask them what they think about guns in bars, and why do your second amendment rights stop at the door to Legislative Plaza? And not everyone was on the same page.

Listen to our discussion with our listeners on guns [download mp3 49.7MB 31:02].

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Despite the political machinations of certain Republican legislators and special interest groups who use hot-button issues to try and divide and conquer, we found out that Tennesseans who disagree can have a thoughtful and thorough discussions on issues like guns and find common ground and consensus. Too bad that’s not the goal of the TNGOP.

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First Comes the Convention Center, Then the Headquarter Hotels

On May 28, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
Just because.

Just because.

Caleb Hannan at the Nashville Scene’s Pith in the Wind blog offers additional question ideas, courtesy of the mayor of Dallas, for those of us going to the convention center panel discussion this Sunday:

Every city reads from the same playbook when it comes to building convention centers. So when you consider a city like Dallas, it’s helpful to picture them about four pages ahead of Nashville.

Whereas we’ve spent the past decade waltzing our way towards a new center, Dallas has spent roughly half that time trying to build an adjoining hotel. Earlier this month, the city finally reached an end point, shooting down a referendum that would have blocked the $500-million, publicly-owned* hotel. The only problem: It’s almost impossible to finance.

In this week’s Liberadio(!) interview with Dr. Heywood Sanders, professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Nashville convention center panel participant, he discusses these not-so-quick-fix “headquarters hotels:”

Listen to the three-minute interview excerpt (full interview here):

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Dr. Heywood Sanders: …In Fact, the latest fillip to this, and it’s one we might want to talk about in the Nashville case, is what happens after you build a new convention center or do a major expansion and you don’t get the business you expect. And the answers the consultants now pedal is, “what you need next door is a headquarters hotel of a least 1,000 rooms.” And if, by the way, you can’t somehow subsidize or induce a private developer to take on that proposition, increasingly we find cities issuing tax-exempt municipal bonds and building their own hotels and going into the hotel business…

Freddie: So this is proposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Mayor’s Office as an economic development must. If you see it as a bust, then why are all these parties so hot on it?

Dr. Sanders: In Nashville I’m sure individual folks have their own reasons. Mayors and local elected officials often like to support big, large-scale development projects. It gives them something that they can point to and claim as a record of a major public advance. It’s easier to take the money and build things like that than deal with rather more intractable urban problems like the quality of the schools or drug problems or the overall level of violence and criminality. Those are tough things to tackle. They take time and a lot of money. Doing big projects, particularly big projects where you can argue that visitors are paying the tab, that’s a nice quick simple fix.

The panel discussion is this Sunday, May 31, at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music (the Steve and Judy Turner Recital Hall) from 2-4 PM.

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Oh, Well, If Rep. Mumpower Says It’s Fair

On May 28, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Today, Tennessee House Republicans won another round in their assault on free and fair elections in Tennessee. Take it away, Knoxville News Sentinel Nashville bureau chief Tom Humphrey:

The House’s 50 Republicans, including Speaker Kent Williams, united today to give their party control of the State Election Commission.

SB547, which has already passed the Senate, would add two Republicans to the commission, which now has a 3-2 Democratic majority. With the 50-45 approval of the House today, the bill now goes to the governor.

Democrats roundly criticized the bill. For example, Rep. Henry Fincher, D-Cookeville, said it was part of a Republican “assault” on the election process.

House Republican Leader Jason Mumpower, however, said the bill is fair. Republicans now have a majority of legislative seats and control all 95 county election commissions.

Why did they feel the need to change the makeup of the election commission, you ask? Well, because they can. And because they had the “leverage” to do so. Here’s a video of two State Senators threatening the House – either give us two more members and the majority on the State Election Commission or we will let the Election Commission die:

Senator Norris: Correct. It’s moved out of committee. I think it’s on the desk of the floor of the House. And that’s where it met it’s potential demise and I just think everybody should realize if it meets its demise there then the State Election Commission will meet its demise here [Senate Government Operations Committee].

Senator Jack Johnson (Senate Government Operations Committee Chairman): And so what I wanted Senator Norris to address in this committee is, uh, we will roll this for one more week – we hope that next week will be our last committee meeting for Senate Government Operations, so they essentially have 7 days to either deal with this issue or we will be more or less forced to allow the State Election Commission to sunset.

For those keeping score at home, here are the other weapons of mass election destruction in their arsenal this year:
1) The delay of implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (HB0614 / SB0872) State Election Coordinator Mark Goins is leading the fight to keep the paperless touch-screen voting machines we use now in 93 out of 95 counties because they a) can be easily manipulated to change vote totals and flip votes from one candidate to another, b) provide no mechanism for a meaningful recount in the case of close elections, and c) increase the length of time it takes for each voter to cast a ballot thereby suppressing the vote by allocating too few machines in certain areas and creating long lines and long waits.

2) The replacement of all county Election Administrators with partisan Republicans.

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Rove is Right: Sotomayor Might Be Too Empathetic to be on the Supreme Court

On May 28, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Based on the following quote, Karl Rove – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – might be right about the empathy argument swirling around Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor:

I don’t come from an affluent background or a privileged background. My parents were both quite poor when they were growing up.

And I know about their experiences and I didn’t experience those things. I don’t take credit for anything that they did or anything that they overcame.

But I think that children learn a lot from their parents and they learn from what the parents say. But I think they learn a lot more from what the parents do and from what they take from the stories of their parents lives.

…Because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position.

And so it’s my job to apply the law. It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result.

But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, “You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.”

When I have cases involving children, I can’t help but think of my own children and think about my children being treated in the way that children may be treated in the case that’s before me.

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who’s been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I’ve known and admire very greatly who’ve had disabilities, and I’ve watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn’t think of what it’s doing — the barriers that it puts up to them.

So those are some of the experiences that have shaped me as a person. — Sonia Sotomayor No! It was Samuel Alito answering a question by Senator Tom Coburn during his confirmation hearing.

In today’s Wall Street Journal Karl Rove wrote:

“Mr. Obama said he wanted to replace Justice David Souter with someone who had “empathy” and who’d temper the court’s decisions with a concern for the downtrodden, the powerless and the voiceless.

“Empathy” is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn’t pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.”

I know it’s confusing so allow me translate what Karl is actually saying: I am a partisan hack.

H/T: Glenn Greenwald

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Dr. Heywood Sanders: The Interview

On May 28, 2009, in Podcasts, by Mary Mancini & Freddie O'Connell

This week, in anticipation of his trip to Nashville to participate in a panel discussion on the proposed convention center, we speak to Dr. Heywood Sanders, a notable urban planning and politics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a convention center expert.

In the interview, Dr. Sanders offers lessons from other cities who have proposed and followed through with similar convention center plans, weighs in on a Dallas-based company’s plan to build a 1.5 million-square-foot Medical Trade Center somewhere near downtown Nashville, urges Nashvillians to attend the panel, and gives examples of the kinds of questions we should be asking the business leaders and elected officials who are pushing the project.

He also gives us his opinion on what a city like ours should do if we find ourselves with hundreds of millions of tourism tax dollars to devote to a major project that is not a convention center.

Listen to our interview with Dr. Sanders [download mp3]:

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The convention center panel discussion, which is this Sunday, May 31, from 2 to 4 PM, at the Steve and Judy Turner Recital Hall at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, will feature Dr. Sanders, who has studied the issue of building projects as civic investments in more than 30 cities over the past 15 years, and Butch Spyridon, who, as president of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, has led Nashville’s $4.0 billion hospitality industry since 1991, and will be moderated by Pat Nolan, host of Inside Politics for News Channel 5+.

Organized and sponsored by all five Metro Council At-Large members and Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors, the panel is also sponsored by several district members of Metro Council, including Lonnell Matthews, Jr., Walter Hunt, Michael Craddock, Mike Jameson, Erik Cole, Karen Bennett, Anna Page, Sandra Moore, Kristine LaLonde, Erica Gilmore, Emily Evans and Duane Dominy.

Organizations sponsoring the event include Vanderbilt University, Metro Channel 3, Davidson County Young Democrats, The Tennessean, the Nashville City Paper, the Nashville Scene, and Liberadio(!) with Mary Mancini & Freddie O’Connell.

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A Quote for those Celebrating the Decision of the California Supreme Court

On May 26, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

For those of you who are celebrating the recent decision of the California Supreme Court (not such an “activist court” filled with, in the words of Sean Penn, “commie, homo-loving sons-of-guns,” when they rule for your side now, eh?) to uphold Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage, I give you this paraphrased quote:

It is time for straight people to try and put themselves in the position of gay people and understand what their lives are like.

Close your eyes and imagine this. You find, after many, many, many years of searching, the love of your life. You want to be with them always and forever and any separation is heart wrenching. You have the butterflies and the yearning and that “Damn, Cupid!” woozy sensation in your head. You want to share your life – in both good times and bad – and to commit yourself completely. You want to stand up in front of witnesses and loudly proclaim your love for this person who, miracle of all miracles, feels exactly the same way about you as you do about them.

Now imagine your government telling you, “No.”

Better yet, look at the one you’re with – the one who gave you those exact feelings today, yesterday, once upon a time, whenever – and imagine your government telling you, “No.”

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