The Daily Drift

Sunset in Paradise

Due to an unexpected - yet delightful - phone call at 10:30 thing morning today's postings are a bit delayed. We will return to our regular schedule tomorrow.

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Today in History

1396		The last great Christian crusade, led jointly by John the Fearless of Nevers and King Sigismund of Hungary, ends in disaster at the hands of Sultan Bajazet I's Ottoman army at Nicopolis.
1598		In Sweden, King Sigismund is defeated at Stangebro by his Uncle Charles.
1775		British troops capture Ethan Allen, the hero of Ticonderoga, when he and a handful of Americans try to invade Canada.
1789		Congress proposes 12 new amendments to the Constitution.
1804		The 12th Amendment is ratified, changing the procedure of choosing the president and vice-president.
1846		American General Zachary Taylor's forces capture Monterey, Mexico.
1909		The first National Aeronautic Show opens at Madison Square Garden.
1915		An allied offensive is launched in France against the German Army.
1918		Brazil declares war on Austria.
1937		German Chancellor Adolf Hitler meets with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini in Munich.
1938		President Franklin Roosevelt urges negotiations between Hitler and Czech President Benes over the Sudetenland.
1942		The War Labor Board orders equal pay for women in the United States.
1943		The Red Army retakes Smolensk from the Germans who are retreating to the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union.
1959		President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev begin Camp David talks.
1974		Scientists warn that continued use of aerosol sprays will cause ozone depletion, which will lead to an increased risk of skin cancer and global weather changes.
1981		Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Supreme Court Justice, is sworn in.

Non Sequitur

Air Force One

You've heard of Air Force One, but what do you really know about it? Here's a short history of what's now considered the "flying White House."

HOMEBOUND
Nowadays we take for granted that traveling around the world is part of the president's job. But that wasn't always the case: As late as the 1930s, it was considered the president's duty not to leave the country -he was expected to remain on U.S. soil for his entire term of office ...and wasn't even supposed to stray far from Washington, D.C. This tradition was left over from the pre-telephone age, when the only way a president could command the government on a moment's notice in an emergency was to be physically in or near the nation's capital at all times. Leaving town literally meant leaving power, and presidents aren't supposed to do that. For the first 130 years of the Republic, not a single American president left the United States while in office, not even once. (Well, okay, once. Grover Cleveland briefly sailed across the U.S.-Canada border back in the 1890s.)

So in January 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt flew to North Africa to meet with Winston Churchill and plan the Allied invasion of Southern Europe, he became only the third president to go overseas (the others: cousin Teddy Roosevelt inspected the Panama Canal in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I).
SMALL WORLD
FDR hated airplanes, but German submarines were patrolling the Atlantic and sinking American ships, so the Secret Service forbade him from traveling by sea. He flew in a chartered PanAm Flying Boat seaplane called the Dixie Clipper. That changed everything.
When FDR's historic trip became publicized weeks later, it turned out to be an important psychological boost not just for the war effort, but also for the fledgling airline industry. If it was safe enough for President Roosevelt to fly during the war, people reasoned, it would be safe enough for anyone to fly in times of peace. Furthermore, Americans realized that with planes, the president could travel almost anywhere in the world in a matter of days and return just as quickly if need be. And thank to radio and telephone communications, it was possible to remain in fairly close contact with the government at all times. Within weeks of Roosevelt's historic journey, the U.S. Army Air Corps (precursor to the Air Force) began making plans to provide a custom-made plane for the president's exclusive use. Since then, each president has had an official plane, and today the president's airplane is considered an extension of the White House.

THE NAME
* Technically speaking, although there is a special presidential airplane, it doesn't have the radio call sign Air Force One. The call sign is attached to the president himself; it is given to whatever Air Force plane in which he happens to be flying. Likewise, any plane in which the vice-president flies is known as Air Force Two.
* In fact, before JFK, each presidential aircraft had its own name: President Roosevelt's plane was nicknamed the "Sacred Cow" by the White House Press Corps; President Truman's plane was the Independence (Truman named it himself, out of fear that it might otherwise become the "Sacred Cow II"); and president Eisenhower's was the Columbine.
* Then in 1962, President Kennedy took delivery of a Boeing 707, the first presidential jet airplane ...and never bothered to name it. With no other name to go by, the media began referring to the plane by its call sign. The term Air Force One has been used for presidential aircraft ever since.
* In 1971 Richard Nixon renamed his plane The Spirit of '76 in advance of the U.S. Bicentennial, but the name never took hold.
MADE TO ORDER

One of the perks of being president is that you get to have Air Force One remodeled to suit your own tastes. President Truman had his plane painted to look like a giant eagle, with stylized blue feathers, cockpit windows that looked like eyes, and a nose painted to look like a big brown beak. (The nose was later repainted yellow, out of fear the White House Press Corps might nickname the plane "Brown Nose.")
* President Lyndon Johnson had all of the passenger seats unbolted and turned around so that they faced the rear of the plane -toward his compartment. He also ripped out the cherry wood divider separating his compartment from the rest of the plane and replaced it with clear Plexiglass, Jerry Ter Horst writes in The Flying White House, "so that he could keep an eye on everybody -and they on him."
* LBJ also installed a secret taping system, which, ironically, President Noxon ordered removed after he took office.
CODE NAME: PROJECT LIDA ROSE
The most extensive makeover for Air Force One came in the late 1950s and was proposed by Allen Dulles, director of the CIA. Not long after he inaugurated the super-secret, high-altitude U2 spy plane program, Dulles proposed outfitting the president's airplane with hidden spy cameras for an upcoming trip to the Sovet Union.
Unlike U2 spy planes, which flew at altitudes as high as 70,000 feet, President Eisenhower's plane would be flying under 5,000 feet, and was the only Western aircraft allowed into Russian airspace. Why not take advantage of the trip to take much closer pictures of Soviet defenses?
Whether or not Eisenhower was informed of the plan (many historians suspect he wasn't), it was approved, and his aircraft was fitted with a camera inside a hidden compartment in the fuselage. The controls were carefully disguised to look like the co-pilot's fresh-air vent, so that they would be undetectable even if a Soviet pilot was riding shotgun in the cockpit.
The cameras on board the presidential plane might well have provided the U.S. with the biggest intelligence coup of the Cold War ...had they ever been put to use. But they weren't- on May 1, 1960, pilot Gary Francis Powers was shot down in his U2 spy plane over Soviet airspace, and Nikita Khrushchev used the incident to scuttle Eisenhower's visit to the USSR. The cameras were removed when John F. Kennedy was elected president.
HELP YOURSELF
* Stealing objects stamped with the presidential seal has long been one of the perks of being invited to fly aboard Air Force One. Still, not every president has approved: President Carter was so offended by the practice that he ordered the plane's expensive engraved crystal ashtrays, candy dishes, and wine glasses removed and had them replaced with plastic containers and paper cups.
* Lyndon Johnson took the opposite approach -he filled the plane with expensive trinkets so that his guests would have something to steal. "It was useful to him to have people brag about flying with LBJ -and to have a souvenir with which to prove it," one aide remembers.
* True to form, when LBJ returned home to Texas on his last official trip aboard Air Force One, he reportedly stole everything that wasn't nailed down ...and a few items that were, recalls pilot Ralph Albertazzie:

When I took over the plane after it came back from Texas, I found an empty larder. We had no presidential china, no Air Force One silverware, no Air Force One cigarettes, no cocktail napkins, no towels -not even any paper products like toilet tissue. They were all gone. Even LBJ's special executive chair -the one we called "the throne"- was unbolted from the floor and taken away. The presidential stateroom was bare of pillows, blankets, and everything else that bore the presidential seal. I couldn't believe my eyes.

Daily Comic Relief

Mitt Romney upset that airplane windows don't open

Because apparently he's never watched a movie or TV show in his entire life.

I meant to write about this earlier today, but was busy dealing with more serious news.  Still, what is this guy thinking?  He's a walking gaffe-machine of late.

In his latest, Romney was talking about his wife's aircraft that had some serious trouble last Friday with an electrical malfunction and had to conduct an emergency landing.

From the LA Times:

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”

As HuffPo points out, Romney has his facts slightly off:

The main reason airplane windows don't open is because there isn't enough oxygen at cruising altitude to keep passengers alive. (The fear of window or cabin failures, which would lead to potentially fatal hypoxia, is why many planes are equipped with emergency oxygen masks.)

"You can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open," Romney told the Times, suggesting that additional oxygen in the cabin during the electrical malfunction could've alleviated the problem. In fact, if there were an electrical fire on board, additional oxygen would have fed the flames.

Here's another reason the windows don't open at 40,000 feet: Because you're traveling at 550 miles per hour, which can slam a window awfully hard on your finger (in addition to ripping the window right off). Another reason, the air temperature is 70F below zero, which might give the passengers a slight chill when the guy in front of you refuses to close his window and the 500 mile per hour -70F wind is blowing in Mrs. Romney's face.  (Then there's the air pressure differential...)

How did Mitt Romney not know any of this?  I had to look at the exact temperature but I knew it was below -40F.  I also knew the cruising speed was around 500pm, and that the air pressure was pretty darn low up there in space where there isn't much oxygen to start with.

What was Romney thinking to even say something this dumb?  I'm increasingly thinking that the man is not the brightest bulb.

Did Romney close his Swiss account to evade prosecution?

As I mentioned the other day, there are so many unanswered questions about Mitt Romney's taxes.

One issue that is increasingly being asked is whether Mitt Romney closed his Swiss bank account at UBS to avoid serious prosecution for avoiding taxes.

UBS reached a settlement with the IRS for nearly $800 million for their role in helping rich Americans avoid paying US taxes. Following the settlement, the IRS announced an amnesty period for Americans who may have been hiding money at UBS, and thousands came forward.

It's still not clear whether Mitt Romney participated in that amnesty period, but what we do now know is that he no longer has a Swiss bank account with UBS as of 2010. The timing is certainly interesting. 

Because Romney won't release full details of his taxes, and instead only released a pile of documents signed by PWC and lawyers, we can't say for sure whether he hid millions in Switzerland or not.

Paul Abrams at the Huffington Post has been following this closely for a while now and has made a list of the circumstantial evidence that points towards Romney participating in the amnesty program. Romney is only answering questions via email about his taxes and of course, he's not answering any questions about amnesty.

Huffington Post:

To review, here is the circumstantial evidence:
i) Romney closed ONLY his Swiss UBS Account, not Caymans or Bermuda or Luxembourg. Hence, he cannot claim "bad optics for a campaign" as the alternative explanation;
ii) Romney closed the UBS account during the time required to receive amnesty;
iii) Romney omitted from his public disclosure of his 2010 returns the specific information about the UBS account;
iv) Romney took six extra months to prepare his 2011 returns, disclosing them in the countdown to the election, whereas he could have disclosed 2009 immediately with 2010, getting all that bad news out at once, during the primary, so that it would be ancient history by now. That is strong evidence that 2009, that would have shown the amnesty with flashing lights, was too toxic.

Someone in the traditional media needs to ask Mitt Romney directly whether he did or did not close his Swiss bank account during the amnesty program. But they also need to demand that he release the full details of his taxes like every other candidate for president in modern times.

Let's not forget that Mitt Romney saw the assassination of an ambassador as an "opportunity"

The Romney campaign is doing another of its now-infamous Hail Mary foreign policy throws today.

This time in an attempt to undercut the United States on the day before the President speaks at a huge meeting of world leaders at the United Nations in New York.

Rather than lob bombs from the west coast, where Mitt Romney today accused Californians of being socialists, the repugican candidate should fly to New York and let himself be heard in person.  Just imagine the efficacy of being able to insult nearly 80 heads of state and government ministers in one fell swoop.

And when Mitt Romney suggests that President Obama doesn't care about the death of a US ambassador, don't forget what Mitt Romney said about that death - the Romney campaign said it was an opportunity.  His staff was elated.  They saw the death of an American, a foreign policy crisis, as an "opportunity."  I wonder if our dead ambassador's family agrees with Mitt Romney that the murder of their family member was an opportunity?

Keep in mind that Mitt Romney also called the Iran hostage crisis in 1980 an "opportunity."  And that he was keeping his eyes out for another "opportunity" for Americans' lives to be threatened.

Republicans can't win on the facts, as facts have a liberal bias.  So they have to lie and fight dirty.  The only problem for them is that their candidate stinks.  Heck, he's not even a Republican.  And all the lies, and flip-flops, are finally coming home to roost.  So as Mitt Romney's popularity drops like a stone all they have left is what they started the campaign with, lies.

Fortunately for us, Mitt Romney doesn't know when to shut up.

Is Romney preparing for a new war in the Middle East?

Or, is he just trying to show the repugicans that he can be a tough guy like the shrub? Either way, the end result is not very good. If he thinks people want yet another costly war that will never end in the Middle East, he's sadly mistaken. Americans that actually watch their own budget are fed up with spending billions upon billions for unnecessary wars that the political class imagines are needed.

If Romney is trying to have a "I have a big penis" moment in order to win over the many repugicans who don't like him or trust him (like the NASCAR voters who now prefer Obama), he's failing to see how dangerous the war talk really is. By promoting another expensive war it only shows how ill prepared he is to lead. Romney's pro-war talk is not productive for any reason.

President Barack Obama hit back hard in a "60 Minutes" interview broadcast Sunday at Mitt Romney's criticisms of his handling of Syria and Iran, saying that if the repugican standard-bearer "is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so."

Obama also brushed aside talk that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pressuring him to take a harder line on Iran's suspicious nuclear program — source of some of Romney's sharpest campaign-trail criticisms.

"When it comes to our national security decisions-- any pressure that I feel is simply to do what's right for the American people. And I am going to block out any noise that's out there," the president said.

Romney endorses "socialism" on 60 Minutes in yet another flip-flop

You can only flip flop so much before you start tripping up badly.

Mitt Romney's latest? He just endorsed "socialism" last night. Which probably won't go over too well with the repugican base two days after Romney declared in his federal tax forms that to him America was a "foreign country."

You see, five years ago Mitt Romney told Glenn Beck that letting the uninsured get free health care via emergency rooms (which is what our country does) is "socialism.

"And in a 2007 interview with Glenn Beck, Romney called the fact that people without insurance were able to get "free care" in emergency rooms "a form of socialism."

"When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is," he said at the time.

As HuffPost notes, Romney was singing a completely different tune last night on 60 Minutes:

Downplaying the need for the government to ensure that every person has health insurance, Mitt Romney on Sunday suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."

So the new "conservative" Mitt Romney is now in favor of "socialism."

I seem to remember, during the health care reform debate, hearing that we pay four times as much for people to go to emergency rooms than what we'd pay if we simply helped them get insurance, government or otherwise.

So, Romney isn't entirely wrong. It is a form of socialized medicine having the government insure health care for everyone who's uninsured. They do it in Israel, and Romney praised that only a few months ago.

But in America, all you have to do is use a dirty word to describe thing - preferably the word socialist or communist - and everyone screams in horror, even though they don't usually understand what socialism even is, or what the thing is that's being compared to socialism (ask the average American to name three things that the dreaded Obamacare actually does - good luck getting two).

But back to emergency rooms, they're expensive as hell in this country, and hardly a suitable alternative to health insurance. In France, you pay around 27 euros or so for an emergency room visit - that's about 35 US dollars. And if you have a medical procedure, they charge you more. But unlike the US, they don't nickel and dime you to death by charging you for every doctor, and every aspirin, separately. It's one flat rate, and the procedure is another flat rate.

In the US, you pay for everything, and you pay a LOT. I believe I read the average American emergency room visit costs around $1000. (That's 770 euros, for you foreigners.) And that's just walking in the door. The price goes up quickly from there.

Were emergency room visits to cost only $35 a person, then I might be more inclined to the Romney point of view (though how do you manage diabetes with regular emergency room visits - and at that point, it's no longer an "emergency" room if we're expecting people to go there regularly for non-emergencies - we might as well skip the facade and admit we have nationalized health care and pay 1/4 of the price we pay today).

I was recently in a US emergency room for more eye troubles on a recent weekend (I was concerned I might have another retinal tear, or worse), and I shudder at the bills I'm going to receive.  I also still shudder at the care I did receive from the 1st year resident who didn't appear to have a lot of hands-on experience dealing with actual living human eyeballs (my eye hurt for a week after).  (My eye is fine.  It did have a small tear, that the resident didn't see - my doc, who was willing to see me on a Sunday morning, did see it, and fixed it.)

We're #1.

Romney slams California as socialist, while campaigning in California

At this point, the Obama campaign doesn't even need to run negative ads.  They only need to hand Mitt Romney a microphone and start recording.
Besides not caring about 47% of the US population, Mitt Romney also doesn't think much of the most populous state in the US. Mitt Romney really has a problem with many Americans which is maybe why he listed the US as a foreign country on his US tax returns.

And now Mitt thinks California is a bit too "Europeans" - which in repugican-land means "socialist" (which really means "communist").  The rnc chair was taken down by Chris Matthews a month or so ago for pushing the "Obama is foreign/European," aka socialist (in addition to it being a racial insult that blacks aren't real "anglo-saxons" like the rest of us (who mostly aren't anglo-saxons either)).

And while it's one thing for Romney to think California is socialist, it's another for him to admit it, and put at risk California's 55 electoral votes, and it's absolutely insanity to admit it while he's campaigning in California.

Who will Mitt Romney offend next?

The repugican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney came to the Golden State for a two-day series of high-profile fundraisers and reportedly took a shot at California in front of a $25,000 a ticket crowd in Del Mar.

Romney “took a pretty big shot at California,” according to a pool reporter.

“He said that under President Obama we’re becoming a lot more European and that the state of California was something he didn’t want to see the rest of the U.S. look like in a few years,” a pool reporter related.

Fact-checkers find Romney/repucican cabal lie twice as much as Democrats

Facts have a liberal bias.  And lies have a conservative one.

This study is from George Mason University, a lesser college in the Washington, DC area that is known as a hotbed of conservative activism.  So take anything you ever hear from "GMU" with a huge grain of salt.  Often there's a conservative bias, and funding stream, underlying folks from that university.

This study, by the self-proclaimed non-partisan "Center for Media and Public Affairs" - which has been accused of conservative ties in the past - finds that media fact-checkers found Mitt Romney and the repugicans lied twice as much as Democrats.  It's some coincidence that the study came out just a few weeks after the repugican cabal collectively decided that it's time to start tearing down fact-checkers.

In any case, the study found that the fact-checkers rated Romney and the repugicans liars twice as much as they rated Dems as liars. While conservatives will surely say this is a sign of the fact-checkers' inherent bias, it's just as likely that fact-checkers are finding twice as often that the repugican lies because the repugican cabal lies twice as often as Democrats do.

From the study:

The study examined 98 election-related statements by the presidential candidates, their surrogates, and campaign ads fact-checked by PolitiFact.com from June 1 to September 11. Major findings:

PolitiFact checked the assertions of Democrats slightly more often than those of repugicans (54% vs. 46% of all statements).

However, PolitiFact rated Democratic statements as “mostly true” or “entirely true” about twice as often as Republican statements -- 42% true ratings for Democrats vs. 20% for repugicans.

Conversely, statements by repugicans were rated as entirely false about twice as often as Democratic statements – 29% false ratings for repugican statements vs. 15% false ratings for Democrats. (This includes categories labeled “false” and “pants on fire.”)

The same pattern holds for statements made directly by the presidential candidates and their campaigns. A majority of the Obama campaign’s statements (55%) were rated as true or mostly true, compared to one out of four statements (26%) by the Romney campaign.

The difference is even greater at the other end of the spectrum, where 26% of the Romney campaign’s statements were rated as either false or “pants on fire,” compared to only 5% of the Obama campaign’s statements.

Get ready for repugicans to, coincidentally all in unison, denounce the fact-checkers, in a massive playing of the refs designed to push fact-checkers further to the right.  But the larger point remains: What are fact-checkers to do if "hypothetically" one party is taken over by extremists who have decided that the only way they can win is to lie?

I think back to 2004 when pundit/journalist Mark Halperin, who was then with ABC, wrote a famous memo in which he warned ABC staff not to simply assume that both sides in the 2004 presidential race were being equally dishonest.

In October 2004 the Drudge Report published a memo Halperin sent to ABC News staff about coverage of the U.S. presidential election directing them not to "reflexively and artificially hold both sides 'equally' accountable" and that both John Kerry and George W. Bush used "distortion" in their campaign, but that Kerry’s distortions were not "central to his efforts to win."[8] Halperin was criticized by conservatives who used the memo to reinforce long-standing complaints of media bias.

Wingnuts had a conniption fit. But what if Halperin was right. Or more to the point, why should we assume necessarily that Halperin was wrong? Why is it impossible that one political party, one presidential candidate, could lie more than the other?

If we're willing to believe, and we do, that some candidates pulled their punches and were "too nice" during their campaigns, then why wouldn't the opposite also be true, that some candidates are too negative, and too willing to lie?

Mitt Romney's first ad of his presidential campaign was a lie about President Obama (that was the infamous ad in which Romney took Obama quoting McCain and made it look like Obama had come up with the quote himself). Obama didn't do the same for his first ad.

Mitt Romney chose to devote his entire convention to a lie, "you didn't build it." Barack Obama's convention theme was "bringing Americans together."

Mitt Romney is now, yet again, suggesting that the foreign-seeming Barack Obama is a socialist (he's using the code-phrase "redistribution of wealth"). When has President Obama suggested anything equally offensive about Mitt Romney?

Some people are more dishonest than others. And some of them run for President.

The repugican state voting laws "will disenfranchise 10,000,000 Hispanic US citizens"

Today, a civil rights group called Advancement Project will publish a report on the new voting laws passed in 23 repugican-led states. The report (not named in Patricia Zengerle's Reuters article and not yet up on the Advancement Project site) claims that 10,000,000 Hispanic voters will be disenfranchised by the new laws, which place hurdles between voters and the ballot box, such as presenting certain types of ID. The rubric for these laws has been that "everyone" has the types of ID specified in the statutes, and the common refrain in response to critics is "Who doesn't have a [driver's license|passport|non-driver ID|etc]?" The Advancement Project's point appears to be that these specific 10 million citizens, who are otherwise legally entitled to vote, don't have the necessary papers or can't meet the qualifiers imposed by the state governments.

According to Reuters, national polls show 70 percent or more support for Obama among Hispanic voters.

The new laws include purges of people suspected of not being citizens in 16 states that unfairly target Latinos, the civil rights group Advancement Project said in the study to be formally released on Monday.
Laws in effect in one state and pending in two others require proof of citizenship for voter registration. That imposes onerous and sometimes expensive documentation requirements on voters, especially targeting naturalized American citizens, many of whom are Latino, the liberal group said.
Nine states have passed restrictive photo identification laws that impose costs in time and money for millions of Latinos who are citizens but do not yet have the required identification, it said.

Voting laws may disenfranchise 10 million Hispanic U.S. citizens: study 

State repugican election chiefs look for voter fraud but so far are finding little evidence of any

State repugican election officials who promised to root out voter fraud so far are finding little evidence of a widespread problem.
State officials in key presidential battleground states have found only a tiny fraction of the illegal voters they initially suspected existed. Searches in Colorado and Florida have yielded numbers that amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all registered voters in either state.
Democrats say the searches waste time and, worse, could disenfranchise eligible voters who are swept up in the checks.
"I find it offensive that I'm being required to do more than any other citizen to prove that I can vote," said Samantha Meiring, 37, a Colorado voter and South African immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 2010. Meiring was among 3,903 registered voters who received letters last month from the Colorado Secretary of State's office questioning their right to vote.
Especially telling, critics of the searches say, is that the efforts are focused on crucial swing states from Colorado to Florida, where both political parties and the presidential campaigns are watching every vote. And in Colorado, most of those who received letters are either Democrats or unaffiliated with a party. It's a similar story in Florida, too.
The repugicans argue that voting fraud is no small affair, even if the cases are few, when some elections are decided by hundreds of votes.
"We have real vulnerabilities in the system," said Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a repugican elected in 2010 who is making a name for himself at home by pursuing the issue. "I don't think one should be saying the sky is falling, but at the same time, we have to recognize we have a serious vulnerability."
The different viewpoints underscore a divide between the parties: Are the small numbers of voting fraud evidence that a problem exists? Or do they show that the voter registration system works?
COLORADO
Last year, Gessler estimated that 11,805 noncitizens were on the rolls.
But the number kept getting smaller.
After his office sent letters to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status, the number of noncitizens now stands at 141, based on checks using a federal immigration database. Of those 141, Gessler said 35 have voted in the past. The 141 are .004 percent of the state's nearly 3.5 million voters.
Even those numbers could be fewer.
The Denver clerk and recorder's office, which had records on eight of the 35 voters who cast ballots in the past, did its own verification and found that those eight people appear to be citizens.
Kevin Biln, an Adams County resident on the list, said he didn't know he was registered and maintains that he's never voted. Another voter on the list, Erica Zelfand, a Canadian immigrant, said she's a U.S. citizen no longer living in Colorado. Robert Giron said he was furious that the 20-year-old daughter he adopted from Mexico was listed as having illegally voted. He said she went to the Denver clerk's office with her U.S. passport and other documents to prove her eligibility to vote.
To Pam Anderson, the clerk and recorder in Jefferson County in suburban Denver, the investigation proves what's already been her experience: Cases of noncitizens on the rolls are extremely rare.
Anderson said the fighting between the political parties over the perception of voter fraud also has less tangible consequences.
"It impacts people's confidence in elections, which is extraordinarily important," she said.
FLORIDA
Florida's search began after the state's Division of Elections said that as many as 180,000 registered voters weren't citizens. Like Colorado and other states, Florida relied on driver's license data showing that people on the rolls at one point showed proof of non-citizenship, such as a green card.
Florida eventually narrowed its list of suspected noncitizens to 2,600 and found that 207 of them weren't citizens, based on its use of the federal database called SAVE, or the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. The system tracks who is a legal resident eligible to receive government benefits.
Of the 2,600 initially marked as possible noncitizens, about 38 percent were unaffiliated voters and 40 percent were Democrats, according to an analysis by The Miami Herald.
The state has more than 11.4 million registered voters, so the 207 amounts to .001 percent of the voter roll.
Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, a repugican, said in a statement that the initiative "is already proving to be a successful process to identify illegally registered voters," which he noted is crucial in a state where the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes.
NORTH CAROLINA
In North Carolina, the nonpartisan state elections board last year sent letters to 637 suspected noncitizens after checking driver's license data. Of those, 223 responded showing proof they were citizens, and 79 acknowledged they weren't citizens and were removed from the rolls along with another 331 who didn't respond to repeated letters, said Veronica Degraffenreid, an elections liaison for the board.
She said the board did not find evidence of widespread fraud, noting there were only 12 instances in which a noncitizen had voted. North Carolina has 6.4 million voters.
"What we're finding is there is strong indication that the voter rolls in North Carolina are sound," Degraffenreid said.
MICHIGAN
Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, a repugican, last week estimated that as many as 4,000 noncitizens are on the state's voter roll.
The department said it verified 1,000 registered voters who are noncitizens, based on an analysis of about 20 percent of complete citizenship data. She extrapolated the 4,000 number from the most recent U.S. Census' five-year American Community Survey, which showed Michigan has a noncitizen population of about 304,000.
That's as far as the investigation has gone. The figures have not been verified.
OTHER STATES
Ohio and Iowa, both with recently elected repugican secretaries of state, also are negotiating with the federal government to also use the SAVE database to verify citizenship, although it's unlikely they'll have enough time to do anything before the Nov. 6 election. While Ohio doesn't have a list of names it wants to check, Iowa is looking at verifying the status of 3,500 registered voters.
Last week, Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation filed election misconduct charges against three noncitizens who voted in gubernatorial and city elections in 2010 and 2011. Among the three are Canadians who told investigators they thought they were only barred from voting in presidential elections.
The three were on a list of about 1,000 names of potential noncitizens who had voted since 2010, which Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz forwarded to the Division of Criminal Investigation.
Early voting in Iowa begins Thursday and Schultz recently told legislators that his office wants to use the information from the federal database "in a responsible manner."
"When somebody casts a ballot you can't un-ring that bell," he said. "If somebody is ineligible to vote and they cast a ballot that's been counted we can't take that back. This is an important election coming up."

 

Did you know ...

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Wingnut fund considers backing Missouri reptile Akin

By DAVID A. LIEB and JIM SALTER
 
A wingnut fundraising group that had shied away from Missouri Rep. Todd Akin is now seriously considering whether to come to the embattled repugican's aid in his challenge to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, an official with the group said Monday.

The Senate wingnuts Fund, which has raised more than $11 million for other repugican Senate candidates, could provide a much-needed financial boost for Akin, who is facing a Tuesday deadline on whether to stay in the race. Akin vowed again Monday to remain in the contest. Appearing at a Kirkwood, Mo., rally with former presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, Akin said there had been discussions with the super PAC but no official agreement on aiding him.

The group previously had shied away from Akin, in part, because of his past use of spending earmarks

to direct federal money to specific local projects. Earmarks now are banned in the repugican-controlled House, and Senate repugicans have voted not to use them.

In the primary, Akin aired an ad that touted a life saved by federal funding that some considered an earmark. But in a statement to The Associated Press last week, Akin said he backs a prohibition on earmarks in some circumstances.

"I support a ban on earmarks that are inserted in the dark of night or that are used by party leaders to buy support for their wasteful spending bills," Akin said in the written statement. "However, I want to make sure that Congress does its constitutional duty and retains the power of the purse rather than giving unelected bureaucrats all the power in Washington, D.C."
McCaskill, a vocal opponent of earmarks, suggested Akin had changed his position on earmarks in attempt to get campaign cash.

Akin's campaign is hoping to capitalize financially this week by demonstrating his resolve to remain in the race despite calls by some top repugicans that he quit after making inflammatory remarks about rape and pregnancy.

"There's no poll that shows this race is impossible," Gingrich said Monday. "I believe by mid-October all of them (repugican supporters) will be in."
Tuesday is the deadline for Missouri candidates to get a court order if they wish to drop out of the race. Akin has other plans for the day — a campaign bus tour.
The repugican leaders are not expected to pitch in. But Akin could get some other help, from a political action committee built in part by tea party horse's-ass Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

The Senate Conservatives Fund had remained neutral in Missouri's repugican Senate primary, which Akin won in early August. But since then, Akin has discussed and clarified his position on earmarks with the organization, one official said.

"Our understanding is he supports an earmark ban," Matt Hoskins, director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, said Monday.

The organization supports a ban or moratorium on earmarks that use legislation to direct a specific amount of money for a specific purpose in a certain state or congressional district.

Akin denied Monday that he had flip-flopped.

"The thing that makes it tricky for people to follow is there are a lot of different definitions," Akin said. "What I am totally against are things that are done in the dark of night, there's been no legislative approval and they're special deals for people."

He added: "The question is when you get into just plain amendments that have gone through subcommittees and committees and things like that, as long as those are not directed to any particular company ... those are things that, as we've talked to DeMint, we're exactly on the same page using the same definition. So there's been no change in our position. And no change in his position either."

Hoskins said the group is looking "very seriously" at supporting Akin, because it appears he will not drop out, still has a good shot at defeating McCaskill and generally aligns ideologically with the organization.

Akin has apologized repeatedly since a TV interview aired Aug. 19 in which he suggested that women's bodies have a natural defense against pregnancy in cases of "legitimate rape." After that remark, Akin lost the financial support of the repugican national cabal, the repugican senators' political committee and the deep-pocketed Crossroads group affiliated with repugican strategist Karl Rove. That nixed millions of dollars of planned TV advertising.

Since then, Akin has raised nearly $600,000 through a small-dollar, online appeal that has cast his candidacy as an anti-establishment crusade against both repugican cabal bosses and President Barack Obama's administration.

During the primary, Akin had been criticized by repugican rivals for supporting earmarks. Akin responded with a TV ad in which the wife of a military veteran said her husband's life was saved by a newly armored Humvee financed at Akin's initiative through "what some call earmarks."

McCaskill has co-sponsored legislation with DeMint to ban earmarks, and her position has often put her at odds with her own party's leadership.

McCaskill's campaign suggested that Akin has shifted his views on earmarks in hopes of getting money for his Senate campaign.

"What kind of Washington politician runs an ad defending earmarks in the primary, then two months later, turns around and changes his position on a dime, for a dime? This is exactly the kind of transactional politics that makes people sick," said McCaskill spokesman Caitlin Legacki.

Murdoch's disgraced son promoted to prime job at Faux

Among the super rich, you can't screw up enough to get a demotion.
Whether it's Wall Street getting massive bonuses after destroying the banking system, and the entire economy, or Mitt Romney's own team who were just paid nearly a quarter of a million in bonuses for getting Romney into last place, or of course the Bush team who never faced the music for ignoring the pre-9/11 warnings, there are different rules for this class.

It's hard to believe that they still think of themselves as victims.

Rupert Murdoch's son James, who slipped out of the UK in disgrace following the extensive phone-hacking scandal, now has a plum position at Faux.

When you are as rich as the Murdoch family, the norms that apply to everyone else do not apply to you. They write their own rules while thumbing their nose at everyone else.

James Murdoch will be given more responsibility over News Corp's U.S. television operations more than a year after he became a central figure in the company's telephone hacking scandal in the UK, two sources familiar with the matter said.

News of the promotion comes on the heels of a ruling earlier on Thursday by a UK regulator that appears to have cleared pay-TV company BSkyB of any connection to the scandal that tainted News Corp last year.

The 39-year-old son of News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch will be given a larger, more operational role in the Faux Networks Group, which oversees Faux's broadcast network and its cable channels that include FX, National Geographic and Fox sports channels, according to two people with knowledge of the move.

Austerity ...

... it doesn't work, especially if the wrong people are being forced to abide by it.

It's not the average working person that is the problem....It's the banksters, the 1%, Goldman Sachs. Where is their austerity?

Recession-hit Spaniards will this week be told to swallow yet more austerity as the government prepares a fresh round of reforms and another budget filled with spending cuts and tax increases that will allow it to seek a bailout from euro-zone partners. - More

The truth hurts

Belarus elects entirely pro-government parliament

By Yuras Karmanau

International observers on Monday condemned a weekend vote in Belarus in which not a single opposition politician won a parliament seat. The election looks set to deepen the former Soviet nation's diplomatic isolation.

Critics also said the 74.3 percent turnout reported Monday by the country's Central Elections Commission chairman

was way too high and indicated widespread fraud.

The main opposition parties, which were ignored by state-run media, boycotted the election to protest the detention of political prisoners

and the ample opportunities for election fraud.

The vote filled parliament with representatives of the three parties that have backed the policies of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko

"This election was not competitive from the start," said Matteo Mecacci, leader of the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "A free election depends on people being free to speak, organize and run for office, and we didn't see that in this campaign."

Belarus' parliament has long been considered a rubber-stamp body for Lukashenko

's policies. He has ruled Belarus since 1994 and Western observers have criticized all recent elections there as undemocratic. Local independent observers estimated the overall turnout as being almost 19 percent lower than the official 74.3 percent figure.

"Belarus gets ever closer to the worst standards of Soviet elections," said Valentin Stefanovich, coordinator of the Rights Activists for Free Elections

group. At least 20 independent election observers were detained, according to rights activists.

Political analyst Leonid Zaiko said the way the elections were held highlighted Lukashenko's desire to prepare for another beckoning economic crisis.

"He plans to control the situation with an iron fist. He has no time for any opposition, not on the street and certainly not in parliament," Zaiko said.
Lukashenko's landslide win in the 2010 presidential election triggered a mass street protest against election fraud that was brutally suppressed. Some of the 700 people arrested at that protest are still in jail, including presidential candidate Nikolai Statkevich.
Opposition politicians have cautioned supporters to refrain from holding protest rallies this time.

The opposition had hoped to use this election to build support, but 33 of 35 candidates from the United Civil Party

were barred from television, while the state-owned press refused to publish their election programs.

The United Civil Party and another leading opposition party, the Belarusian Popular Front, pulled their candidates off the ballot and urged voters not to show up at the polls a week before the election.

The United States

and the European Union have imposed economic and travel sanctions on the Belarusian government over its crackdown on opposition groups and independent news media.

"The aim of giving President Lukashenko's regime the appearance of democratic legitimacy has clearly failed," German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement. "In view of the glaring irregularities in these elections, it is clearly visible for everyone what Belarus is today: the last dictatorship in the heart of Europe."

Westerwelle said Germany

and its European partners would step up their efforts to push for the release of political prisoners and isolate Lukashenko and his regime.

EU foreign ministers hold talks in Brussels next month on political freedom in Belarus. They are expected to consider possible revisions to sanctions against the country aimed at more specifically targeting those in the leadership deemed responsible for the political crackdown.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule lamented that "the elections took place against the background of an overall climate of repression and intimidation" and described it as "yet another missed opportunity to conduct elections in line with international standards in Belarus."