November 29, 2008 :: Webb Tisch :: One Comment
E pluribus unum: of the many, one. We often forget the meaning of this legacy. We often conveniently slip into ignorance about the aspirational nature of the American political system. American democracy was designed to be everything that feudal monarchies, whether they included parliamentary processes or not, could not be, or had refused to be. It was designed to be a system in which authority was distributed across as wide a swath of the social landscape as possible, in order that fewer people suffer injustice, and that no one suffer injustice without recourse.
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November 17, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
In Alaska, 7-count convicted felon Sen. Ted Stevens had narrowly led Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, but counting of early-cast paper ballots and absentee votes has favored Begich, a Democrat in a Republican-controlled state, and Begich is now favored to win. Georgia Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss is now facing a heated runoff, in which more campaign cash is being spent than in the first round and John McCain has taken to the campaign trail. In Minnesota, author and radio-host Al Franken trails Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by just 200 votes, the count ongoing.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom dictated that financial minds must view “green technology” as pie in the sky, an unaffordable idealistic quest for something beyond the “easy” solution of endless oil. Then, almost overnight, the financial markets discovered that oil was not infinite, that the entire US economy was beholden to the pricing whims of an international cartel —this was long known, but tolerated—, and failure to go green could cripple the world’s most powerful democracy.
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November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
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November 16, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
Since California voted to ban same-sex marriage —legal there since a state supreme court ruling finding in favor of gay marriage rights on constitutional grounds— on 4 November, there have been daily demonstrations against the ban. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed his hope that the ban will be overturned or repealed. On Saturday, 11 days after the ban was voted in by referendum, a nationwide rally for same-sex marriage rights achieved unprecedented numbers, with a presence in all 50 states.
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Barack Obama’s election victory, making him 44th president of the United States, was resounding not only for its historic significance, not only because the nation faces monumental crises and is calling for serious reform at a potential turning point in political trends, but because mathematically, it was decisive. Obama carried at least 28 states —with Missouri still in recounts—, won more than 65.1 million votes —nearly 8 million more than McCain—, and if McCain takes Missouri and the one unassigned Nebraska vote, his Electoral College margin is 364 to 174.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Republican party has seen virtually every one of its over-arching policy assumptions discredited or rejected, in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It now faces an historic challenge, to reinvent itself in a climate where the other party dominates both houses of Congress and has elected a popular new president by a wide margin. The campaign of Sen. John McCain struggled to overcome the Obama message, in part because it was relying on the assumption that specific Republican party platform planks were the political ideas most en vogue with the electorate, when they were in fact at odds with current economic and political reality.
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November 6, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Sen. Barack Obama, as president-elect, now faces the daunting task of staging a transition from campaign to governing, and from the Bush years to the Obama years, in what must be the most artful and adroit performance of the task seen in decades. Facing two wars, looming multifaceted economic crisis, and the need to overhaul national energy policy and fight environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale, Obama is faced not just with forming a cabinet and White House team, but formulating a strategy for enacting the change he has promised in a time of historic difficulty.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
John McCain used to be a “maverick”, an independent thinker, a rebel against his party’s leadership, and that entailed adopting, promoting and furiously defending ideas that diverged from his party’s stated agenda and its leaders’ most prized political philosophies. He shed the trappings of the true moderate or independent in an apparent effort to win favor among his party’s decision-makers and financial backers, which dampened his appeal as an independent thinker. And most importantly, he seemed blind to the real spirit of the times, which rejected the politics of fear and called for an activist approach to crisis.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I have long felt, as so many Americans do, a profound emotional attachment to the ideals we always speak of when we talk about our founding revolution, our enlightened democracy, our progress toward a freer and more just world. And I have always aspired to see those ideals put on display, not just by an historic moment, but by the collective awareness of millions of impassioned American citizens. This moment in history is a sea change in our collective mindset, and a victory for all Americans.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
President-elect Barack Obama has reportedly offered the post of White House Chief of Staff to Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), considered to be one of the most capable organizers in the House of Representatives, with military experience and a no-nonsense approach to policy. Emanuel, who has not yet accepted or declined the offer, is clearly a force in the House, was instrumental in the gains Democrats achieved in 2006 and 2008, and will have to wrestle with the decision to leave Congress.
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November 5, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
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November 5, 2008 :: staff :: 3 Comments
They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided; too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night – at this defining moment in history – you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do; what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days; what America can do in this New Year. In schools and churches; small towns and big cities; you came together as Democrats, Republicans and Independents to stand up and say that we are one nation; we are one people; and our time for change has come.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has defeated Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to become the 44th president of the United States of America. Around 11pm Eastern Time, American news media and wire services began projecting that enough states would deliver their Electoral College votes to Obama to make him president-elect. Shortly afterward, Sen. John McCain phoned his rival to congratulate him on his historic victory. Sen. Obama is the first African American to win the presidency of the United States.
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November 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
In the state of Virginia, voters coming in from the rain have reportedly had problems when water dripped from their clothes, hands or hair onto paper ballots which later need to be optically scanned. Election officials have reported this may “spoil” the ballots, rendering them unreadable by optical scan machines. In many precincts across the country, long lines or computer glitches, or both, caused a scramble for quick fixes, usually emergency paper ballots, for those waiting on long lines.
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November 4, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
By mid-afternoon, CNN was already reporting record turnout among voters in key battleground states, Virginia and Ohio. Reports from across the nation also seemed to indicate huge turnout in the earliest hours, and radio reports have featured impassioned voters talking of a sleepless pre-election night, and getting on line at predawn hours. Efforts to get out the vote and to suppress the vote have been widely reported in both Virginia and Ohio, and Democrats have been forecasting that higher turnout means new younger and minority voters and a better chance for Obama.
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November 4, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates.
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November 4, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
Early voting —in some states actually in-person absentee voting— has allowed as many as 40% of registered voters in North Carolina to cast ballots already, before the opening of the first polls on Election Day. According to ABC News, in North Carolina more African American voters have already voted than in the 2004 election, and in Georgia some 85% of the 2004 African American turnout have already cast ballots. George Stephanopoulous reports that of so-called “likely voters” who have voted so far, fully 58% were leaning toward Obama, as opposed to 40% for McCain.
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November 4, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Madelyn Payne Dunham, nicknamed “Toot” —grandmother, in Hawaian— by grandson Barack Obama, has passed away, one day before the election which may make him president of the United States. Dunham died after a long struggle with cancer, and the candidate said she passed peacefully in her sleep. He told a rally in Charlotte, NC, that “She’s gone home”, and that it was a difficult joy amid the tragedy that his sister was able to be with her when she passed.
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November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We have seen the old punchcard ballots ridiculed for their potential flaws in 2000, in Florida. We have seen the dangers of touchscreen voting machines almost everywhere they have been used, at one point or another. Indeed, the state of New Jersey is using them even after having commissioned a study that demonstrated comprehensively they could be easily manipulated to swing an election. And none of the solutions we’ve heard seem able to guarantee an errorless or tamper-free count.
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November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
An electronic voting machine made by Premier Election Solutions (Diebold) has been found to flip votes repeatedly to Republican candidate John McCain. A local election official in Adams County responded to the complaint by halting the machine’s use and sequestering it, so it could be examined for evidence of tampering and/or persistent malfunction.
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November 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The confluence of viciously hard economic times and an election that has stoked tensions over social and political conservative values and their place in our future course, pushing ideology to the side —even as vastly divergent approaches to multiple crises play out in the national political discourse—, has illuminated a dark corner of institutional conservatism: the empathy deficit. The struggle of conservative ideologues and politicos to be relevant in the present economic unraveling is tied to a rhetorical habit of demonizing the Other, i.e. the underprivileged, the alien, the non-institutional, the marginalized.
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November 2, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Any individual, be they low-level election officials, state governors, or non-state actors, who participates in an effort to deprive legitimately registered or entitled-to-be-registered voters of their vote, should be prosecuted. The denial of Constitutional rights is not just a civil liberties issue, not simply a matter of accidental incompetence, and when it involves the actual election process, it is an assault on the government of the United States, which is ultimately supposed to be led by the will of the voter.
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October 30, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
There are reports coming out of Virginia suggesting that an unidentified person or group has been distributing fliers targeting minorities and registered Democrats, instructing them incorrectly that Election Day will be Wednesday, November 5. ELECTION DAY IS TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, for everyone who has not voted early or by absentee ballot.
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October 21, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, is the candidate that is best positioned to offer the solutions our nation requires, in these troubled and challenging times. His positive vision of a dynamic American society, capable of innovating to combat a global energy crisis, principled in defending Constitutional law and human rights, combines the open and dynamic nature of American democratic culture with an energetic commitment to tackling new challenges, motivating a resurgence of the kind of major projects that will help rebuild and spur our economy.
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October 20, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
It has for some time been a hallmark of American politics that conservative ideologues speak of “liberals” with disdain and condescension, and liberals view “right-wing” politics as nasty and unsavory. But the recent eruption of anger, vitriol and even violent hatred, from some individuals attending McCain-Palin rallies brings up the question of whether conservatives have blinded themselves to political reality, to the meaning of democracy, to the virtues of balance, by entertaining an irrational hatred of liberals.
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October 20, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Barack Obama has begun to raise the issue of how rival Sen. John McCain plans to pay for added costs in his budget, particularly healthcare, given his tax cut plan and his claims about coverage. According the Wall Street Journal, which cites his own campaign, he will do so with massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Sen. Obama used the figure of an $882 billion cut to Medicare coverage alone.
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October 19, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
In an interview with Meet the Press, former Sec. of State Colin Powell said he knows both John McCain and Barack Obama to be “distinguished Americans, who are patriotic, who are dedicated to the welfare of our country”, criticized his friend Sen. McCain for “a little unsure” what to do about the economic crisis, suggesting he “didn’t have a complete grasp of the economic problems”. Powell also questioned a number of McCain’s judgments on policy and campaign tactics, and praised Sen. Obama’s “intellectual vigor” and “steadiness” in dealing with serious challenges.
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October 19, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Chicago Tribune, conservative monument of American journalism, which has never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president, since 1847, has endorsed Barack Obama, the US senator from Illinois, for president. Perhaps the most poignant phrase for many voters would be “He is ready.” The fact that this was the major sticking point for many suggests the rest of his appeal is an easy sell.
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October 17, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
The US Supreme Court has reversed an order to the state of Ohio to allow the Republican party to organize an effort to question or counter the right of newly registered voters to cast ballots on election day. The Republican party had sought to repeat its efforts in the 2004 election, which led to 300,000 voters being denied the vote, in a state Bush carried by just 190,000 votes, and had won the right to challenge at least 120,000 registrations, possibly more than 200,000.
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October 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Barack Obama appears to have kept his cool, delivered his message and kept his focus firmly on issues and the work of governing. John McCain fired a number of gimic-enabled shots at Obama, but failed to deliver a coherent message, other than his allegation that Obama wants to raise taxes and he would cut them for everyone, a factually untrue claim about his tax proposal.
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October 15, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The monumental series of 7 3-hour-long debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas ended on 15 October 1858, exactly 150 years to the day before tonight’s third Obama-McCain televised 90-minute debate. The two Illinois politicians were competing for one of the state’s two Senate seats, and their epic debates are considered a watershed for intellect in American politics, a transformative political moment and a media revolution that drove democracy’s expansion in human society.
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October 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Sen. John McCain may be scrambling to save his political life. Of course, until the American people vote, it remains true he might win and become the next president of the United States. But the Branchflower report has just found his vice-presidential candidate guilty of abusing her office as Alaska governor, and he has just had to scold his own supporters for espousing racist and paranoid views which his campaign had at least implicitly sought to smear Obama with. His standing in the polls has fallen dramatically —as of today, RCP’s daily tracking poll average projects 313 Electoral College votes going to Obama, 158 to McCain, with 67 “toss up”—, and conservative luminaries are weighing in on his weakness as a candidate.
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October 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has become mired in a controversy over its aggressive personal attacks on Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, which has put the Republican candidate in a supremely awkward position. During a week in which rallies held for his candidacy have featured allegations that Sen. Obama is somehow linked to domestic terrorists or has suspicious overseas supporters, more than once audience members have shouted out threats to Sen. Obama’s life.
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October 9, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago, has suspended law-enforcement support for evictions, expressing outrage at mortgage lenders, and saying too many innocent renters are being forced onto the street with literally zero notice. Sheriff Thomas Dart says all foreclosure-related evictions will be postponed indefinitely, because law-enforcement has “no idea who’s in the home” when they show up to force residents to leave. He says there are too many “unjust” circumstances in which innocent people, whom nobody has informed of the building’s foreclosure, are targetted by evictions.
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October 9, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
Dear Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson: There is grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures. Because regulators are partly responsible for creating the environment that is leading to rising rates of home foreclosure in the subprime mortgage market, I urge you immediately to convene a homeownership preservation summit with leading mortgage lenders, investors, loan servicing organizations, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing-related agencies to assess options for private sector responses to the challenge.
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October 9, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
A Public Policy Polling survey of North Carolina voters gives Sen. Barack Obama a 6% point lead over Sen. John McCain, in a state no Democrat has carried since 1976. Reports suggest that new voter registration favors Democrats 6 to 1, and some have expressed concern that Republican party operatives may try to stop first-time voters from casting votes, challenging their registration or misdirecting them to incorrect polling places. The state may move toward Obama because he is “connecting” with voters on economic issues.
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October 9, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Since Sunday, when the McCain-Palin campaign consciously opted to “go negative”, attacking Obama as having “poor judgment” and “palling around with terrorists”, rallies for Sen. McCain’s candidacy have been marred by what appear to be increasingly hot racial tensions. A spokesman for the campaign has told Café Sentido they “do not play the race card”, but observers have questioned whether there is a conscious effort being made to spark racial or ethnic biases and instill fear in the electorate about Sen. Obama’s background or personal associations.
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October 6, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
The presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) this weekend shifted aggressively to personal attacks on Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) character, openly announcing that they intend to sow doubt in voters’ minds and move the political debate across the nation away from economic issues. McCain’s running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, began attacking Obama’s character, trying to link him to BIll Ayers, a onetime member of the group the Weather Underground. The Obama campaign has responded by putting together a documentary linking Sen. McCain to the savings and loan corruption scandal of the late 1980s.
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October 6, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Sen. John McCain’s campaign has begun to launch personal attacks on Sen. Obama, who appears to have solidified leads in most “battleground states”. Meanwhile, Sen. Obama has said McCain’s campaign is “out of touch, out of ideas and running out of time”, and has assailed McCain’s healthcare plan for raising taxes on working people. McCain’s plan would tax employer-provided healthcare benefits, offering individuals a tax credit for buying their own healthcare. Obama says McCain’s tax credit is insufficient to cover private healthcare costs and will leave people struggling.
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September 30, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
ACORN is an organization that unites and coordinates the efforts of multiple community-organizing groups around the country, focusing originally on housing-availability and inequity issues, and expanding into healthcare rights, civil rights, voter registration and electoral and state-representation reform. The acronym stands for the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now. It was founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1970, in response to the need to deal with a number of civil rights issues in the city.
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September 29, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
With the nation facing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and voices in private finance calling for a major bailout, with the Republican president, his financial advisers, leaders of both parties in Congress calling for a $700 billion bailout package, the US House has voted down the rescue package. The stock market closed with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 777.68 points. Talks of a “done deal” are obviously over, and the administration and Congressional leaders will now be starting over.
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September 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
I want to write about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through meaningful improvements to the human condition. I want to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact becomes clear that seems to limit what can be said about hope: that vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply to it, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.
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September 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was meant to be his answer to the stadium-sized explosion of his rival’s historic address, his moment to demonstrate his own version of leadership. It is now being mocked by political commentators as a ham-fisted attempt at catching the wave. McCain performed rhetorical acrobatics to try to both be like Obama and be like Bush, while supposedly offering something of his own entirely distinct brand of politics. Botched stage-craft was an added drag on the speech’s resonance.
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September 5, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
My heartfelt thanks to all of you who helped me win this nomination and stood by me when the odds were long. I won’t let you down. To Americans who have yet to decide who to vote for, thank you for your consideration and the opportunity to win your trust. I intend to earn it.
Finally, a word to Sen. Obama and his supporters. We’ll go at it over the next two months. That’s the nature of these contests, and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and admiration. Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other. We’re dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. No country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn’t be an American worthy of the name if I didn’t honor Sen. Obama and his supporters for their achievement.
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September 4, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska accepted the Republican party’s nomination for vice president in at their convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. She said she was looking forward to the “challenge of a tough fight against competent opponents”, but wasted no time getting to the red meat. She said she was joining a ticket that would “serve and defend America”, and that John McCain put the “security of the country that he loves” ahead of his own political fate, reminding the audience that McCain said he “would rather lose an election than lose a war”.
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September 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Al Gore’s choice for VP in the 2000 election, and still a self-proclaimed Democrat —though he was voted out in his party’s primary, before winning back his Senate seat as an independent— addressed the Republican National Convention last night, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lieberman enthusiastically endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and said his goal is to work as hard as possible to make him the next president of the United States.
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