Category Archives: Politics: US: 2004 Election

Philadelphia Daily News, GOP fails in effort to move polls:

REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES working to re-elect President Bush submitted last-minute requests in Philadelphia on Friday to relocate 63 polling places.

Bush's Pennsylvania campaign staff filed the requests, using the names of two Republicans running for the U.S. Congress and seven Republican ward leaders.

Of the 63 requests for changes, 53 are in political divisions where the population of white voters is less than 10 percent. …

Bob Lee, voter registration administrator for the City Commission, said the requests appear to be “discriminatory” and were filed too late to be eligible for a hearing on Wednesday.

“They're trying to suppress the vote,” Lee said of Republicans. …

Lee, who has worked for the commission for 21 years, said he became suspicious of the requests because of the last-minute timing, the unusually high number and the locations. …

Requests are sent to hearings before the City Commission after public notices are posted for five days at the polling place, the proposed new polling place and three other places in the division.

Lee said the City Commission on Wednesday will hold its last hearing on polling place changes before the Nov. 2 election.

Since the requests came in on Friday afternoon, he said, there is not time for the public notices.

Then, the understatement of the week,

The requests could potentially confuse voters. The city has already ordered postcards mailed to 1.1 million registered voters before Election Day, directing them to polling places.

Which is of course the whole point. Undoubtedly, Philadelphia is not the only place this will happen. And in Florida, if you vote in the wrong place, your vote will not be counted (FWIW, the court reached the only possible conclusion given the wording of the state legislation).

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the Justice Department has just moved to block a Democratic lawsuit challenging a similar rule blocking the counting of 'provisional ballots' when a registered voter appears at the wrong precinct.

Why can't we allow people to vote in Post Offices or something? And why, in this computerized age, is it necessary to force people to vote in a given precinct?

The Carpetbagger Report: The media has its priorities; are they yours?

Words devoted to the Mary Cheney “story” in the Washington Post over the past three days: 1,099

Words devoted in the Washington Post over the past three days to the fact that the president's top political aide testified before a federal grand jury on Friday as part of an ongoing criminal investigation of the Bush White House: 438

The New York Times' ratio was even worse. The manufactured Mary Cheney flap has generated 3,074 words since Saturday (from two news items and two op-eds) in the paper of record; Rove's testimony's received 813 words.

Meet the Press, meanwhile, devoted 1,055 words to Mary Cheney yesterday; Rove's grand jury testimony wasn't mentioned at all.

The Washington Post even polled on the Mary Cheney “story” on Friday (64% said Kerry's comment was “inappropriate”). There were no questions in the poll about the ongoing criminal investigation of the White House.

I'd like to see a poll about whether Bush saying he never said he didn't care about Osama was “inappropriate”. No. How about a poll asking if invading Iraq with no plans at all for winning the peace was “inappropriate”?

Putin urges voters to back Bush. Actually the strangest part of this story isn't that Putin supports a fellow Putinizer, but rather the reasons given for that support.

Putin claims to oppose the Iraq war, but to think that the 'terrorist attacks' against US forces “are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat 'could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world.'”

In other words, if you were to substitute “US” for “Bush” in that statetment, Putin's postiion on Iraq is much more like Kerry's than like Bush's: it was a mistake to go in, but now that we're there a pullout would be an error too.

Fellow member of the reality-based community Matthew Yglesias looks into the abyss that he brilliantly labels the 'Putanization of Amercian life'. It's ugly down there.

Matthew Yglesias: Threats

Christopher Hitchens, in one of the few insightful things he's said about the war on terrorism, took the chance in his final Nation column to criticize those on the left “who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” At the time, I thought it was a very sharp remark. I never supported Bush and always hoped he would lose in 2004 since I thought his policies were misguided, but many people seemed to me at the time to have lost all sense of perspective about who the really threatening enemies were. Suskind's article along with other pieces of evidence of what one might call the creeping Putinization of American life (the Sinclair incident, the threatening letter to Rock The Vote, the specter of the top official in the House of Representatives making totally baseless charges of criminal conduct against a major financier of the political opposition [shades of Mikhail Khodorovsky], the increasing evidence that the 'terror alert' system is nothing more than a political prop, the 'torture memo' asserting that the president is above the law, the imposition of rigid discipline on the congress, the abuse of the conference committee procedure, the ability of the administration to lie to congress without penalty, the exclusion of non-supporters from Bush's public appearances, etc.) are beginning to make me think this assessment may have been misguided. Terrorist forces operating in and around Chechnya have done some horrible things — I was in Moscow for the big apartment bombings — but ultimately the most harmful thing they have done was to enable Putin to tighten his grip on power.

Update: For an example of how common culture produces similar responses, see this post by Kevin Drum on the same Yglesias text, using the same “abyss” metaphor for its headline!

The great Electoral Vote Predictions Blog summarizes today's top polling news including this story which I think is the only piece of signal amidst the week's polling noise:

Frank Luntz, the top Republican pollster wrote in the Financial Times: “Step by step, debate-by-debate, John Kerry has addressed and removed many remaining doubts among uncommitted voters. My own polling research after each debate suggests a rather bleak outlook for the Bush candidacy: many who still claim to be 'undecided' are in fact leaning to Mr. Kerry and are about ready to commit.” In a world where the spinmeisters constantly claim that their horse can not only walk on water, but also trot and gallop on it, having a top GOP strategist with access to real data say his horse is sinking fast is ominous for the Bush campaign. Read the whole story here.