I've been meaning for the past couple of days to put together a summary of my arguments for voting for Obama. I may still get around to it, but in the meantime the New Yorker has posted a much better article than I could ever write.
You can read that article here.
Every few years the Republicans come out screaming about voter fraud. Anyone who has really looked at this knows it's basically BS. The reality isn't that there aren't people out there that might like to vote fraudulently, it's that there isn't a good way to actually do it. You just can't really cast enough ballots to move an election. Talking Points Memo has a really good breakdown/summary of the current ACORN mess.
Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.
I was reading this entry on Feministe today and it really struck me as important.
"When anti-choice extremists were terrorizing American women and their doctors, John McCain had multiple opportunities to make what should have been an easy choice," said Kathryn Kolbert, President of People For the American Way, and a longtime women's rights advocate who successfully argued a crucial abortion rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. "But he chose political expediency over law and order. He didn't say a word when Marylin Shannon sympathized with an attempted killer. He voted against the clinic access bill even as everyday Americans were being assaulted and besieged by domestic terrorists. As someone who faced repeated threats for work on behalf of reproductive rights, I am deeply disturbed by John McCain's willingness to stand with and side with sympathizers and enablers of domestic terrorism."
On the other hand, we have McCain opposing stopping domestic terrorism against abortion clinics. This isn't from back in the 60s, this is from the past few months. People who attack abortion clinics are terrorists by any reasonable definition. They attack in order to terrorize the doctors, staff and patients of the clinics.
Ugh.
I've been reading the "History News Network" for a little while now and sometimes there are really interesting articles. This one is a great example.
There is another way to explain the Great Depression, of course. It requires looking at the changing structure or "long waves" of economic growth and development, digging all the while for the "real" rather than the merely monetary factors. This explanatory procedure focuses on "the fundamentals," and typically treats the financial system as a tertiary sector that merely registers the value of goods on offer--except when it becomes the repository of surplus capital generated elsewhere, that is, when personal savings and corporate profits cannot find productive outlets and flow instead into speculative channels.
It's worth reading, but probably only if you actually like economic theory.
Another great post at Firedoglake.
Principle no 1.: No household should pay a housing cost (mortgage payment - principal + Interest) that exceeds 30% of their gross income( before any deductions) as reported on their latest Federal Tax Return.
I always thought that part was kind of obvious. Read the rest of it.
