The best poll tracker

The best poll tracker can be found at:
Los Angeles Times - latimes.com. Its not that its information is the best, its that it is the most fun to play with.


However, the problem I find is that it's really hard to make Kerry win. Without Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, we lose. We need Michigan (which has had a huge Bush run-up). We need Pennsylvania (where farmers are polling in greater numbers than city people (because W stands for White).


Florida is a lost cause. Lets give up and try somewhere else. Too many rednecks in florida wearing the flag and shooting the vermin (oh and piss-poor, which explains why they keep sending me their tax money!)

Ohio. Beautiful Ohio. I never thought I would utter those words. But we really need Ohio. And Ohio really needs jobs.

Forbes.com: Economy Grows at 3.7 Percent Annual Rate

More great news. This is on the economy. The Bush people have been telling us we have had a recovery. Hopefully this will be the last economic report that reflects his "recovery" and his policies directed toward "economic growth." Hopefully we do not give him a mandate on destroying our economy.

Forbes.com: Economy Grows at 3.7 Percent Annual Rate

Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths (washingtonpost.com)

For those who say the 1100 dead American troops was worth the cost. For those who say the Iraqis welcome us. For those who say Iraq is better off now than they were under Saddam. For those who say Saddam was a monster, and killed thousands of civilians.

---

I think I see why "they hate freedom."

Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths (washingtonpost.com)

Senator Dayton (D-MN) responds to fear mongering

Senator Defends Shutting Hill Office (washingtonpost.com)


Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota closed his office in DC and sent his staff home this week. He also advises against anyone visiting Captial Hill between now and Tuesday.


The part of this I love, is it is a tongue-in-cheek response to the repeated fear mongering by the "intelligence" services. The CIA-FBI presented a scenerio where, "al Qaeda would use weapons of mass destruction to launch multiple simultaneous attacks on the United States and overwhelm the U.S. government."


Hoot!


The city of Washington and other leaders on both sides of the isle have begun making fun of him. Making fun of him for taking our intelligence reports seriously.

READ THAT AGAIN. They are making fun of him for taking our intelligence reports seriously



I love Minnesota.

The Onion | Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3

The Onion | Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3

Protect the voters!

Love him, hate him, whatever. Michael Moore is a powerful foe. And he is using some of his political cache to try to dissuade voter intimidation, fraud, and irregularities. Also, you may want to print a copy or distribute this. It is a card that has all the correct information on how to avoid disenfranchisement and protect your vote. If you print one out, give the other 3 on the sheet to your friends, or somehow make sure people who need it can get to it.

http://homepage.mac.com/civan93/ep_card.pdf

We have to stop him. George Bush is a monkey. They have tried to disenroll 35,000 people so far in Ohio. In Florida they have been more successful. In Nevada, they caught a company the GOP employed to process voter applications tearing up democrats registrations.

Get out the VOTE!

Get out the vote! Send a card, make your friends vote....

Senator Kerry in Albuquerque

Senator Kerry stopped in Albuquerque yesterday to rally supporters. It was his third stop of a very long day beginning in Green Bay with a middle stop in Las Vegas, NV. On stage here is Chester Nez, one of the surviving Navajo Codetalkers from WWII. He blessed Senator Kerry with a traditional blessing, the same way he did the Red Sox at the beginning of the season, and again after game 3 vs. The Yankees.

Governor Richardson noted that the crowd exceeded 18,000. I worked the crowd with the other MoveOn Pac volunteers, signing up volunteers to canvass this weekend.

Kerry gave a rousing speech, discussed some of Bush's miserable failures and spoke some really interesting Spanish with a John Kerry accent. According to the Daily Show report, he also spoke French to Haitians in Florida. Pander. Pander. Hey, whatever works.

The Bush protesters were in force. They ... uh, well. W stands for White. There were approximately 30 Bushies out there and they all were wearing the most adorable t-shirts with a "Heinz" ketchup label, that reads "Kerry Flip Flop Loser" Clever. Very clever. That stunning republican wit. Anyhow, the age in the W crowd ranged from about 15 to 40, with 80% of the people being too young to vote. Hitler Youth anyone? 2 degrees from fascism. One interesting thing is that all of those kids were white. There was only one person of (moderate) color (light brown, perhaps 25% Hispanic) in their crowd. They also were wearing shirts adorning their high school, which is the one known for being the rich, white school. If that is the best they can do is rich, white, teenagers, New Mexico is totally a blue state.

Latest Zogby Poll Results

The new polls indicate that this race is going to be a hard race for John Kerry. It is not looking good in the swing states.


PLEASE HELP IF YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE

Illegal disenfranchisement of college students

Recently in New Mexico, a group of politicians attempted to force tens of thousands of newly registered voters to meet strict ID requirements. The move could have kept thousands of our peers in New Mexico from voting this November, but thanks to the work of our New Voters Project organizers on the ground in New Mexico, the judge dismissed the case.

In another instance, county District Attorney Oliver Kitzman tried to intimidate Prairie View A&M University students in Texas from voting. He went so far as to threaten to prosecute students who declared Prairie View as their permanent residence.

At George Mason University, 2,000 student voter registration forms were rejected by the local board of elections because students used their campus addresses. Election officials even called up some students and tried to get them to change their campus addresses back to their home addresses. Eventually the students who tried to exercise their right to vote at school were told the registration forms had been lost!

Sign the Petition for Student Voting Rights today, and help protect not only your own rights, but the rights of our peers nationwide to go to the polls in November. Sign the petition today at this link:

http://www.newvotersproject.org/petition

Chick Tracts Against Bush

Everyone needs to read this one. We now have Christians making Chick Tracts against Bush. He is not a good Christian. He is evil.

You can download it at the following locations:

• My .mac account
• Prohosting http://blake.prohosting.com/psharker/

You will need to download the us-mammon.pdf file

Early Voter Irregularities in NM

With all the hubbub and "liberal propaganda" about the possibility of the Diebold machines "ensuring Bush wins the election" ... It seems like when someone, like oh say the president of the Albuquerque City Council, Michael Cadigan complains "I cast my vote for president. I voted for Kerry and a check mark for Bush appeared." ... SOMEONE WOULD LISTEN.

But no, Clerk Mary Herrera rules that it was user error. For example, could have "leaned his palm on the touch screen and it hit the wrong button." An allegation he strongly denies.

Or, he could have voted for Kerry and it registered Bush because the MACHINES HAVE NO BACKUP OR INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION. No, I'm not truly concerned that the machines will perform in an unfair manner, but rather, that if an error occurs like Mr. Cadigan encountered, that many people would not notice. People, in general, are not very observant.


PS. New update: Read followup post
http://civan93-politicalrants.blogspot.com/2004/11/voter-irregularities-and-followup.html

Letter to the editors of various papers

For a man who does not admit ever having made a mistake, the president sure has a poor record. Today's news about the Al Qaqaa ammo dump is just one more miserable failure of the Bush Administration.

760,000 lbs of explosive materials were stolen from this ammo site.The administration knew of this site and its contents *before* the invasion of Iraq. For reference, the bomb that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland used less than one pound of this same explosive.

Imagine the carnage that 760,000 lbs of this explosive could cause. If one pound can kill 300 people, 760,000 lbs would be more than enough to kill each and every American soldier currently serving in Iraq, all of our active duty National Gaurdsmen, every civilian contractor, with enough left over to wage a massive war of terror in the US. This is not a president who is strong against terror.

The Bush administration lied to the american public by telling us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, they let the real weapons, the ones that actually exist, the ones we actually knew about before the invastion, fall into the hands of Al Qaeda and their allies against the US. This is not a president who is strong against terror.

It is time someone was accountable for the mistakes of this president, other than the American people. We need a leader who will protect the American People. That leader is not George W. Bush.

Letter from the Democrats: Bush Incompetence

Even before invading Iraq, the Bush administration knew that a huge facility called Al Qaqaa contained nearly 380 tons of deadly explosives. Despite the fact that they knew exactly where this facility was and what was there, they took no action to secure or protect the site. Due to the stunning incompetence of the Bush administration and their incomprehensible failure to plan, these explosives have disappeared.

Let me put this in perspective -- the bomb that took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland used less than one pound of this same explosive. There were 760,000 pounds at Al Qaqaa.

You can read the article by visiting:

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/news/news_2004_1025.html

Reply from Taco Cabana

Sandy Salinas to me 8:16am (6 hours ago)


Mr. Gist, your email to Carrol's Corp. was forwarded to me as I manage marketing and advertising for the Taco Cabana brand at the subsidiary's main office in San Antonio, Texas. Regarding your request, Taco Cabana is currently not on the air and has no plans to advertise via broadcast through the end of 2004. For future reference, Taco Cabana employs a media guideline that eliminates programs that are excessively violent or include strong sexual content, and are derogatory to any individual, group or culture. As such, the program you described, "Stolen Honor", would not have been included in Taco Cabana's media schedule.

Sandy Salinas
Sr. Director of Marketing

National Debt, Interesting report

A very real, really scary report on our national debt.

Thanks to Alistair and Congressman John Tanner of Tennessee for bringing this Treasury report to our attention. Note: This is legit, from the treas.gov website.

Tanner went on to say that we are going in debt faster than our Economic Growth can run to catch up.....He also said that if all these countries wanted to tie a noose around our necks and demand the notes to be paid off now......we would be in deep trouble. Mind you this is all on top of...an over $7.1 trillion National Debt, a deficit last year of almost 300 billion, and so far this year a deficit of 500 billion, plus a Trade Deficit of $46 billion......Tanner also pointed out that we are borrowing an average of $1.1 billion a day....and we are paying interest with all these countries combined at $1 billion per hour......

Scary hotels. Need boycott

It has been told to this reporter by a reputible source that we have a new enemy to watch.

Here's an item to make your hair curl: a friend of mine manages a hotel in the Woodfin Suites / Chase Suites chain. Perhaps you have seen these hotels. We have one in Emeryville and they are scattered throughout the US. The owner is an arch-conservative who lives in San Diego. He has issued a directive to all Woodfin hotels that they must alter their tv station lineup on all the guest room televisions in their hotels. All news stations except Fox News are to be removed. All tvs are to be set to Fox News unless the customer complains and actually asks for other news stations to be set on their tvs. (The owner's name is Sam Hardage. He's a leading Republican and here's a story about him from 1998 if you're interested: http://www.sandiegometro.com/1998/jul/coverstory.html).

The Lone Star ICONOCLAST - Editorial, Opinion of the Publishers

Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford Texas is endorsing John Kerry in this upcoming election. This is perhaps the most succinct argument against Bush I have read. And it's his hometown paper. And yes, it is a bit ... uh ... iconoclastic, however ithey supported him in 2000.

Grassroots efforts for the campaign

A great article explaining what different groups are doing to support their man. Very interesting and inspiring.

Bill Maher speaks out ... to Canadians

Interesting article. Scathing perspective.

Q:Thousand, well more than a thousand, hundreds wounded. You've got the situation –

Maher: And the plan itself seems to be, if not completely out of reach, uh at the point where, is it salvageable? I don't know. I mean it doesn't seem like it. I think we controlled more of the country when Saddam Hussein was in office. I'm not saying that as a joke. I really mean that. You know when Saddam was there, we had the north, we had the south – they were called no-fly zones – he had the middle part. I don't think we have that much now. I really don't. So the people who we are apparently training to take over this, they are Iraqis, they're young men, they're working with the insurgents. Openly. You know it's just like Vietnam…