The Republicans dawdled - Now Hurricane Matthew could spread ZIka problem up the Atlantic coast

How Hurricane Matthew Could Make the Zika Virus Exponentially Worse The virus is likely to spread from Florida in the aftermath.

The largest concentration of Zika cases in the United States is in and around Dade County, which may be spared the direct impact of the storm, but a huge rain event like Matthew quite obviously would leave massive amounts of standing water within which Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carried the virus, could breed and thrive.

(A large part of the hot zone is at an elevation of nine feet above sea level. Some predictions have the area being inundated by a 12-foot storm surge.)

And it is not just puddles, either. Think about how water can pool in piles of debris, and in scattered wreckage. Think about endless heaps of worthless household junk. Think about thousands of evacuees leaving the current hot zones in and around Miami. Now think about all the crews coming from all over the country to help with the recovery effort over the next several months, walking amid the debris, turning it over in the heat that always follows a hurricane. Now think about all those crews going back to Iowa or Maine.

The most direct precedent probably is the experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A 2008 report from the Centers for Disease Control demonstrated how the mosquito-borne West Nile virus spiked in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

The immediate increase in cases may be attributed to increased human exposure to mosquitoes. Tens of thousands of persons in the hurricane-affected region were living in damaged housing or were waiting outside for days to be evacuated. The sudden decrease in WNND cases in the hurricane-affected areas 3 weeks after landfall could be attributed to reduced human exposure caused by eventual evacuation and aerial application of insecticides. The increase in WNND incidence in 2006 might also be due to increased human-mosquito exposure as a result of mosquito larval habitat creation (root ball voids from fallen trees, and flooded abandoned swimming pools), continued substandard living conditions, and increased outdoor reconstruction activities.

Ousted Florida Republicans, including ex-Gov. Crist, say voter suppression was state GOP's goal

From Daily Kos: Ousted Florida Republicans, including ex-Gov. Crist, say voter suppression was state GOP's goal

The former chairman of the Florida Republican Party and former Gov. Charlie Crist, along with two of the party's consultants, say the Grand Old Party curtailed early voting in the state for the express purpose of reducing turnout by Democrats. Although citizen advocates have been saying for more than a year that such efforts in Florida and elsewhere were intended to hurt Democrats at the polls, these insider comments are the strongest evidence yet of the GOP's unAmerican shenanigans directed at curtailing the vote. Not just of Democrats, but of African American voters.

Dara Kam and John Lantigua at the Palm Beach Post quoted Jim Greer, the former state Republican chairman:

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants. [...]

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.” ...

“The sad thing about that is yes, there is prejudice and racism in the party but the real prevailing thought is that they don’t think minorities will ever vote Republican,” he said. “It’s not really a broad-based racist issue. It’s simply that the Republican Party gave up a long time ago ever believing that anything they did would get minorities to vote for them.”

The law that was passed in 2011 with supermajorities of Republicans in the Florida legislature cut early voting days from 14 to eight, placed restrictions on voter registration efforts that were so onerous the League of Women Voters stopped its efforts in the state and made it more difficult for voters who changed counties between elections to vote, a move that affected minority citizens more than whites.

Greer is under indictment for a campaign fundraising scheme that allegedly put $200,000 into his pocket. He claims party officials knew what he was doing and didn't object and he has sued them for money he says they owe him. The party's current chairman says anything Greer says should be viewed in light of the indictment. In fact, Greer made similar allegations last July during a court hearing on his lawsuit.

The problem with the current chairman's line of defense is that Crist backs up what Greer says. And so do two current GOP consultants, one of whom didn't want his name used:

Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Republicans, said he knew targeting Democrats was the goal.

“In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in 2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close, but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.

Crist said that after he extended early voting hours by executive decree in 2008, some Republicans told him, "You just gave the election to Barack Obama.”

Republicans Call Obama's Tax, Program Cuts Program: Class Warfare

Obama Plan to Cut Deficit Will Trim Spending by $3 Trillion
By HELENE COOPER, New York Times, published: September 18, 2011

First half of the article reads as follows. (Click here for complete New York Times article including Republican claims of class warfare.)

(I would argue from the left that Pres. Barack Obama's Medicare, Medicaid cuts are class warfare; the Republican right call Obama's tax policies class warfare. The problem is that we have no left third party to challenge him.)

WASHINGTON — President Obama will unveil a deficit-reduction plan on Monday that uses entitlement cuts, tax increases and war savings to reduce government spending by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, administration officials said.

The plan, which Mr. Obama will lay out Monday morning at the White House, is the administration’s opening move in sweeping negotiations on deficit reduction to be taken up by a joint House-Senate committee over the next two months. If a deal is not struck by Dec. 23, cuts could take effect automatically across government agencies.

Mr. Obama will call for $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy, through a combination of closing loopholes and limiting the amount that high earners can deduct. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. Administration officials said that the Medicare cuts would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age.

Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from the ending of the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy.

That veto threat will put the president on a direct collision course with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who said last week that he would not support any legislation that included revenue increases in the form of higher taxes.

Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to receive sharp criticism from Congressional Republicans, who on Sunday were already taking apart one element of the proposal that the administration let out early: the so-called Buffett Rule. The rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, who has complained that he is taxed at a lower rate than his employees — calls for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers.

That proposal, which was disclosed on Saturday, was met with derision Sunday by Republican lawmakers, who said it amounted to “class warfare” and a political tactic intended to portray his opponents as indifferent to the hardships facing middle-class Americans.

Obama calls out GOP for Holding FEMA Funds Hostage

The House Republicans are refusing to give more money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA.
(This is a particularly big issue right now, since the money could be of great used for helping the people that are suffering from the effects of Hurricane Irene, and FEMA has run out of money. Of course it has run out of money: this year has seen so much extreme weather, and we have four months to go in the remainder of 2011.)

So, it was quite proper when President Barack Obama criticized the GOP for holding FEMA funds hostage.
Los Angeles Times: White House blasts GOP over FEMA funding".

Now, one wonders whether some middle of the road voters in flood besieged New Jersey will reconsider support for Republican congressional or presidential candidates. Just consider how the supposedly moderate N.J. Governor Chris Christie has taken the state out of the Northeast carbon cap compact.
Will weather disaster-plagued districts flip from Republican to Democratic in the Presidential and Congressional votes in the 2012 general election? Just note (on the 2010 Congressional elections map below) the red district from northeastern North Carolina to New Jersey. Will voters see the light about global warming (as opposed to deniers Rick Perry and Chris Christie?

Well, maybe it will take more 100 degree days and destructive hurricanes. Click on this link for "Natural disaster risk assessment reveals most and least dangerous cities" at AgentGenius.com for natural disaster risk. The very Republican red Southeast has the most cities that are indicated to be the riskiest in which to live.

ALEC -bolder than shadow government, Blatantly pull strings

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), after a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, has been exposed by John Nichols in the nation, in "ALEC Exposed".

One contributor at democraticunderground.com

Who are your state ALEC members? Maybe you have Billionaires that can thank them.

Find a list of who has been exposed so far.
http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

What is ALEC ?
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills.

More than 98% of ALEC's revenues come from sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations. Each corporate member pays an annual fee of between $7,000 and $25,000 a year, and if a corporation participates in any of the nine task forces, additional fees apply, from $2,500 to $10,000 each year. ALEC also receives direct grants from corporations, such as $1.4 million from ExxonMobil from 1998-2009.

Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called "model bills" reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations. Through ALEC, corporations have "a VOICE and a VOTE" on specific changes to the law that are then proposed in your state. DO YOU?

Thanks to annm4peace at democraticunderground.com.

Speaking of Koch, Walker: CMD report shows money chain from wealthy interests to Republican Governors

According to Common Dreams and the Center for Media and Democracy report that they cite,
(NSFW PUN IN SPOOF POSTER AT END OF THIS POST)
The key beginnings of the article, February 23, 2011, at commondreams.org:

A new investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy documents the big money funneled by one of the richest men in America and one of the richest corporations in the world to put controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in office.

The Republican Governors Association and the Kochs' Investment in Scott Walker
Walker was elected just over three months ago on the heels of an exceptionally expensive gubernatorial race in the Badger State, fueled by groups funded by the Koch brothers, David and Charles. David Koch, the son of a radical founding member of the John Birch Society, which has long been obsessed with claims about socialism and advocated the repeal of civil rights laws, personally donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) in June of last year. This was the most he had ever personally given to that group. (Fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch matched Koch's donation to the RGA with a $1 million donation from his company News Corporation, parent company of FOX "News" Channel.)

A PICTURE, WITH A VULGAR PUN, FITTING A VULGAR PAR, RUINING AMERICAN POLITICS:

States' redistricting: brace yourselves for the 2010s as a Republican decade

The coming Republican decade derives from state level Republican lawmakers' self-serving redistricting.

This will make the task of progressives' pushing for electoral victories much more difficult.

The November 2, 2010 Republican sweep of the elections handed state-level Republicans great redistricting power.
Mother Jones explains. Read: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/republican-decade-congressional-redistricting

Not a fan of your new GOP-dominated House of Representatives? You'd better get used to it. After winning almost unprecedented power over the congressional redistricting process, Republicans are poised to lock in their gains for a decade or more. And there's very little the Democrats can do to stop them. This year, the Dems could draw less than half the districts the GOP does.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

The Republican wave couldn't have come at a worse time for Dems. America's once-a-decade census has wrapped up, and many states are due to change the boundaries of their congressional districts. Population-based adjustments mean that slower-growing states (like Ohio) will lose seats, while faster-growing states (like Florida) will gain them.

The only solace is that rising Hispanic populations in Sun Belt states will lead to realignment of states to blue state or purple state status. Witness the strong Latino support for Democratic candidates in this week's elections in California and Nevada.

Gov. Jindal's lie about his Hurricane Katrina role

Childish, disaster, these were words, not only used by Democrats, and also by Republicans.
From the Associated Press, on GOP-leaning commentators' reactions:

David Brooks, a conservative New York Times columnist who has criticized aspects of the stimulus plan, nonetheless called Jindal's arguments "insane" and tone-deaf given the dire economic challenges the country faces.
"To come up in this moment in history with a stale, 'Government is the problem, you can't trust the federal government' is just a disaster for the Republican Party," Brooks said on PBS' "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." "It's not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is."

Fox News commentator Juan Williams focused on Jindal's delivery.
"It came off as amateurish, and even the tempo in which he spoke was singsongy," Williams said, adding that the content of the speech was "very simplistic and almost childish."

So, Gov. Bobby Jindal (La.) will sit on the shelf of buffoonish Republican "leaders," and "stars."
And several Republican governors will attract a lot of voter anger in 2010, over their rejection of unemployment compensation aid. News reports have already registered voter anger at governors that that have rejected federal unemployment aid.
Frank Rich has pointed out that Gov. Jindal now has a budget with a $1.7 million deficit; in his campaign he offered in his campaign, and a promise of some kind of "alternative" administration.
GOV. JINDAL'S KATRINA LIE
Talking Points Memo has pointed out that Jindal's claim that he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a sheriff that was trying to circumnavigate bureaucratic red tape.

Jindal had described being in the office of Sheriff Harry Lee "during Katrina," and hearing him yelling into the phone at a government bureaucrat who was refusing to let him send volunteer boats out to rescue stranded storm victims, because they didn't have the necessary permits. Jindal said he told Lee, "that's ridiculous," prompting Lee to tell the bureaucrat that the rescue effort would go ahead and he or she could arrest both Lee and Jindal.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal's presence in Lee's office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story's intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn't there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

And TPM placed this episode in the larger context, connecting it to the GOP's fight against onerous government regulation: "There's a larger point here, though. The central anecdote of the GOP's prime-time response to President Obama's speech, intended to illustrate the threat of excessive government regulation, turns out to have been made up."

But overall, Jindal failed in the Republicans' quest to resuscitate their ideology that minimal government involvement is best for a comfortable country. Their impact, via the Gingrich Congress in the 1990s and the Bush presidency prove the contrary.

Rep. Frank points out Repub. hypocrisy on one-party government

Republicans want to have their cake and eat it too.

Through most of Pres. George W. Bush's tenure (six years) Republicans controlled the White House, the House, the Senate. As Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.) said on Meet the Press, the Republicans had no reservations about governing with one-party government.

Now that the Democrats won their greatest presidential victory in over 40 years, and have secured both houses, now they rant, along with their Rush Limbaugh / Bill O'Reilly allies, against Democratic one party government.

RNC candidate in racially exclusive club? --I'm shocked

Recall, the collaborationist French head of the local police, Captain Renault in "Casablanca," with his disingenuous "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here"?
My sarcastic shock arrives to this case of Katon Dawson, a candidate for the Republican National Committee. Talking Points Memo reports that he has an unsavory past, particularly, membership in a whites-only country club. As the author, Greg Sargent notes, this kind of information does nothing to dispel the association of the GOP with insensitive, small-minded racism of the past, rather than a modern expansive posture, welcoming people of diverse backgrounds.

Now here's a good way for the GOP to make the case that it hasn't been reduced to a southern regional rump party that's held hostage by intolerant crackpots: Elect as the new chairman of the Republican National Committee a southerner who just resigned a longtime membership in a whites-only country club.

Katon Dawson, the South Carolina GOP chairman, announced his candidacy for RNC chair yesterday.

And guess what: Back in September, when Dawson was first quietly laying the groundwork for his RNC run, The State newspaper [of Columbia, South Carolina] reported that he resigned his membership in the nearly 80-year-old Forest Lake Club. Members told the newspaper at the time that the club's deed has a whites-only restriction and has no black members.

Dawson claimed to the paper that he'd actually been working since August to change the club's admission practices after reading about them in the press. Nonetheless, his membership could become an issue in the RNC chair race.

After all, the paper says he was a member for 12 years, so it seems like a pretty fair question to ask whether he started working to change the club's rules this summer, and then resigned, in preparation for his RNC chair candidacy.

That seems like a particularly relevant question when you recall that the case some GOPers made against Obama over his ties to Reverend Wright was that his supposed silence in the face of Wright's rantings should raise questions about Obama's patriotism.

What's more, The State said that Dawson resigned the club after it became known that the paper was getting ready to report his membership.

Either way, it's hard to see how it sends a winning message for the GOP to pick as its chief strategist and public face someone who was a member of a club where the first African American president in history apparently need not apply. Ah, those good old Repubs.

IT expert compelled by fed. court to testify on '04 Ohio election administration

e Pluribus Media Journal reported that today, Monday November 4, Computer IT expert Mike Connell will be forced by a federal judge to testify about what he knew about the construction of computer architecture in the 2004 election in Ohio.

By veteran Ohio politics reporter John Michael Spinelli:

Columbus, Ohio: With only a couple more days until the nation votes, the news from yesterday's federal court hearing in Cleveland that Mike Connell, an IT expert who was working for then-Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in Ohio on election nights in 2004 and 2006, will come in to testify on what he knows about the computer architecture setup on those election nights and whether Bush wrongfully won Ohio and a second term in the White House and whether such systems still exist, is as nail biting as any final episode of "24" when anti-terrorist maverick agent Jack Bauer saves the day by neutralizing a nuclear bomb from exploding.

In an email message to OhioNewsBureau Saturday, chief plaintiff lawyer Clifford O. Arnebeck, whose 2006 lawsuit alleging voter suppression in 2004 has now morphed into an attempt to prevent the possible corrupt activities that a man of interest like Connell can shed light on from happening again in three days, was in the Carl Stokes Federal Court Building in Cleveland Friday, along with Connell and his trio of defense attorneys. "At the end of the day yesterday at the US District Court, Judge Solomon Oliver denied Michael Connell's motion to quash the subpoena issued for his deposition testimony, and ordered the deposition to take place at noon on Monday November 3, 2008 in Cleveland," Arnebeck wrote.

Arnebeck and others have long known that Connell was a key inside IT contractor for Ken Blackwell in the administration of the 2004 and 2006 elections, at the same time he was managing the IT function for the Bush Presidential campaigns and other Republican partisan campaigns, from 2000 to 2004 to 2006.

Arnebeck and his his cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore , who is lending his credibility and knowledge to the allegation contained in the King Lincoln case before US District Judge Algernon in Columbus, have identified Connell as a key witness to Karl Rove's various maneuvers affecting elections during this decade.

Connell's defense attorneys, from the powerful Columbus law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan and Aronoff , have sought to delay their client having to sit and testify until after Tuesday's General Election. Connell, who has worked for the Bush family for decades, with assignments that included working in various positions for Jeb and George W. Bush, switched Republican teams a while back and teamed up with Arizona Sen. John McCain. The underdog Republican has in the remaining weeks of this election exuded a unique air of confidence that he can win Ohio, and maybe other states, despite trailing his opposition in most states. This air of supreme confidence troubles Arnebeck and Spoonamore, who supports McCain and knows Connell from professional acquaintances. In Ohio, depending on what polls are used, the race between the two is either within the margin of error (meaning it's a statistical dead heat) or shows Obama up by as many as 12 percentage points.

Election watchers and researchers who have been tracking the trail of Connell through their own methods of cyber sleuthing for years, believe Connell and his associates may have compromised the presidential election in Ohio in 2004 by inserting a computer, among other tactics, into the Ohio secretary of state's vote information transferal system. Such tampering, they say, could explain how votes were "tuned" to Bush and away from Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president that year. Experts, such asSpoonamore, an expert on data security, thought the election results turned odd in a dozen or so Ohio counties late on Election Day.

Gleaned from privileged sources, Arnebeck thinks Connell will "not lie" if he's asked pointed questions on what he knows about the work he and his company did for Blackwell then, and whether any vestiges of that work, such as secret cyber back-doors or other computer architecture work, still exist and whether they are in place to again flip votes from Obama to McCain for this election like some believe happened four years ago.

The reference to the popular TV series "24" may not be so far fetched as it seems. The star of that series is always chasing the bad guys against a ticking clock that usually has some explosive device attacked to it. The explosive device in Ohio, while not a bomb with devastating potential, could be aDoomesday Machine for voting that operates to the benefit of Republicans when the vote is close enough, as it could be in Ohio, so that the cyber thievery of the system can do its work with little to no detection.

"This sends a signal to every member of Karl Rove's team of 'electricians' assigned to fix vote counts in Tuesday's election. When you turn a switch to flip a lot of votes, just think of it as turning the key on a jail house door, behind which you will be spending a lot of years," Arnebeck warned Rove and others who have malicious ideas about subverting the will of voters, as he suspects occurred during previous elections.

Obama to have bipartisan cabinet

Barack Obama has said that he will appoint a bipartisan cabinet. This is disappointing. The Republicans have not pursued wise policies. How could Obama or we be sure that a Republican cabinet secretary is following an Obama/Democratic vision?
From Reuters, in the New York Times:
Obama Says Would Include Republicans In Cabinet

SUNRISE, Florida (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday he would include Republicans in his Cabinet if he wins the election.

Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois, also said he had "some pretty good ideas" about people he might tap for senior government jobs, though he emphasized he is focused for now on the final days of the campaign and takes nothing for granted....

Obama said he "absolutely" considered it important to have Republicans in the Cabinet but he sidestepped a question on whether he would ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his job. There has been speculation that either Obama or his Republican rival, John McCain, might ask Gates to stay on.

"I'm not going to get into details," Obama said, but he added that national security policy, in particular, should be nonpartisan.

Other people mentioned as possible defense secretary picks in an Obama administration include former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska....

Interview video clip of Obama with Charlie Gibson, on cabinet.

GOP operative, ex-con, on vote rigging tactics

" Ex-GOP operative tells cautionary tale about 'how to rig an election'"

Allen Raymond was a GOP operative, being a member of the Republican Leadership Council. He also operated a phone bank company. The two aspects came together in his role in the 2002 New Hampshire phone jamming scandal.

He tells of his role in interfering in elections, at the service of the Republican Party in a new book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative."
--Click here for the alternet interview with Raymond.
Details of his role, his jail time, and his book are available in the CNN article.

In a year with election-interfering conduct by Republicans, high and low, Democrats need to be vigilant in exposing misdeeds such as those confessed by Raymond.

McCain, Palin and the GOP's class war

As I wrote yesterday, This election, should John McCain lose, will result in a big shake-up and a long moment of self-reflection for the Republicans. They will need to loosen their strong ties to the cultural conservative right. As David Brooks noted, the Republicans have lost the affinities of many voters in affluent areas along the two ocean coasts. (See his column, "The Class War Before Palin.")
Columnists hypothesized earlier this year that McCain stood to lose the support of the anti-immigrant crowd. The Republican ticket this year stands to lose the support of many moderate thinking Republicans this year. The Sarah Palin selection sealed indecision that these moderates would have about the ticket. The Colin Powell endorsement of Barack Obama will finalize the flight of moderate Republicans from the party's ticket this year.
The Republicans/ conservatives will need to reconcile the six-pack crowd with the multiple homes crowd within their ranks.
At the close of last week, John Heilemann wrote in New York Magazine of how the McCain/Palin campaign is opening up tensions within the GOP and the conservatives:

The Right’s Class War: The prospect of a McCain loss has the Republican Party angrily turning on itself. Can the eggheads and the Joe Six-Packs get along?
For a man who has just been, in his eyes, excommunicated from both a magazine and a movement founded by his father half a century ago, Chris Buckley, son of the sainted William F., is doing a creditable job of keeping his upper lip stiff. “I’m still sort of getting my apostate act down,” Buckley says with a chuckle when I phone him a few days after the unpleasantness unfolded. “I’m reading Apostasy for Dummies.” The apostasy in question is, of course, his endorsement of Barack Obama, which provoked such a torrent of outrage and abuse from the right that Buckley felt it only proper to offer to quit his column at National Review—an offer that was taken up, to his great surprise, “rather briskly,” as he puts it. “I guess it shows, be careful to whom you tender your resignation, because they just might accept it!”
Buckley’s good humor does nothing to conceal his melancholy and bewilderment at this turn of events. “I was really quite amazed by the reaction, and I think it shows just how bloody calcified the political discourse has become, and tribalist, and snarling,” he tells me. “I want to say that it’s a tempest in a teapot, but there seems to be something going on here, and maybe this has accidentally tapped into it.”
If the Buckley affair were an isolated incident, such talk would be easy to dismiss as self-flattery—but it isn’t. With the prospect of defeat for John McCain growing more likely every day, the GOP destined to see its numbers reduced in both the House and Senate, and the Republican brand debased to the point of bankruptcy, the conservative intelligentsia is factionalized and feuding, criminating and recriminating, in a way that few of its members can recall in their political lifetimes. Populists attack Establishmentarians. Neocons assail theocons. And virtually everyone has something harsh to say about the party’s standard-bearer. Election Day may still be two weeks away, but already the idea-merchants of the right have formed a circular firing squad.
When the weapons of choice shift from pistols to Uzis after November 4, the ensuing massacre will be for Democrats a source of political opportunity, not to mention endless entertainment. But for Republicans it will be a necessary passage toward either the revival or reinvention of conservatism. Nobody serious on the right doubts that the overhaul is at once required and bound to be arduous—but it may take longer and prove even bloodier than anyone now imagines.
To get a sense of the struggle ahead, a good place to start is with Sarah Palin, who has been the flashpoint for the most severe intra-conservative contretemps so far. In the weeks since her selection as McCain’s running mate, a startling assortment of name-brand pundits on the right—Kathleen Parker, George Will, David Frum, David Brooks—have pronounced themselves displeased with the pick. Brooks went so far as to declaim that Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Buckley, for his part, tells me that McCain’s vice-presidential choice was roughly 60 percent of the reason that he decided to endorse Obama. “I will readily confess that I was one of many who swooned the day after the announcement,” he says. “But it’s kind of like dating a supermodel. There comes a moment, unfortunately, where they start talking.”
Yet Palin retains the fierce loyalty of a cadre of more populist, grassrootsy voices in the right-wing punditocracy who have denounced the main-line-conservative criticisms of Palin as the snooty, disloyal, and craven attempts of faux Republicans to curry favor with the ascendant liberal elite. “They … believe as intellectuals,” writes one pro-Palin opinionator, Victor Davis Hanson, “that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind—in contrast to the ‘cancer’ Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table talk other than the proper chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.”
Not surprisingly, Sarracuda’s foes on the right dismiss the counter-backlash more or less out of hand. When I ask Frum about the apparent class overtones of the anti-anti-Palin argument, he deems it a mere “rhetorical trope.” What he hears instead is the sound of defeatism. “The people who defend her have already given up any serious thought of Republicans’ wielding governmental power anytime soon,” Frum says. “They have already moved to a position of pure cultural symbolic opposition to a new majority. The people who criticize her do so because we have some hope that we could be in contention in 2012, and there’s some risk that she could be the party’s nominee, and she’d probably lose—and even if by some miracle she won, she’d be a terrible president.”

Read the remainder of Heileman's column, in Power Grid in New York Magazine.

Project Vote Decries GOP plans to disenfranchise African-American voters

From Market Watch: "Project Vote Denounces GOP Plans to Foreclose on the Voting Rights of Low-Income Michigan Residents"

It is terrible to lose one's home to foreclosure. It is additionally terrible to be disenfranchised of one's right to vote by virtue of having one's home foreclosed.

The Macomb County, Michigan Republican Party (or "GOP") revealed that it planned to disenfranchise African-American voters that have lost their homes to foreclosure.

James Carabelli, chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, has announced plans to assign "election challengers" to polling places to question the eligibility of home foreclosure victims based on residency. "We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren't voting from those addresses," Carabelli told the [Michigan] Messenger . . . .

As the Messenger reports, Macomb County is in the top three-percent of counties in the U.S. hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis -- and African-Americans, as the primary victims of sub-prime lending practices, make up the majority of these cases. African-Americans also tend to vote democratic, which is why it's not surprising that the GOP would target these voters for suppression.

* * *
This is clearly a racist maneuver, and so, it is a violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Also, we have full adult suffrage; it is not the 1820s any more. You don't need to own property in order to vote. Democracy-minded voters should denounce the Republicans' plans. Lastly, the government should not permit private, non-governmental groups to assume powers of deciding whom should receive the franchise (the power to vote).

It is fortunate that the chicanery has been uncovered earlier. We must be vigilant against these disenfranchisement maneuvers continuously, through the end of the election. We must mobilize to make sure that people are not prevented from voting as they were in 2000 and 2004.
The September 11, 2008 Market Watch article on the GOP anti-franchise plans and Project Vote's protest.

UPDATE:
By the end of September 11, the Michigan GOP withdrew the maneuver disenfranchise voters that had lost homes to foreclosure, but planned other vote-thwarting maneuvers, as this post from "Michigan Messenger" indicates: "Republicans recant plans to foreclose voters but admit other strategies"