CAPITOL AREA PROGRESSIVES (CAP) - DEMOCRATIC CLUB OF ELK GROVE
Capitol Area Progressives is dedicated to the development, promotion and implementation of progressive policies and legislation. Capitol Area Progressives advocates progressive issues and candidates at local, state and national levels through a variety of mechanisms: campaign consulting and training; community education and action; grassroots organizing; lobbying; and fundraising. Capitol Area Progressives believes in returning the power of our democracy to our citizens and, as envisaged in our constitution, establishing a government "of the people, by the people and for the people."
CAP Blast!
Elk Grove Dem HQ Thanks all the volunteers We won 2 major races because of your help Joan Buchanan & Lois Wolk Keep posted here for news & events CAP will meet again in February 2009
CHICAGO - Little in Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that dropped like a bombshell here on Tuesday. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Mr. Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors.
‘I was speechless and sickened,’ says a critic of disgraced Gov. Blagojevich
“I almost fell over,” said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and a frequent critic of the governor. “I was speechless and sickened. In all of the millions of indictments I’ve read over the last years, I can’t remember anything as vile as this.”
Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend of the governor, suggested that Mr. Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality.
“I’m not sure he’s playing with a full deck anymore,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I think he brought a lot of this on himself. He’s so gifted, but so flawed in a number of fundamental areas. It’s like he dared the feds to come get him.”
As President-elect Obama works to make good on his promise to shut down Guantanamo Bay, including the military commissions system that his predecessor put in place, and which has become the butt of worldwide ridicule, the Defense Department’s close-knit circle of neoconservatives is busy laying traps and bombs to obstruct Obama’s plans. Their objectives are clear: they want to push the process of the commissions as far as they possibly can so that by January 20, Obama is presented with a fait accompli. This strategy has led, among other things, to the extraordinary meeting arranged among defendants at Gitmo to push them into guilty pleas; next, I expect to hear still more charges and cases announced in advance of the transition in power in Washington. But of course if the 9/11 defendants really do want to plead guilty, that’s all the more reason for this to occur in a federal court context, where the process and the punishment stand some chance of being viewed credibly by the world. Adam Zagorin at Time reports:
Remember that long-ago news conference when George W. Bush couldn’t think of any mistakes he had made? Unbelievably, he still can’t.
When ABC’s Charles Gibson, interviewing Bush at Camp David, asked the president what one “do-over” he’d like to have, this was Bush’s reply:
“I don’t know—the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq; a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
Fellow sufferers from Bush Derangement Syndrome, mind your blood pressure. Just seven more weeks. Hang in there, because there are two more snippets from the interview that I have to quote.
WASHINGTON (CNN)—Terrorists are likely to use a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in the world in the next five years, a blue-ribbon panel assembled by Congress has concluded.
They are more likely to use a biological weapon than a nuclear one—and the results could be devastating, the chairman of the commission told CNN.
“The consequences of a biological attack are almost beyond comprehension. It would be 9/11 times 10 or a hundred in terms of the number of people who would be killed,” former Sen. Bob Graham said.
He cited the flu virus that killed millions of people in 1918 as an example.
“Today it is still in the laboratory, but if it should get out and into the hands of scientists who knew how to use it for a violent purpose, we could have multiple times the 40 million people who were killed 100 years ago,” he said.
The U.S. government “needs to move more aggressively to limit” the spread of biological weapons, the commission said in its report.
Graham warned that such measures would be costly, but were necessary.
World Leaders Don’t Shake Bush’s Hand At G20 Summit (VIDEO)
Posted by admincathlyn on 11/20 at 02:04 PM
It appears in this video that President Bush’s approval is in a sorrier state than polls indicate. In a video taken at the G20 summit, Bush walks across a line of world leaders without shaking or being asked to shake any of their hands. Whether the President is being rejected by the world leaders or he is rejecting them, CNN’s Rick Sanchez aptly says that Bush looks like “the most unpopular kid in high school that nobody liked.”
In a Senate hearing room in September, weeks before Barack Obama won the election, a series of law professors, lawyers and civil libertarians outlined one of the biggest challenges that will be facing the next president: bringing the United States government back under the rule of law.
Over the past eight years, they testified, American legal traditions have been degraded in areas ranging from domestic spying to government secrecy. The damage that has been done by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others is so grave that just assessing it will be an enormous task. Repairing it will be even more enormous.
This was not a new complaint. Civil liberties advocates have been sounding the alarm for years. The difference now is that a Democrat is about to assume the presidency, and one of the most ardent defenders of civil liberties in his party — Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin — is dedicated to putting the restoration of the rule of law on the agenda of the incoming government, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.
New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Published: November 14, 2008
Frank Schubert was the chief strategist for Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman in California.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
SACRAMENTO — Less than two weeks before Election Day, the chief strategist behind a ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California called an emergency meeting here.
“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.
The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.
As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.
“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”
HONDURAS: UN APPEALS FOR GREATER AID AS FLOODS CAUSE FURTHER DEATHS AND DAMAGE
7 November 2008 – United Nations aid agencies are stepping up their relief efforts and appeals for funding in Honduras, where a persistent tropical storm has intensified in recent days and spread to new areas of the Central American country.
At least 60 Hondurans have now died as a result of Tropical Storm Paloma, and the number of people affected by the flooding has risen this week by about 50,000 to nearly 320,000, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported today.
Paloma first struck the region as a tropical depression in mid-October, causing floods and destruction in neighbouring Guatemala as well. But in recent days Paloma has intensified into a bigger storm and struck different parts of the country with torrential rainfall.
Less than 10 per cent of the $17 million flash appeal launched last week by UN agencies and their non-governmental organization (NGO) partners has been received so far, and the amount received includes $1.5 million allocated from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF).
OCHA called on donors to immediately increase their support, warning that urgent assistance is needed to avert a further deterioration of the humanitarian situation.
How the economic crisis can help Obama redefine the Democrats.
As Roosevelt did with the New Deal, Obama has represented different versions of moral leadership to different groups of voters.
Liberals In September, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for President, was asked by a reporter for his view of the job that he was seeking. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” Roosevelt said. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preëminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” He went down the list of what we would now call transformative Presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson. (He also included Grover Cleveland, who hasn’t aged as well.) Then Roosevelt asked, “Isn’t that what the office is, a superb opportunity for reapplying—applying in new conditions—the simple rules of human conduct we always go back to? I stress the modern application, because we are always moving on; the technical and economic environment changes, and never so quickly as now. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are bogged up or lose our way, as we have lost it in the past decade.”
When the reporter pressed Roosevelt to offer a vision of his own historical opportunity, he gave two answers. First, he said, America needed “someone whose interests are not special but general, someone who can understand and treat the country as a whole. For as much as anything it needs to be reaffirmed at this juncture that the United States is one organic entity, that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all.” But Roosevelt didn’t limit himself to the benign self-portrait of a unifying President. “Moral leadership” had a philosophical component: he was, he said, “a liberal.” The election of 1932 arrived at one of those recurring moments when “the general problems of civilization change in such a way that new difficulties of adjustment are presented to government.” As opposed to a conservative or a radical, Roosevelt concluded, a liberal “recognizes the need of new machinery” but also “works to control the processes of change, to the end that the break with the old pattern may not be too violent.”
NO ON 8 RALLY IN ELK GROVE - MONDAY, NOV 3, 5:00-7:00pm
Please join supporters of “NO on Proposition 8” for a rally in Elk Grove on Monday, November 3 from 5pm-7pm. The rally will take place on the corner of Elk Grove Florin and Bond Road. Saturday and Sunday, supporters of No on 8 held successful rallies with nearly 90 attendees at each rally! ONLY one more day to rally and show support for NO on 8!!
Elk Grove has been bombarded with YES on 8 supporters, primarily Mormon church members and their children standing on many major intersection corners in Elk Grove with their signs. Every evening you will find these misguided “religious” families standing in mass on the street corners with a lone, brave NO on 8 supporter standing in their midst. The Elk Grove Citizen ran an article last week stating how Yes on 8 lawn signs were being stolen all over the City of Elk Grove - no mention was made of the fact that No on 8 lawns signs have been stolen at a much higher rate! Two days ago, 4x8 foot signs for “Yes on 8” were hung on overpasses along Highway 99. The Elk Grove office called Cal Trans to have the signs removed.
Please show your support of NO on 8 by attending this rally and by putting a window sign up in your home or a lawn sign in your yard.
A delivery of No on 8 Lawn Signs and Rally Signs to the Elk Grove Campaign HQ is expected Monday 11/03 around noon. The SIGNS ARE FREE!
GOTV, Election Day Activities, ELECTION NIGHT, and Afterwards
Posted by admincathlyn on 11/02 at 09:55 PM
ELK GROVE VOLUNTEERS ROCK!!
Thank you Elk Grove volunteers for all the hours and hard work you have given to the Democratic cause! We have been inspired by your enthusiasm and commitment to electing Democrats to ALL levels of government. You ALL are awesome!
We had 164 volunteers RSVP for Saturday, Nov 1. On Saturday, November 1st more than 182 of you came through the Elk Grove Campaign HQ - 96 of you showed up, including Assemblyman Dave Jones, to walk precincts in Elk Grove, Stockton and Galt despite the pouring rain. Our phone banks were full all day and our office volunteers were busy all day as well. Some of you brought along your children to walk or phone bank with you (to record on the tally sheets and to watch the process). High School students earning Community Service hours also showed up to help us prepare and deliver our Obama door hangers. Thank you for your dedication.
SINCERE THANK YOU FROM CATHLYN DALY
It has been a privilege to serve as the Director of Operations for the Elk Grove Democratic Campaign HQ. I sincerely appreciate the time and effort each of you has put into the campaigns. It has been a great deal of hard work and much sacrifice for many of you, but your efforts have not gone unnoticed and have certainly made a difference. You have been an instrumental part of changing the course of our community, our state and our country.
The Elk Grove Campaign HQ served as a base for 9 campaigns: Lois Wolk (Senate District 5), Joan Buchanan (Assembly District 15), Alyson Huber (Assembly District 10), Katherine Maestas (Elk Grove City Council), Rod Brewer (Cosumnes Community Services District), Sandi Russell (Cosumnes Community Services District), Doug McElroy (Cosumnes Community Services District), Davies Ononiwu (Florin Resources Conservation District/Elk Grove Water Board), Doug Elliott (Florin Resources Conservation District/Elk Grove Water Board) and provided support and/or distributed materials for Nancy Bui (SMUD Board), Dr. Bill Durston (Congressional District 3) and Barack Obama (President).
It has been a pleasure to work with all of the candidates and their staff. The coordinated effort between campaigns and the team effort has been groundbreaking and outstanding.
Thank you for all you have contributed and, most of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve my fellow Democrats.
Sincerely,
Cathlyn Daly, Director of Operations
Elk Grove Democratic Campaign HQ
Democratic Party of Sacramento County
Latest GOP smear plot revealed: Professor paid to try to tie Ayers to Obama biography
Posted by admincathlyn on 11/01 at 09:58 PM
Rawstory.com
John Byrne, 11/01/08
The brother of a Republican congressman and a Republican businessman attempted to pay an professor in Oxford to use software he designed to “prove” that 1960s radical William Ayers helped write Sen. Barack Obama’s biography.
The professor, Dr. Peter Millican, teaches philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford. His software is designed to detect when works are by the same authors by comparing the use of similar words and phrases.
The offer was revealed Sunday in a British newspaper.
“He was entirely upfront about this,” the professor said of the Republican businessman who made the offer. “He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.”
Millican said he took a preliminary look and found the charges that Ayers had had a hand in ghostwriting Obama’s book “very implausible.” A deal was agreed for “more detailed research,” the paper said, but when Millican “said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.”
The Republicans sought to allege similarities between Obama’s Dreams of My Father and Ayers’ Fugitive Days.
The offer was made by Robert Fox, a California GOP businessman and brother-in-law of Republican Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT).
Documents reveal how Ohio routed 2004 voting data thru company that hosted external Bush Admin
Posted by admincathlyn on 11/01 at 12:14 PM
Rawstory.com
Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Friday October 31, 2008
Newly obtained computer schematics provide further detail of how electronic voting data was routed during the 2004 election from Ohio’s Secretary of State’s office through a partisan Tennessee web hosting company.
A network security expert with high-level US government clearances, who is also a former McCain delegate, says the documents – server schematics which trace the architecture created for Ohio’s then-Republican Secretary of State and state election chief Kenneth Blackwell – raise troubling questions about the security of electronic voting and the integrity of the 2004 presidential election results.
The flow chart shows how voting information was transferred from Ohio to SmarTech Inc., a Chattanooga Tennessee IT company known for its close association with the Republican Party, before the 2004 election results were displayed online.
Ever since Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s poisonous comments on Hardball ten days ago, it has looked increasingly possible that her deep red district might turn blue next week.
Her Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, a former mayor and state transportation commissioner, has raised more than $1.5 million since Bachmann channeled Joe McCarthy on MSNBC. The Washington Post reported today that Tinklenberg’s fundraising “in a single week, is more than what any other Democratic challenger has raised in a fundraising quarter in the entire two-year election cycle.”
Bachmann’s constituents seem to be rejecting her politics of division, distraction and demonization as well. According to a new Minnesota Public Radio/University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute poll, Tinklenberg – previously considered a long-shot – now leads Bachmann 45 to 43 percent. Approximately 40 percent of the district’s voters say that they have “re-evaluated [Bachmann] and are less likely to support her,” and two-thirds disagree with her comments.
Today in an interview with CNBC, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blasted unions:
But this is — we’ve been talking about it for a long time — this is a threat to the fundamental of labor-management relations. It’s fundamental to democracy, the right to have a secret ballot.
The way that Senator Obama envisions — and the unions, and this is their big push, they’ve gotten commitments from Senator Obama and Senator Biden — union organizer goes to your house and says, Hey, Joe, can I sign you up for the union?
That is — we all know what that opens the door to. It’s dangerous for America, it’s dangerous to small business. And I think it’s a threat to one of the fundamentals of democracy.
McCain added that he would veto the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in a “New York minute.” Watch it:
ES&S Touch-Screen Votes Now Flipping in TX Too! Obama/DNC Attorneys Still AWOL!
Posted by admincathlyn on 10/25 at 04:54 PM
State After State, ES&S iVotronics Are Flipping Democratic Votes to Republican!
What You Can Do About It, And Where the Hell Are Those ‘Thousands’ of Obama/DNC Attorneys?…
Posted By Brad Friedman On 24th October 2008
This is just getting worse and worse. Now it’s happening in Texas. (And in MO, if you read to the end of the article). And the vaunted “thousands of attorneys” from the Obama campaign and the DNC are still nowhere to be found.
With every incident so far reported of touch-screen vote-flipping during early voting in this year’s general election --- from county [1] to county [2] in WV and in Nashville, [3] TN) --- it’s been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine that has failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In most every instances [see update below], it’s been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.
These are the same machines that lost 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County in the 2006 U.S. House Race for Katherine Harris’ old seat. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, was declared the loser to Republican Vern Buchanan (whose own wife had trouble voting for him that day), by just 369 votes. Several academic studies, and even the GAO, have been unable to rule out either tampering or hardware/software error for the disappeared 18,000 votes.
As we wrote earlier this week [4], after there was finally one report of a vote flipping from Democratic to Republican in TN (a very rare instance, btw), these machines need to be taken out of service now, impounded and quarantined immediately, and every voter needs to be given a paper ballot where these machines are currently being used. Voters who have such problems need to inform other voters waiting in line which machine should not be used (and we offer other tips below, as well).
[Update: The rare vote-flip from Republican to Democratic now seems to have been a hoax carried out by local Republicans, according to a TN election integrity activist who did some digging and reporting. Details here… [5]]
The latest reports today of ES&S vote-flipping [6] come from Palo Pinto County, TX, where two voters --- one of them an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters --- saw straight-ticket Democratic votes flipped to straight-ticket Republican votes. Two times for the first person, and three times for the alternate election judge!
McCain campaign paid Republican operative accused of voter fraud
Posted by admincathlyn on 10/23 at 12:47 PM
TimesOnline.com.uk, 10/22/08
McCain campaign paid Republican operative accused of voter fraudHannah Strange
John McCain paid $175,000 of campaign money to a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states, it has emerged.
As the McCain camp attempts to tie Barack Obama to claims of registration irregularities by the activist group ACORN, campaign finance records detailing the payment to the firm of Nathan Sproul, investigated several times for fraud, threatens to derail that argument.
The documents show that a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party, made the payment to Lincoln Strategy, of which Mr Sproul is the managing partner, for the purposes of “voter registration”.
Mr Sproul has been investigated on numerous occasions for preventing Democrats from voting, destroying registration forms and leading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to leach the Democratic vote.
In October last year, the House Judiciary Committee wrote to the Attorney General requesting answers regarding a number of allegations against Mr Sproul’s firm, then known as Sproul and Associates. It referred to evidence that ahead of the 2004 national elections, the firm trained staff only to register Republican voters and destroyed any other registration cards, citing affidavits from former staff members and investigations by television news programmes.
The Department of Homeland Security will take over responsibility for checking airline passenger names against government watch lists beginning in January, and will require travelers for the first time to provide their full name, birth date and gender as a condition for boarding commercial flights, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
Security officials say the additional personal information—which will be given to airlines to forward to the federal agency in charge—will dramatically cut down on cases of mistaken identity, in which people with names similar to those on watch lists are wrongly barred or delayed from flights.
The changes, to be phased in next year, will apply to 2 million daily passengers aboard all domestic flights and international flights to, from or over the United States. By transferring the screening duty from the airlines to the federal government, the Secure Flight program marks the Bush administration’s long-delayed fulfillment of a top aviation security priority after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief Kip Hawley said yesterday that, except in rare situations, passengers who do not provide the additional information will not be given boarding passes.
“If you don’t provide the data, then you are going to put yourself in a position where you are probably going to be a selectee,” subject at a minimum to greater future security scrutiny, Chertoff said in remarks announcing the program at Reagan National Airport.
WASHINGTON—Colin Powell demonstrated his eponymous “Powell Doctrine” of overwhelming force on Sunday when he endorsed Barack Obama on Meet the Press. The one-time chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff systematically marshaled his assets to neutralize the Republican endgame strategy, which is to suffuse the air around Obama with a vague mist of terrorism, socialism and “otherness.”
Powell was so definitive that it was easy to forget the disconnect: Obama made his reputation with a speech in 2002 warning against war in Iraq, while it was Powell who went before the United Nations and used his credibility to build support for the Iraq invasion.
Powell told Tom Brokaw that he still believes that war was the right course of action, based on what he and other officials knew—or thought they knew—at the time. He said he believes the war was mishandled. And he said he still opposes a “deadline” for withdrawing U.S. troops, though he added that a “timeline” for withdrawal is beginning to emerge.
New York Times, Op-Ed Columnist
By BOB HERBERT, 10/20/08
It never ends. The Republican Party never gets tired of spraying its poison across the American political landscape.
So there was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that the press should start investigating members of the House and Senate to determine which ones are “pro-America or anti-America.”
Can a rancid Congressional committee be far behind? Leave it to a right-wing Republican to long for those sunny, bygone days of political witch-hunting.
Ms. Bachmann’s demented desire (“I would love to see an exposé like that”) is of a piece with the G.O.P.’s unrelenting effort to demonize its opponents, to characterize them as beyond the pale, different from ordinary patriotic Americans — and not just different, but dangerous, and even evil.
But the party is not content to stop there. Even better than demonizing opponents is the more powerful and direct act of taking the vote away from their opponents’ supporters. The Republican Party has made strenuous efforts in recent years to prevent Democrats from voting, and to prevent their votes from being properly counted once they’ve been cast.
Memo to Fox News & GOP: America Has the Second-Lowest Business Taxes In the World
Posted by admincathlyn on 10/21 at 02:29 PM
OurFuture.org, 10/21/08
David Sirota
Last week, I appeared on Fox News to discuss Barack Obama’s tax proposals.
Not surprisingly, the “debate” centered around the false premise that Obama’s tax cuts are actually welfare. I say that’s false because - as I pointed out on the show - everyone pays some form of taxes, whether it’s income, property, sales or payroll taxes. When you take all those taxes together, most working- and middle-class Americans pay a higher effective tax rate than the Warren Buffetts of the world (as Warren Buffett, by the way, readily acknowledges). So Obama’s plan to pass refundable income tax credits is only a handout if you look exclusively at one slice of taxes - in this case, income taxes. But in the overall tax scheme, those tax credits are aimed at better equalizing the tax structure so as to diminish the gap between Warren Buffett’s very low effective tax rate and Joe Sixpack’s high effective tax rate. Only in the asylums of Fox News and Republican Party politics is reducing that effective tax rate gap billed as theft from the rich to finance “welfare.”
Article published Thursday, October 16, 2008
SPRINGFIELD TOWNSHIP
By LARRY VELLEQUETTE and TOM TROY
BLADE STAFF WRITERS
Local man focus of presidential debate
Joe Wurzelbacher views the debate from his Springfield Township home.
( THE BLADE/LORI KING )
“Joe the Plumber” isn’t a plumber — at least not a licensed one, or a registered one.
A check of state and local licensing agencies in Ohio and Michigan shows no plumbing licenses under Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher’s name, or even misspellings of his name.
Last night, his name, “Joe the Plumber,” came up about two dozen times in the debate between Mr. Obama and Republican nominee John McCain.
Since last night Mr. Wurzelbacher who lives alone with his 13-year-old son has been besieged with local and national news media, willingly granting interviews.
Mr. Wurzelbacher told reporters Thursday morning that he worked for Newell Plumbing & Heating Co., a small local firm whose business addresses flow back to several residential homes, including one on Talmadge Road in Ottawa Hills.
According to Lucas County Building Inspection records, A. W. Newell Corp. does maintain a state plumbing license, and one with the City of Toledo, but would not be allowed to work in Lucas County outside of Toledo without a county license.
Mr. Wurzelbacher said he works under Al Newell’s license, but according to Ohio building regulations, he must maintain his own license to do plumbing work.
He is also not registered to operate as a plumber in Ohio, which means he’s not a plumber.
Sacramento GOP site deletes Obama, Osama material but retains ‘ridiculous’ rumor
Posted by admincathlyn on 10/15 at 12:57 PM
Rawstory.com
Ron Brynaert, October 15, 2008
Welcome to The Sacramento County Republican Party
The Party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Freedom
A Republican website which linked Sen. Barack Obama to terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and also called for the waterboarding of the Democratic presidential candidate has taken most of the offensive material down, but still sports a “ridiculous” chain e-mail based on a conservative’s satirical column, RAW STORY has found.
“Sacramento County Republican leaders Tuesday took down offensive material on their official party Web site that sought to link Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and encouraged people to ‘Waterboard Barack Obama’ – material that offended even state GOP leaders,” Ed Fletcher reports for the Sacramento Bee. “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has pushed the party to try to broaden its appeal, took issue with the site. ‘In the governor’s view, it’s completely and totally inappropriate,” said Julie Soderlund, a Schwarzenegger spokeswoman.’”
However, on its front page, the website (SacramentoRepublicans.org) retains a copy of a chain e-mail which has been widely debunked.
“Hot on the heels of his explanation for why he no longer wears a flag pin, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama was forced to explain why he doesn’t follow protocol when the National Anthem is played,” the material taken from a chain e-mail states.
“As I’ve said about the flag pin, I don’t want to be perceived as taking sides,” Obama said. “There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’ If that were our anthem, then I might salute it.”
The non-partisan website FactCheck.org calls the e-mail “ridiculous,” noting that it was derived “from a column dated Oct. 27, 2007, on a Web site called the Arizona Conservative, which is written by John Semmens and clearly labeled as humor. His column, in fact, is called ‘Semi-News—A Satirical Look at Recent News.’
Sacramento County Republican leaders Tuesday took down offensive material on their official party Web site that sought to link Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and encouraged people to “Waterboard Barack Obama” – material that offended even state GOP leaders.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has pushed the party to try to broaden its appeal, took issue with the site. “In the governor’s view, it’s completely and totally inappropriate,” said Julie Soderlund, a Schwarzenegger spokeswoman.
Hector Barajas, a California Republican Party spokesman, said Democrats have been playing the race card, but that the local party went too far in this instance.
He said the campaign should be about who is ready to be the nation’s commander-in-chief, that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has never questioned Obama’s patriotism, and that he’d ask local leaders to take down the offensive content.
Taking credit for the site (sacramentorepublicans.org) and its content was county party chairman Craig MacGlashan – husband of Sacramento County Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan.
The Bee asked MacGlashan about the content after seeking his reaction to hate-filled graffiti that was spray-painted over an Obama display on a fence at Fair Oaks Boulevard and Garfield Avenue.
In recent weeks, MacGlashan, an attorney, joined local Democratic party officials in condemning vandalism to political displays.
The vandalism to the Obama display appeared to have been done overnight Monday. A racial epithet, profanity, “KKK” and the words “white power” were clearly visible from the roadway. Six of the nine fence panels were defaced.
“What you are describing to me is not free speech, it’s vandalism. We don’t condone it,” MacGlashan said.
But he defended his Web site. “I’m aware of the content,” he said. “Some people find it offensive, others do not. I cannot comment on how people interpret things.”
MacGlashan said he would “consider people’s complaints” before taking any action.
By Tuesday night, much of the questionable material – which ranged from depicting Obama in a turban to attacking Michelle Obama – had been removed, replaced with political cartoons attacking Obama.
The flap comes as tensions in the presidential contest between McCain and Obama have heightened, and as race has been thrust into the forefront of the campaign. If elected, Obama would be the first non-white president.
The Sacramento GOP’s Web site is markedly different in tone from other GOP or Democratic Party sites in the region in its use of illustrations and cartoons attacking the presidential nominee.
Democratic party officials condemned the GOP site. “It’s exactly the kind of vile, repugnant politicking that has relegated the California GOP to an afterthought in California politics,” said Roger Salazar, spokesman for the state Democratic Party. “Even the top of their ticket would be disgusted by this display of dishonesty.”
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The upcoming Hofstra debate will measure the two presidential candidates against the challenge of replacing a woefully incompetent commander of this luxury-liner republic that has sprung devastating leaks drawing us all into a titanic struggle to stay afloat.
The Nov. 4 elections are just that critical.
With everything at stake, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain should lay aside trivial pursuits and engage the economic issues of debt, war, credit, and steadying global confidence. While the candidates’ individual purposes may be served by fingering the villains who caused the wreck, the public interest is better served by indicating how this calamitous rupture might be repaired - and soon.
If recent trending of the campaign is a guide, however, the debate will showcase no such regenerative statecraft. If the Arizona senator discusses the economy, one aide said recently, he loses. McCain’s fear of constructive engagement over the economy makes Obama downright giddy. Yet it frustrates his every attempt to debate the issues.
What Right Wingers Mean When They Call Obama A “Socialist”
Posted by admincathlyn on 10/13 at 11:49 AM
Prospect.org
Adam Serwer | October 13, 2008
Right-wing attempts to paint Barack Obama as a socialist aren’t just disingenuous. They’re rooted in a history of conservative smears against black leaders.
On Saturday, Georgia Congressman John Lewis went nuclear on John McCain, releasing a statement that seemed to compare McCain to segregationist George Wallace. “George Wallace never threw a bomb,” Lewis wrote. “He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights.” The civil rights icon continued, “Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”
Lewis accused McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.” He was referring to the angry tone of recent McCain rallies, where cries of “kill him” and “off with his head” have made many people anxious about the potential for violence against the Democratic nominee.
Cindy McCain’s Attack On Obama’s Record Offends Military Spouses
Posted by admincathlyn on 10/13 at 08:10 AM
Huffingtonpost.com, 10/12/08
Diane Tucker
At a rally in Bethlehem, Pa. last week, Cindy McCain spoke about having two sons serving on active duty: “I’m proud of my sons, but let me tell you, the day that Senator Obama cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body. I would suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day, and see what it means.”
Never mind how many drinks are needed to erase the mental image of Barack Obama wearing Cindy McCain’s stiletto heels. The fact is—many military spouses support Obama-Biden, and they were deeply offended by Mrs. McCain’s outburst.
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