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Here’s what John McCain said in the debate last night about ACORN:

We need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

In psychology, this is known as “projection“. In politics, it’s “cover fire”. Republicans are in the process of cleaning out voter rolls nationwide, removing as many Democrats as they possibly can. Much of what they are doing is illegal, and we will learn the details after the election, just as we did in 2000 and 2004. We got just a taste of it here in Montana when Republicans sent out 6,000 voter registration challenges in Democratic-leaning counties.

They are doing it right out in the open, and so have called on their legions of bloggers and talk radio hosts to cover their backs – to distract attention from their activities. They are leveling accusations at Democrats, and are using ACORN as the marshmallow for toasting. That’s the reason behind McCain’s hyperbole.

ACORN is a group that attempts to register poor people to vote. These people tend to vote Democratic, and so are natural enemies of the Republicans. Frankly, I doubt their efforts yield much – in my one run for office in 1996, I carried hundreds of voter registrations to the court house. But these people tend not to show up on election day. They aren’t really paying attention. So ACORN is probably not terribly effective.

ACORN pays people to get voter registration cards, and hires people who are otherwise not gainfully employed. So it naturally follows that some of these ne’er-do-wells will cheat and make up names. Mickey Mouse turns up, as does Tony Romo. ACORN is required to turn in all registration cards they gather, and so they flag the suspicious ones, and fire the people responsible.

In other words, they are innocent of any wrongdoing except registering people who might vote Democrat. That’s their real crime.

But beyond that, ACORN is just a scapegoat. The Republicans are focusing attention on that group while they go on with their nefarious business of scrubbing voter rolls, merrily breaking laws as they go. They are the real criminals, the real people who are “destroying the fabric of democracy”.

That’s not hyperbole.

News anchors were flustered last night when focus groups handed yet another debate victory to Barack Obama. Wasn’t John McCain forceful? Didn’t he make his case? Didn’t he confront Obama about William Ayers? Wasn’t that a good line about running against George Bush? (It was.)

Watch this – it’s where rubber meets road:

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Ronald Reagan was perhaps the first president to utilize the television medium effectively. He was a master – the fact that he was first an actor made politics a cinch for him. He projected warmth and sincerity. He was the Roy Hobbs of politics – The Natural.

When we watch TV, two streams are coming at us – audio and visual. But the audio is secondary. We can filter words, but images control. They go straight to our brains unfiltered. John McCain keeps losing these debates because he fidgets, looks angry, rolls his eyes, and has kind of a goofy smile. Obama, on the other hand, is calm and collected. He could be reading the phone book – he’d still win.

Each debate is free advertising for Obama – he projects intelligence, warmth, sincerity, calmness. Maybe he is none of those things. It doesn’t matter. All he has to do is show up. When news anchors throw up their hands in frustration over McCain’s inability to win a debate, they’re letting on that they don’t understand their own medium. But news anchors are basically actors, like Reagan. They ought to understand this debate business better than they do.

Then there’s FOX News. It’s an angry network, and must have an angry audience. Interviews are contentious, people constantly talk over one another. It’s news anchors are openly partisan. The network averages about eight million viewers, but is pretty much stuck at that number. The rest of us have been exposed to it and steer clear.

FOX viewers are likely the partisans that flock to debates and yell angry words at speakers. FOX keeps these people in constant agitation, as do Limbaugh and the other talkers. These are the people who were urging McCain to show his fire, to get angry, to confront Obama.

They’ve had their way now. McCain got angry, confronted Obama. And he got his hat handed him. And Obama did it with a calm smile. It appears that Obama, like Reagan before him, understands the medium and how to use it.

McCain is not TV material. He’s a bad actor. He’ll never “win” a debate.

With twenty or so days to go, it appears as though Barack Obama is poised to take the White House. But twenty days is an eternity in politics. Anything can happen – we could attack Iran, Osama might turn up, or people might discover that Obama has a knocked-up teen-aged daughter, which would be unforgivable for a black man.

I am often critical of Democrats, and they are so often worthy of criticism. They can be pale imitations of Republicans; they too-often agree in principle with Republican positions on taxes and war. Bush’s agenda could have been stopped if we had a genuine opposition party. But the Democrats didn’t put up much of a fight.

Bill Clinton, now a born-again liberal, governed as a Republican for his last seven years in office. He got his fingers burned on health care, and thereafter behaved himself. I often bring up the fact that 500,000 Iraqi kids perished on his watch. But it doesn’t register – a typical Democrat reading this paragraph will only see white spaces. 500,000 kids starved, malnutrition and preventable disease. The man in the tailored suit attending cocktail parties did this to them. Ah, the banality of evil.

But I did read something over at Counterpunch that caught my eye – I’ll quote and then cite:

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

The author of those words? Noam Chomsky. I never thought I’d see words like that from him. What next? Ralph Nader joins the party?

Barring election theft, always real possibility when votes are counted in secret, it appears as though we are in for a few years of Democratic rule. Republicans will go into lock-down mode, and will do all in their power to make governing impossible. It will be a fight.

Our job as citizens is to keep the pressure on them, to remind them that they are supposed to be somewhat progressive, to hold them to liberal standards. It starts on November 5th. We cannot afford what we had while Clinton was in power: a Democratic snoozathon.

If by chance I awake on that day to find that Sarah Palin is Vice President, I’ll be reminded what musical satirist Tom Lehrer said in 1973: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize.” If bimbo Sarah Palin assumes high office, the word “absurd” will no longer have meaning.

There is much befuddlement and some amusement over Governor Sarah Palin’s response to the bipartisan report that she had violated state ethics laws in her (and Todd’s) harassment of William Monagan and others to pressure them into firing Palin’s brother-in-law.

Here’s what the report says:

Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: To get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.

That’s a violation of the Alaska State law Sec. 39.52.110:

(a) The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust. (more)… and …

Sec. 39.52.120. Misuse of official position. (b) A public officer may not (3) use state time, property, equipment, or other facilities to benefit personal or financial interests; (4) take or withhold official action in order to affect a matter in which the public officer has a personal or financial interest; (5) attempt to benefit a personal or financial interest through coercion of a subordinate or require another public officer to perform services for the private benefit of the public officer at any time…

Here’s what the report concluded:

For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 2952.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

Pretty straightforward, though some have tried to muddy the waters by equating a “personal” interest with a financial one, and saying thereby that absent financial interest, no law was broken.

Here’s what Governor Palin said in response:

“I’m very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing…any hint of any kind of unethical activity there.”

I’m grateful to the Aussie’s, who in the 1990’s coined the expression “dog-whistle politics”. That’s what Palin is doing – yes, objective observers can see that she is plainly contradicting the findings of the report, but she is speaking to a special group of people – those who support her without question or reservation, who think that Katie Couric sandbagged her by asking her if she read things. They will never read the report, and their only information on that report will be what Governor Palin says.

They heard her. That’s all that’s going on. Sarah’s talking to the Christians.

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Sarah Palin was roundly booed last night as she dropped the ceremonial puck at a hockey game in Philadelphia. It was a strategic blunder on the part of the McCain campaign to put her in an open forum. She’s widely reviled now.

First they withdrew her from the media. She doesn’t’ do interviews or press conferences because she can’t think on her feet, has no depth, and is kind of an airhead. Then they put her on the stump and filled her pretty little head with hate speech. They even ban people now from talking to her supporters now at her rallies, because they are so obviously unbalanced.

What good is she to Bush? (McCain (Freudian)). She has but one value: She has solidified his support among racists and bigots and Christian fundamentalists. But she polls less than McCain now, meaning she’s a drag on the ticket. The stroke of genius doesn’t look so geniusy anymore.

Here’s another clip on the hockey game.

The American Psychological Society has has approved a measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the secret CIA black sites.

APA president Alan Kazdin recently wrote President Bush to inform him of the decision:

The effect of this new policy is to prohibit psychologists from any involvement in interrogations or any other operational procedures at detention sites that are in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law…In such unlawful detention settings, persons are deprived of basic human rights and legal protections, including the right to independent judicial review of their detention…There have been many reports, from credible sources, of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees during your term in office. Therefore, the American Psychological Association strongly calls on you and your administration to safeguard the physical and psychological welfare and human rights of individuals incarcerated by the U.S. government in such detention centers and to investigate their treatment to ensure that the highest ethical standards are being upheld.”

The measure was the result of grassroots organizing within the association, and 60% voted in favor of it. The fact that 40% voted against it is disturbing.

Most people only dabble in politics every two years or so, and don’t really understand it well. There is but one objective in the game, and that is to win. Winning means getting more votes than the other guy. It’s that simple. The means by which this is done vary – often times it is a mere matter of persuasion, but this is a crude and primitive technique. Even using wedge issues like abortion and gays and guns doesn’t guarantee results.

There are other ways to bring about political victory – for instance, controlling vote counting machinery. I’ve written a lot about that – if ever there were a case of the Emperor’s New Clothing, it is the doe-eyed acceptance of electronic voting machines where the actual count is done behind a green curtain. Americans presume to know that our way of doing things is superior to all others, so the idea that votes are being stolen right under our noses, out in plain sight, is unthinkable. Think again.

Another way to bring about victory is to keep the other party from voting in the first place. The game is pretty obvious now – Democrats want to register as many voters as possible, Republicans want to keep them away from the polls. So the right wing noise machine has been busy for two years now – it started out quietly, as one official or another would complain about “voter” fraud, as if election fraud was not our greatest problem. (John Fund of the Wall Street Journal wrote a book about voter fraud, which is itself a fraud.) Then it got louder. And louder. Pretty soon all of the ‘pubbies were talking about it, and the blogs got into it (here, here, here) – here we go again – RWCJ (right wing circle jerk).

Like everything coming out of the Republican Party, they are organized from the top down. The ground level people bark on command, it seems. So when the Montana Republican Party challenged the voting credentials of 6,000 people in Democratic-leaning counties, it followed the national lead. The hypocrisy made the skin crawl – these folks who work their top-down economics on us, who despise any organizing attempts by the lower classes, such as labor unions and ACORN, are suddenly concerned that voting rights be preserved. Righto.

A judge stepped in and put a stop to the shameless Montana purge, calling it “political chicanery”. But the New York Times and CBS News have covered more chilling aspects of the vote purge movement, where swing states like Nevada and Colorado have been targeted. In Colorado alone, 19.4% of voters have been removed from the rolls since the 2004 election. There are sure to be confrontations as people go to vote on election day and find out they are not listed. Sure, in some places they can file provisional ballots, but that’s a fake vote – that is, those ballots are not counted. They are just used to get pesky voters out of their hair.

What to do? Democrats, as usual, are on this like sweat on Rocky Balboa – no, wait, that’s not true. Democrats, as usual, are not on this at all, and have done little or nothing about it. Greg Palast has offered up a comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, that offers advice on what to do when challenged by Republican thugs on election day, or when learning that you have been purged from the voting rolls. (Insist on voting on a real ballot, don’t yield to pressure, stand your ground, call the police.)

Election fraud, voter intimidation, voter purges. We’re in line for another stolen election. Vice President Sarah Palin. It’s high comedy. There is a TV show that’s going to run on BBC America – channel 264 on Direct TV, 879 on Dish, at 4 and 8 PM (MST) tonight. Here’s the promo:

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Make some popcorn. We’re behind the eight ball again. Learn what the Republicans have been up to these last four years, and how the Democrats did nothing about it.

The following is the text of a “sermon” I plan to give this coming Sunday at our Unitarian gathering. Since it will only drift off into the ether afterwards, I’m putting it up here too so that my reader can be as bored as the fifty or sixty poor souls on Sunday. I was asked to give a five minute talk on how I became a Unitarian.

Comets and Curiosity .

Bill Maher, the comedian and also the guy that made the movie Religulous (which we’ll probably never get to see here in Bozeman), had a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. He talked of his first confession. He went in and kneeled in the confessional and said:

I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t care – that’s above my pay grade. I’m only the Treasurer. Let’s just have some fun. There’s so much we don’t know, so much to wonder about, so much to research and investigate. We’ll never run out of questions. And we are not bound by anyone’s belief system. We are free to investigate and wonder and let it take us where it takes us. Even to our inevitable doom, wiped out by a comet.

Yeah – I watched the debate last night. Wife and I talked about it afterward – I asked her not to dwell on words so much as demeanor and attitude. She’s much more observant of people than I am.

She says that Obama comes across as cool and confident, approachable, knowledgeable and assured. McCain knows it all, has an edge on him, and is a fighter. He seems willing to do or say anything to take Obama out. (Obviously she’s been influenced by the recent ads and attacks by McCain/Palin.)

End of story.

Except this – I think of a tyrannosaurus Rex when I see McCain strutting around on stage flailing his short arms. It’s a bit comical.

Now, on to substance.

End of story.

Except this – both candidates went out of their way to affirm that the United States is a force for good in the world. We rescue people. Debates are hardly the place to let reality interfere, but this notion or rescuing people is our official mythology, and neither candidate is going to affirm any other. But when I see both candidates prostrate themselves at the alter of American exceptionalism, each goes down another notch. I wonder if either really know what’s up, if they have both internalized the lies. I think one is a little smarter than the other, but there is no avenue – none! – for expression of truth in presidential politics, so if Obama has an inkling of how the U.S. really behaves on the world stage, he’d better repress it.

And I think he has.

We are a violent culture, a violent people – we have killed millions in Iraq alone, our latest bloodbath. (I go back to 1990 to put that “s” on the end of “million”.) The mythology of benevolent intervention is necessary to shield us from ourselves, to hide the mirror. We are about resources – Obama did say at one point that we have 3% of the world’s oil, yet consume 25% of world oil production. That statistic ought to say it all – we can only survive with other people’s resources. We are too insecure merely to buy from others, so we take by force.

Usually we murder other people while carrying the cross of Jesus, though we’re not so vocal about spreading Christianity with our bullets and bombs anymore. There has been progress, I guess.