Leader Pelosi
Published by Mike Stark July 28th, 2006 in UncategorizedI had a chance to ask Leader Pelosi a coupla questions today.
Previous to my queries, she discussed the minimum wage. mcjoan has a good review of that issue up over at Kos.
I tried a different approach. An issue that scares the bejesus out of a lot of us diehard liberals is that we won’t turn out people in the mid-term elections. The Republicans have left this country waddling in such an incredibly huge shit-pie, it would really be a shame if we couldn’t find a way to take at least one of the congressional houses back. I mean, really… Iraq, stem-cell, minimum wage, deficit, corruption, war profiteering, lack of oversight, judicial extremists, North Korea & Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Israel… Trade deficits, imploding real estate market, Katrina, Medicare Part D, increasing crime, stagnant wages… the list is pretty close to endless…
So yeah… it’s be a shame if we didn’t get the turn-out. To be fair, earlier in the call, Leader Pelosi mentioned Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickle and Dimed. She said that after she wrote the book, Barbara talked to some in Congress. She was asked if the people that she worked with - housecleaners, waitresses and retail workers - if they would vote for Democrats. Ehrenreich’s answer was “not likely”. The reason? People believe that there isn’t anyone at all in Washington that is on their side.
We need to find a way to communicate to people that work for a living that the democratic Party is on their side. I know it’s going to be hard as long as we have Joe Lieberman providing cover for Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donal Rumsfeld and the rest of the Republicans… It’ll be hard as long as we have MBNA Biden pushing through ridiculous bankruptcy reform bills… and it’ll be hard as long as we have Congressmembers and Senators willing to sign onto every trade agreement that has the word “Free” in it…
But we simply must work through those issues. As bad as some Dems are on those bills, they are light-years ahead of the opposition in most respects.
OK - gonna grind the gears a little hear as I downshift. If you are watching the Lieberman race as closely as I am, you know that Holy Joe has threatened the Congressional ticket if Lamont’s challenge is successful.
I asked Ms. Pelosi if she would make a special effort for the downticket races in CT if Lieberman made good on his threat to make life difficult for the rest of the Dems in CT. I liked the answer I got.
And for the record, I like what she said about Democrats owning August. I think our leaders are fired up. I hope their enthusiasm trickles down to the roots.
14 Responses to “Leader Pelosi”
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A great third paragraph you wrote there, Mike.
I’m troubled by all the talk about voting, however. Have you forgotten? Bush was not elected; Americans cast their votes for Gore and then Kerry. The republicans STOLE both elections…and I have not gotten over it.
I’m sure you read Bobby Kennedy’s article about Ohio. The republicans rigged that election, just as they rigged Florida.
I don’t understand why we liberals keep telling people to get out and vote. WE DO THIS. The republicans don’t know how to win votes, they only know how to win elections: by stealing them.
So what is the Democrat plan to ensure that our elections are not rigged and not stolen? As I understand it, Diebold machines are going to be used in a lot of places.
If the best we can do is say “Get out and vote”, then we have already lost. We need to do more.
Focks:
I sympathize with your concerns. Electronic voting should be a bipartisan concern.
But…
This is exactly the sort of sentiment we can’t have.
We can’t tell people their votes won’t count. That will do incredible damage to turn out.
What we have to do is make it so the election is so not-close that it can’t be stolen. We need to get as many people to the polls as we can. Busload after busload.
And in the meantime, we support Bobby Kennedy. We demand paper trails. We demand clean elections and accurate counts.
But get people to the polls first.
You can also vote absentee in many states. I think that would make it more difficult for anyone to commit fraud.
Focks perhaps it during your education in civics and political science it escaped your notice that the electoral college is not bound to vote with the popular vote or that recounting only specific counties is unconstitutional. Besides all recounts including those by the NYTimes and CNN verified that Bush did in actuality win.
Ezsuds absentee ballots are only counted after the election date and then only in the event of a close race. Maybe it escaped your knowledge that these same absentee ballots are the votes Gore was trying to have discounted.
As far as voter fraud,I think both sides pulled some crap honestly. And I don’t like it a bit. I don’t like our political process hijacked like that.
The thing for Democrats to do,is to play an honest game to the hilt. IF the other side wants to cheat,they’ll get caught at it just like last time(and as the Dems got caught out).
Democrats want to be the party with higher morals,they have to BE the party with higher morals. And it’s much easier to nail someone’s arse to the wall when your hands are spotless.
IMO,of course.
ezuds said: “You can also vote absentee in many states. I think that would make it more difficult for anyone to commit fraud.”
thats actually how the ohio controversy happened, they didn’t count a lot of the absentee ballets
That is absolutely false, Brooklyn. In the case of Ohio, so many votes were needed to pass Ohio to Kerry. They rigged it so that this number of votes precisely went to Bush. It happened the same way in other states.
At no time in history have so many anomolies like this favored the republicans. It is statistically impossible, just as it is statistically impossible for exit polls to “fail” so miserably. Can’t happen.
The elections were rigged. I know exactly what our electoral system is all about. I knew this had happened a year before Kennedy came out with his report.
They’ll do it again and again and again until we have SOMEBODY monitoring our elections. I’m all for bringing in foreign countries to do just that, as well as doing away with electronic voting.
And incidentally, CNN and every other “news” organization is owned by a handful of huge multinational corporations, all of which are giving it to each other in their corporate butts.
The republicans know that if they can control the media, they can cheat. This is why all republicans recently defeated the “net neutrality” bill, defeated in the House and, last week, the Sentate. Republicans HATE the free flow of information, and the web, as we know it, will soon be turned over to the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, all republican-loving Telcos. They figured out that needed to either control the web, or die.
You will soon see the internet (in America) go down the toilet, because the big corporate sites will pay a large fee to make their sites as fast as they are today. Sites like this one, CallingAllWingnuts, won’t pay these tolls, and MAY end up dying, because they will load so slowly, people won’t want to visit them anymore. It’s coming.
I’ll bet few of you know about this. It’s another dirty little secret that the corporate media in this country won’t cover too much. And republicans were paid off by the Telcos to vote to defeat net neutrality.
I’ve done my homework on what republicans are doing to kill the middle and lower classes in this country, and no amount of republican bullshit is going to change the reality of where America is heading.
Republicans and the Telcos. Maybe you should check Al Gore and the telecommunications act. Get back to me then
Brooklyn,
maybe it escaped your knowledge, but if absentee ballots are only counted after the election date in event of a close race, atleast there will be something there to count. If it’s not close, it wouldn’t matter anyway. If it is close, I want my vote to count. It’s kind of hard to manipulate electronic data, when you are voting on paper. Until there are paper backups (receipts) for electronic voting, I’ll vote absentee.
I’ll not engage in a discussion with anybody who resorts to the moldy cottage-industry “arguments” of “Gore”, “Clinton”, “Swift boat” and all the other authoritarian cliches.
Brooklyn,
What you say about the recounts all going to Bush is not accurate. From a recent Media Matters for America article (which includes links to info)…
Sammon’s assertion of a Bush victory in a model recount conducted by mainstream media outlets was similarly misleading. Apparently referring to a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) — organized by a consortium that included The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, the Tribune Co. (publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel), and The Wall Street Journal — Sammon misrepresented the results. The NORC researchers “examined all ballots that were initially rejected by voting machines” and then applied “different standards for determining voter intent and tallied results based on several scenarios that sought to approximate conditions on the ground in Florida.”
Contrary to Sammon’s claim that the media recounts “all concluded” that Bush would have emerged victorious, different recount scenarios yielded different winners, as Media Matters for America has previously documented. According to the Post, when the recount tallied ballots in which “at least one corner of a chad was detached from punch-card ballots,” Gore won Florida by 60 votes. “[U]nder the least-restrictive standard for interpreting voter intent, which counted all dimpled chads and any discernible optical mark (which in the case of optical ballots Florida’s new election law now requires to be counted as votes),” the Post reported, “Gore had 107 more votes.” One recount with a “more restrictive interpretation of what constitutes a valid mark on optical scan ballots” — and in which chads had to be “fully punched” — saw Gore win by 115 votes. And a recount that replicated “the standards established by each of the counties in their recounts” gave Gore 171 more votes than Bush.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200603160002
And in light of all the controversy surrounding Diebold (Calif., Tallahassee, FL, Virginia, Ohio), and the ties the Diebold CEO has to the Bush administration, I don’t think it’s that far-flung to say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I would love for Congress to investigate Diebold, but that won’t happen with the current crop in Congress. Let’s put it this way…switch the party title from “Republican ties to Diebold” to “Democrat ties to Diebold” and the Right-wing noise machine would be in full throttle.
Hey Focks Security:
Those were two excellent follow up replies up at the top were great. Thank you for staying on top of this issue and educating people. It is important.
BANG!
And the saddest thing to me is,the very folks out here carrying water for these scumbags will be right there alongside the rest of us in the “have not” category. But because of their blind trust in words uttered by wolves in sheep’s clothing,they’ll support this mess.
But you know…. the Pubbies are the party of “values” lol. Too bad the only thing they value(in the party head itself) is a dollar bill. I guess when they talk about God,that’s where they’re praying at.
Wheee!