Monday, October 17, 2011

Florida Republicans move up primary. Will Democrats and the press say it doesn't count?




The Florida Republican party recently announced that over the objections of the Republican National Committee, they are going to move the date of its presidential primary up to January.

This decision and the difference between the reactions of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee recalls one of the most disgraceful, dishonest, corrupt episodes in the history of the Democratic party when, during the 2008 primaries the hierarchy of the Democratic National Committee headed by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Donna Brazille and others, conspired to do everything possible to tilt the playing field in favor of Barrack Obama. And did it by depriving 2.200,000 Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan their  voting rights and their rightful voice in the process to select the Democratic nominee for president.

I use the word "conspire" because that is exactly what it was. What the Democratic National Committee did in Florida and Michigan was as sinister and corrupt as any act committed by Boss Tweed, the corrupt Democratic party official in New York City in the 1850's who literally threw away votes for candidates he did not support.

The decision to move the Florida and Michigan primaries up over the objections of the DNC were made by two party chairpersons in each state with the support of state party officials. Both Florida and Michigan did it because they were afraid their primaries would be irrelevant after Super Tuesday and they wanted to call attention to their unemployment and economic problems. The DNC said no, and the two states said they would defy the national party and move them up anyway.

What the DNC could have done as punishment for defying national party orders was sanction the party officials who made the decision. They could have stripped them of their credentials. They could have levied heavy fines on the respective state parties. They could have banned the party officials from the Democratic national convention.

Instead the DNC used it as an excuse to help Obama by disenfranchising 1,600,000 Democrats in Florida and another 600,000 Michigan - 2,200,000 voters who the DNC punished and whose crime was to show up and vote on the dates their state Democratic party and their state's attorney general told them to. The DNC decided they were the ones to be punished by announcing that their votes wouldn't count and the delegates elected to cast their votes for a presidential nominee wouldn't be seated.

To show just how corrupt the process was, Michael Moore, whose good works have been invaluable to the cause of common sense,  threw 600,000 of his friends and neighbors in his beloved Michigan under the bus by supporting the DNC's decision to disenfranchise them because he, like most journalists and Obama supporters, had an agenda of seeing a president with black ancestry get elected

Never mind that this candidate had proved over 11 years that he was the most dishonest, duplicitous candidate since Richard Nixon. Never mind that over 11 years he had proved he was a do nothing politician who did nothing but talk a lot. Never mind that he had been caught in more lies in two months than most dishonest politicians in a career, whether it was seven consecutive days lying about Jeremiah Wright or his lies and duplicity that was exposed over NAFTA during the Ohio primaries. There was an agenda and that agenda was going to be seen through even if people like Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington, Keith Olbermann, Gail Collins and just about everyone in the press along with the DNC had to shred every iota of their integrity to make it happen. And that meant disenfranchising 2,200,000 voters in Florida and Michigan.At the same time that American soldiers were dying in Iraq to secure free and fair elections there.

While Obama was making speeches in 2008 saying things like " voices must be heard, every vote must count" he was also deeply involved, conspiring with officials at the DNC to do everything possible to keep the votes from Florida and Michigan from counting because of what those voices were saying, voices that said in landslide numbers that they wanted Hillary Clinton, not Barrack Obama to be the Democratic nominee for president.

The press dutifully went along acting like errand boys and accomplices for DNC officials, refusing to count the Florida and Michigan votes and the delegate counts that went along with it. This went a long way in creating the expectation that Obama would be the nominee despite facts at the time to the contrary which was the whole point.

Jonathan Alter, in Obama's pocket  from day one, actually wrote an article saying that Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race because she had no chance of winning. This even though Clinton had landslided Obama in 13 of 15 of the biggest states in the country. " Do the math" Alter wrote. In the end the math said that Clinton had won the popular vote over Obama and neither candidate had the 2/3 delegate majority to seal the nomination after the primaries ( which is what led to the rigged roll call vote for Obama at the convention).

The Florida Republican party's decision to move their primary up over the objections of the national party but with no threat made by the RNC that their votes wouldn't count recalls the whole ugly mess in 2008, a mess caused by the of leadership the DNC and the political corruption of Democratic congressional leaders and the press that brought about Obama's nomination.

You would think that politicians would have learned a long time ago that nothing good will ever come from trying dishonest or corrupt means to achieve a desired result. Nixon learned it in Watergate. Politicians who went to jail like Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham learned that. And now, after Obama sold out the Democratic agenda,after he has caved in and capitulated to Republicans on the most important aspects of the Democratic agenda, after his duplicitious and gutless first two years in office cost the Democrats the House and their biggest opportunity in 60 years to accomplish their goals, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic leadership know it too.

And unless they find another nominee for president in 2012, the price for their manipulation will get steeper.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Republican congressman unconsciously compares Occupy Wall Street to American Revolution.




Peter King, a right wing New York Republican congressman joined the growing list of Republicans condemning the Occupy Wall Street protests that continues to spread far beyond Wall Street with smaller protests cropping up in cities from coast to coast, and spreading around the world, but King's condemnation was especially amusing since, without realizing it, he compared the protestors to the American colonists who revolted against British rule.

In an interview with right wing radio host Laura Ingrahm, King referred to the Occupy Wall Street protestors as "anarchists" and a "rag tag mob", precisely the same language the British used in referring to American colonists who revolted against King George. He's now the second king to refer to American protestors as "anarchists" and a "rag tag mob".

King was also concerned that the Occupy Wall Street protestors were getting too much attention from the media, something he has no problem with when the Tea Party organizes protests.

Referring to the protestors as a "mob", King said:

"We have to be careful not to allow this ( the protests) to get any legitimacy," he warned. "I'm taking this seriously in that I'm old enough to remember what happened in the 1960's when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy," he said. "We can't allow that to happen."

The policies that King referred to that were shaped by the protests of the 1960's that he objects to were civil rights, equal rights for African Americans, the Voting Rights Act that gave African Americans the right to vote, integration, equality for women, insistence that 18 year olds who were old enough to get drafted and be sent to war were old enough to vote for or against those who send them there, respect for the global environment with protests against polluting the air and water, sexual freedom, freedom of speech, an end to social double standards, and an end to an ongoing war that killed 50,000 American soldiers needlessly because of egregious miscalculations by two presidents and the super ego of one, Richard Nixon.

In two sentences about the Occupy Wall Street protests, King summed up everything that is at the root of all liberal vs. conservative animosity and conflict. Not only have conservatives still not gotten over losing the Civil War, they haven't gotten over the 60's either when so many of the conformist, unequal, unconstitutional and narrow minded values they cherished were exposed as frauds and demolished.

Mayor Bloomberg might have a point when he says that the Occupy Wall Street protestors miss the point that it's the taxes these banks and Wall Street firms pay that help pay for the services in the city that benefits everyone. But Mayor Bloomberg misses a different  point --  that it was the taxes paid by average working people that went to prop up these banks that were on the verge of collapse because of the sheer greed, ineptitude and incompetence of those who controlled them. Average working people saw their tax money spent on cleaning up the egregious and dishonest mistakes of bank presidents and investment houses and benefit the people with the multi-million dollar salaries, the people who caused all the problems in the first place but, thanks to government bail outs didn't lose their jobs ( a case can be made that many of them should have gone to jail much less lose their jobs), while not enough of their tax payer money went to saving their own jobs and the economies of their own communities.

The biggest point the protestors are missing is that the inequality and injustice they now feel is not the fault of the banks or Wall Street who are only doing what the law allows. That fault can be laid directly at the feet of Barrack Obama who, despite a huge congressional Democratic majority watered down Financial Reform and took out its most important provisions." Too big to fail" the concept that was at the heart of the tax payer bailout has not been fixed because Obama caved in to Wall Street and bank pressure, a pattern which followed his caving in to pressure from health insurance companies by dropping the public option.

It is not the banks or Wall Street that has to go. It's Obama.  And the Republican majority in the House.