The Supreme Court ruling LAST Monday, 1 short week before the pivotal primary, has to rewrite the script for voter outreach for TODAY, or else many staunch supporters won't be able to have a vote counted on Tuesday.

Your GOTV phone calls, or door-to-door canvass, will bear fruit only if you check and ask, "Do you have a state-institution ID, one that shows an expiration date?" If they don't, the Obama field offices need to be prepared to help the voter either (1) get the documents on Monday (transportation) or (2) - per the SoS site for Indiana - help the person the day before Election Day - to "vote absentee-in-person at the county election office before Election Day, and while there, affirm that an exemption (for indigence/poverty) applies to you."

If the voter does not have the resources to acquire the documents to bring to BMV, they can affirm on Monday at the county Election office they're entitled to the exemption. For a vote to count by Election Day, this is the only option there's time for if a person can't get the set of documents.

Voters should be asked to double-check their registration status today too

This message is for Obama phone bankers and field planners.

The Supreme Court ruling LAST Monday, 1 short week before the pivotal primary, has to rewrite the script for voter outreach for Monday, or else many staunch supporters won't be able to have a vote counted on Tuesday.

Your phone calls, or door-to-door canvass, will bear fruit only if you check and ask, "Do you have a state-institution ID, one that shows an expiration date?" If they don't, the Obama field offices need to be prepared to help the voter either (1) get the documents on Monday (transportation) or (2) - per the SoS site for Indiana - help the person the day before Election Day - to "vote absentee-in-person at the county election office before Election Day, and while there, affirm that an exemption (for indigence/poverty) applies to you."

If the voter does not have the resources to acquire the documents to bring to BMV, they can affirm on Monday at the county Election office they're entitled to the exemption. For a vote to count by Election Day, this is the only option there's time for if a person can't get the set of documents.

If this is a preview of November, today is THE DAY to stop letting votes being siphoned off to provisional (NOT counted today).

The provo's, combined with automated voter roll database (by ES&S, Diebold/DIMS, Covansys, Accenture [in PA]), and database purging, mean that the HAVA law should be renamed the H-elp A-lawyer Void A-nother (ballot)  law.

Any voter who is told their names disappeared from the voter rolls or got a card directing them to the wrong precinct, but "you can vote provisionally" is being parsed off to a marginal voting system. Those votes – if counted at all – are NOT counted On Election Day.

This is what the front page of pollster RasmussenReports looks like this afternoon.

According to Rasmussen polling, in a telephone survey of 800 likely voters, Obama leads Romney by 9 (vs Clinton ahead of Romney by a smaller number, by 5).

Barack Obama also is leading John McCain now by a bigger margin than Clinton does. Obama bests McCain by 5 points, vs Clinton edging McCain by just 2.

The press (Las Vegas Sun, WaPo) reports now that the Democratic Party in Nevada made public 1 set of rules (doors will be kept open on Saturday until 12:00 noon).

Clinton caucus chairs used other rules.

The party procedures were clear:

NEVADA DEMOCRATIC PARTY RULES

THIS PROCESS MAY NOT BEGIN UNTIL NOON

In order to participate in the Nevada State Democratic Party Caucuses, attendees MUST be in line, or signed in, by noon. At noon, Presidential Preference Cards should be given to any person in line, and after that point, no Presidential Preference Cards should be given to any new arrivals, as they will not be allowed to caucus.

But the playbook [below] distributed to Clinton campaigners (pp 6-7) instructed them to have caucusers report before 11am and then close the doors a half hour early, at 11:30.

Bob Bauer at the Obama campaign said they fielded 100s of complaints Saturday about precinct captains closing the doors early.

I'm saying this not to be popular here. I know the overwhelming sentiment.

Straight out – you detractors can't be more wrong about her. Especially the interview she ran tonight with Valerie Wilson.

I loved the interview, and the tone and pitch were perfect. Damn close. Valerie absolutely shone, because (1) she's got a strength and beauty that made her shine and (2) the questions from Couric were on target and designed to bring out Wilson's views, her protests and indignities.

A good MSM interviewer, who wouldn't come across as a partisan advocate and uni-directed like a blogger tries to (like I try to be), will lob a couple of questions of the kind that a detractor would pose. Sure, when that happens, it's a bland, milquetoast kind of question. But usually it brings out an answer that's surprising, that grabs you and makes you root for 1 side or the other (for Plame Wilson or for Libby and Cheney).

Harry Reid had made a deal, he thought, to let a partisan Republican lawyer from DoJ's civil rights group, Hans von Spakovsky, get a vote on his nomination by Bush to the FEC – in a "package deal" that would let 3 others be voted on too.

von Spakovsky is one of the most repugnant of Bush's nominees to a position to monitor electioneering, 1 of the most influential of folks to jumpstart an outright purge of the voter rolls, beginning in Florida 2000.

Reports coming in this morning are: Olson is rising today to the top as a candidate to be named to trusted replacement of Gonzales as AG.

But Olson's just 1 more in a line of partisan warriors - not what the country desperately needs now for tarnished DoJ with its compromised attorney offices.

The role of service by Olson in his deception to Congress and to the public, like that of Laurence Silberman, was to hide the carefully buried truths of the Iran-Contra fiasco.

Both men's names were touted as leading choices for Bush's next nominee to the post. Silberman staged an intercession aimed to stymie Jimmy Carter's fall negotiations in the fall of 1980 to get our hostages freed from captivity in Tehran — so that his man Reagan could gain from the impasse and get elected. The resulting arms-for-hostages award for the release of the men after Reagan was elected was defended strenuously with mistruth by Olson.

The writing by attorney Ted Olson of anonymous articles for the Spectator magazine for the Arkansas Project aiming to smear and destroy the Clinton presidency is an exquisitely close reminder ...

After I enjoyed the debate and flipped the channel, a disconnect by the CNN commentators with their audience sounded through the airwaves, a crackle you could hear, loud and clear.

First thing, CNN crowed: Hillary was dominant. On Fox News, Frank Luntz queried his resident focus group to draw their reaction.  Hillary or Obama, he asked?

     A woman member's sure answer    >> I'd like both of them, she said.

Next question, a follow-up, came to Luntz from Sean Hannity at home base: "Which of them would do they want at the top of the ticket?" he asked.

Luntz turned to the men and women sitting in front of him.

Have you seen the favorable/unfavorable polling numbers for the Democratic candidates for president published by Rasmussen?

My take on the race is this – I am not moved 1 way or another either to or from any single candidate by a striking contrast in her or his ideology weighed against all the rest.

You don't find huge schisms, even on the war in Iraq.

As a practical matter, I want a nominee who's: in tune with the needs of citizens, less of a deceiver, and not so gungho to spill our soldiers' blood while ducking out on their own service obligations compared to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

So who breaks comfortably over the 50% mark for favorability? [Link to Rasmussen Reports]

Obama or Edwards. 1 of them are electable.

To drive the point home, here's the ratio calculated for favorables/unfavorables -->

Imus.   I'm for 'im, and I am vs 'im – here's why.

Can't agree with the guy.  But I wake up to him every day, my husband and I actually, and we listen to him for more than an hour.

As a host, he is ideologically uncommitted. To pin him down, he tilts moderate to liberal, but his producers Charles McCord and Bernard McGuirk are much more conservative than him.

For endorsements of candidates, his choices are whimsical, or at least inconsistent.  He has backed Kerry, McCain, Biden and Lieberman.

Most reliably, he backs the lawmakers who have loyally supported his own causes, such as bills in Congress to tackle autism in children.  With this cause-oriented instinct, he supported Rick Santorum, while disagreeing with his politics.

He pushed very hard for Harold Ford, Jr for senator.  What struck me was that for weeks afterwards he was on-air devastated and demoralized by the defeat of Ford.  Hearing Don Imus' political remarks following the election, the guy was nearly obsessed for more than a month, he could not get over his bitterness that the voters of Tennessee narrowly rejected that candidate.  It was interesting, that harangue – it always turned my head why he couldn't accept that.

Consider this, along with the hoopla of the Oscars.

Award-winner and VP Al Gore chartered a rescue plane in the 1st week following Katrina and flew to New Orleans to medEvac 100s of patients from Charity Hospital and bring them to Tennessee.  

During the transport, Gore declined interviews while he was shuttling the evacuees that Saturday and in a 2nd return flight he made on Sunday, but the doctors who flew with him talked about the experience.  

Gore had to work around a sequential blockade by FEMA, which naturally denied his team permissions, repeatedly.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP)- Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son.

...  [Gore] refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew last Saturday and Sunday. . . .

 

 

Your favorites and not-so-favorite candidates who seek your approval to be the Democratic nominee for Prez swarm today to Nevada, Carson City — and ABC will be there with its cameras rolling, at noon.

The moderator is George Stephanopoulos.  Yet ABC will not run the event on TV at noon or later today. You can expect a couple of clips to go by if you watch World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson. Don't blink, or you'll miss it.

Who's attending?

In the disputed race between Christine Jennings and Vern Buchanan —the two are separated by 369 votes in their claim to a seat in the US House of Representatives— the "iVotronic" touchscreen machines at the precincts did not alert voters to undervotes, and did not ask if they wished to input a vote choice in a race that was not yet recorded.

Yet, that operation is at odds with specific printed instructions on the website of election supervisor Kathy Dent (R) that showed voters the sequence to expect in casting a vote on Sarasota County's iVotronic, sold by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). [Screenshot here - scroll; the link is at the jump.]

18,000 voter records registered no vote for a congressional seat, 13% of voters [1 of 8] who walked into the booth, yet only 1.2% of Sarasota absentee (paper) ballots cast no vote in that race. >>  More people had a vote recorded for "Hospital Board southern district" than for the Jennings-Buchanan race to replace Katherine Harris.

In the disputed race between Christine Jennings and Vern Buchanan —the two are separated by 369 votes in their claim to a seat in the US House of Representatives— the "iVotronic" touchscreen machines at the precincts did not alert voters to undervotes, and did not ask if they wished to input a vote choice in a race that was not yet recorded.

Yet, that operation at odds with specific printed instructions on the website of election supervisor Kathy Dent (R) that showed voters the sequence to expect in casting a vote on Sarasota County's iVotronic, sold by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). [Screenshot here - scroll; the link is at the jump.]

18,000 voter records registered no vote for a congressional seat, 13% of voters [1 of 8] who walked into the booth, yet only 1.2% of Sarasota absentee (paper) ballots cast no vote in that race. >>  More people had a vote recorded for "Hospital Board southern district" than for the Jennings-Buchanan race to replace Katherine Harris.

Keep an eye on  H D T V [Hold down the Vote] efforts by the GOP. The tactics rely on intimidation, lies, discrimination and -with a new twist- technology. In the 1981 NJ governor's race between Tom Kean, Sr. and Jim Florio, intimidation earned the GOP a DOJ warning and consent decree after Kean, Sr. took a 1,797-vote (out of 2.2 million)lead - after the GOP's "Ballot Security Task Force" posted illegal signs and hired off-duty police to walk the polls, exclusively in minority precincts.

The RNC... hired an army of workers to patrol targeted black and Hispanic polling places... prominently displayed revolvers and BSTF armbands.

Since the DoJ order, the RNC has switched methods.

To deny a voter the ballot relies now on 1) VoterID,  and 2) central databases —sold by contractors to the states— that mechanically lose and purge voters. The databases are built by vendors Covansys, Accenture, ES&S, Diebold/DIMS, Unisys, PCC Tech and Saber Consulting. Below, the campaign gifts(+party leanings) of the companies that build the voter databases. For starters, donations listed for employer Covansys in the last 2 elections:

                        [ --crossposted at politicalcortex-- ]

 2 CIA officials tell us Washington –twice– declined to send the reinforcements they asked for when bin Laden was cornered in Afghanistan in 2001.  By the time of the 2nd request by the CIA for troops, the special ops force could hear Osama bin Laden on radio asking his followers for forgiveness for leading them to their imminent capture.  It was that close.

From Gary Bernsten, who led the CIA's paramilitary unit chasing bin Laden after he fled from Kabul (Christiane Amanpour interviewed him on CNN) –

AMANPOUR:  ... the CIA was sure it knew where he was, thanks in large part to a radio taken off a dead al Qaeda fighter.

BERNTSEN: We listened to bin Laden for several days using that radio, listened to his communications among him and his men. We listened to him apologize to them for having led them  –

As we come round to the 5-year mark, what scares me is a confluence of events that may HIT us FAST, ones that Bush & Co. is preparing us for with a ferocious preemptive round of political broadsides.  Oh, and also with a new law he says he wants, one that will pull judges out of the loop.

I'm talking about  /1/ al Qaeda  and  /2/ a verbal slingshot counteroffense.

Amanpour told us (in a special CNN aired 3x in August) that bin Laden has overcome 2 hurdles.  Motivational hurdles that he has mounted.

Amanpour surprised me by saying bin Laden took heat from his admirers and followers for 9-11 because the attack he launched overlooked one sacred precept and mandate of the Muslim faith.