(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

I actually didn't listen to the debate last night.  Kip got a flat tire Tuesday and I had to go pick him up right before the Candidates Forum the League of Women Voters was sponsoring--I wasn't late to the Forum, but I did show up in my shorts instead of the nice clothes I'd been intending to wear.  So yesterday after Kip was done with work, we drove out to the parking lot where he'd left his crippled car, and Kip jacked it up, took off the flat, put the donut on, and we took the flat (in my car) to the nearest tire place.  They were closed by then.  Grumpy (well, I was grumpy; Kip doesn't get grumpy, much) and tired, we went shopping, bought comfort food, and went home.  I didn't realize until about 9:30 that it was debate night, and by then I was in bed, because I was going to have to drive Kip to work at 7:30am.  I thought briefly about getting up and listening, but decided if I did that it would take me hours to calm down enough to go to sleep.  So I deliberately left the debate unlistened-to.

I think it came out okay anyway; at least that's what most people seem to think.  So that's good then.

*Plus* today I called around to 3 local tire places, figured out the best deal, took my bike pump out to Kip's car, pumped the donut to its regulation pressure, let the car off the jack, and drove it to the tire place.  I got the new tires put on, then drove around looking at houses, then got the alignment done, and took the car over to Carson-Newman for Kip.  Go me!

In the meantime, what I was intending to post about yesterday: ACORN.

The Republicans are trying to make a big deal of ACORN's voter registration drive.  They have some questionable voter registrations, duplicates, registrations made out in the name of Mickey Mouse, that kind of thing.

The kicker is that of 1,000,000 voter registrations collected, 30,000 seem to be bad.  For those who lose track of all those zeros, that's an error rate of 3%. 

3%.

In 2004 I helped register voters.  I spent six hours sitting in a grocery store, asking people if they would like to register.  I got all kinds of responses; people who wanted to register and were grateful for the chance, people who decided to register when they saw other people registering, people who were uninterested, people who were out and out hostile (at the electoral process itself, fortunately, not at me.)  I think I got 30 forms.

If I'd had one joker--one--who thought it was funny to fill out a registration in the name of Mikey Mouse, I'd have had an error rate of 3%.  I didn't check any of those registration forms before I turned them in; those peoples addresses were not any of my business, so I wouldn't have known.  But in case I did have such a joker, I assure you, I was not trying to finagle anything.

But the Republicans would be happy to throw out all 29 of the real registration forms over the one bad one.

Comments

[erin-ruston.livejournal.com]

And... this surprises no one. Politicians of any party are happy to disenfranchise those that might vote against them. The Republicans just happen to be the ones being sloppy about it this time.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

ACORN is a grassroots community thing. Most of the people who hit the pavement for them are unpaid volunteers, just like I am when I work on a particular campaign. Except that, sometimes, they pay a little stipend to some people--especially to the "less fortunate" who seem willing to work hard and could use a "hand-up". Liberal groups are often more than willing to help those who want to help themselves.

Anyhow, my understanding of the ACORN thing is that this 3% error rate is made up mostly of a few batches of registrations that are clearly not kosher. Fake names, multiple registrations in the same handwriting. What that tells me is that there's a couple of bad apples in the bunch. could be any of:

1. Some overzealous volunteers who cheated. Very unlikely that the higher-ups would know about this. The equivalent of if I got on the phone banks and, without authorization or notice, decided the thing to do was to call undecided voters and say "We are sex offenders and we want you to vote for McCain."

2. Some homeless people getting some remuneration for their work decided to supplement a small take of valid registrations by making up their own. Again, the higher-ups would be completely unaware that this was happening.

3. It's possible a Republican mole did this specifically to create plausibility for GOP accusations of fraud.

In ALL of these cases, the safe bet is that ACORN did not knowingly do anything wrong, and neither McCain nor Obama have cause to regret that they are both associated with the organization.

[artbeco.livejournal.com]

If it's any comfort, the question of Acorn and Obama'a affliation was brought up by McCain in the debate last night, and Obama answered (I thought) very clearly, straight, and put the matter to rest quite ably. There were a number of what sounded like desperation attacks by McCain that Obama calmly answered and cleared up in what seemed like a once and for all manner. He was very clear, very focused on the issues, all through the debate. Which I cannot say for McCain.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

As Rachel Meadows observed:
"...voter registration fraud is very different from actual voter fraud and voter suppression".

[howeird]

Seems to me ACORN is about the same thing as the "Kill Him" people. Over-zealous supporters who go out and do bad things because they think they are helping their candidate. I don't hold a candidate responsible for the stupid things his supporters do on their own, unless he does nothing to stop it.

Having said that, I'll also say that while it sounds real good to dismiss 30,000 errors as a 3% error rate, the excitement isn't about the error rate*, it's about the canvassers themselves writing in phony names. Chicago has a long history of registering the dead, which adds to this drama.

---

I happen to be a quality test engineer. I've worked in that capacity for Motorola, Sony and HP, among others. None of those companies would accept a 3% error rate. Motorola's published goal is 0.03%.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

mmmmm...donut

[gorgeousgary]

I watched the Phillies-Dodgers game instead of the debate. Since I don't care who wins (and will probably root for either over the Rays), it's much less stressful.

According to one article (or column, I forget which) in the Washington Post, there have been cases where ACORN workers themselves have noticed, and properly reported and/or corrected, anomalies in registrations. And the local officials turned right around and cried "VOTER FRAUD!" anyway.

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

We don't watch the debate on live TV together in our house. It would only lead to marital strife.

So today I plugged headphones into my computer, and caught up on the debate here.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, seems the Republicans want to win this election the good old-fashioned way--by stealing it. A self-selected sample, with targeted removals, isn't going to give the will of the people. Now if it were up to me, voting would be a responsibility of citizenship, the gummint would be required to make an effort to register all eligible citizens, and any attempt to keep people from voting would be severely penalized. But then, I'm a damned radical--I actually believe in democracy.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

And...how are these fake names going to vote? Falsified ID? That seems a bit much.

[howeird]

It got Mayor Richard Daley elected a number of times, when it took professional forgers to make a real-looking ID. These days anyone with a valid ID on hand can produce a real-looking fake ID in minutes with Photoshop and off the shelf badge imprinting software. Bear in mind that most voter registration is done via mail or online. There are some challenges, such as making sure you have a different polling location for each ID, and the address used belongs to someone in the organization so the voter's pamphlet is not returned to sender.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

When I saw this, I asked Kip if he'd ever heard of Democrats trying to do the same thing. He said he had. I don't recall having seen it myself, but my memory is not all that good.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

--and go you! for working on the campaign, by the way. I've been meaning to say that, and now is a good time. :-)

plus,

4) as I understand it, groups that try to get people registered are not allowed to pick and choose which registrations they turn in--they *must* turn in *every* single one. Which is basically a good thing; how much of a pisser would it be if you filled out a registration form at Costco, and thought you were registered, but it got thrown out because the person handling the forms didn't want anyone of your party to be able to vote? All organizations are allowed to do is to flag the forms they think might be suspect. Which ACORN duly did and they're *still* being blamed.

and

5) Voter Registration Fraud is not the same as Voter Fraud. Voter Fraud is if I went and voted twice, say under two different names at two different polling places. Voter Registration Fraud would be if I filled out a registration for Donald Duck. Or Howie Mandel, or someone else I am not.

While Voter Registration fraud is a waste of the election committee's time, it's Voter Fraud you have to actually watch out for. Different things. ACORN is *not* accused of Voter Fraud. Though certain Republicans would love for you to be confused about that.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thank you for telling me this; since I didn't actually listen to the third debate, it's good to hear from someone who did. :-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

None of those companies would accept a 3% error rate. Motorola's published goal is 0.03%.

Hmm, just guessing here, so I'll let you tell me--are any of those companies running programs that, like a voter registration effort, are active only for a few months every four years and staffed mostly by hastily recruited volunteers and poorly paid short term recruits with only a few days (if that) of training for their positions?

Are any of these companies dealing in material largely produced by people over whom the companies have little or no control, no job to take away, no paycheck to stop? You know, the way voter registration forms are filled out by people that the collectors of the forms have no power to coerce?

Are any of these companies required by law to pass every single object produced, no matter how obviously flawed, on to the next step of the process, the way groups that register voters are required by law to pass every form on to the election commission?

It is unrealistic to compare voter registration forms to microchips. A better comparison would be, oh, say, library cards.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It sounds like vote fraud requires so much organization that the time and effort would be better spent on getting voters who already agree with you to the polls. After all, if you persuade 3 like minded voters to carpool with you, that's pretty much got to be easier than finding 3 friends who will pass on to you extra voter registration cards for you that come to their addresses, and going to 4 different precincts under 4 different names on voting day.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

?

Donuts are tasty.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Picking the less stressful option makes good sense. :-)

I heard about ACORN flagging questionable registrations too.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't have a high speed connection right now, alas. But thanks for the link anyway; perhaps I'll get to it when I'm at the library.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Voting *is* a responsibility of citizenship. It's just that many people don't live up to it.

I don't know that it would make sense to make it compulsory, if that's what you mean to suggest; I fear it would just increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

Though I know there are countries that do it (that aren't dictatorships--though some dictatorships do it too) and seem to get reasonable results with it.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

As it is now, though, the pols are picking the voters, often by scaring them into voting, which is one reason that attack politics work so well. I want to bring out the moderates, and make the pols campaign to everyone in their districts, rather than to minorities who they can persuade. A well-run sampling system would be better at producing a democratic result than what we have now. There's a lot of other things which might be tried--instant runoff or range voting, and proportional representation, which it turns out we used to been have in some localities--it was dropped because communists occasionally won a few seats. Mass democracy is still a new thing, historically, and we aren't very good at it yet.

[erin-ruston.livejournal.com]

There was some Dem hanky panky involving Republican voter shared-ride vans and flat tires. Gotta love Madison, WI.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Oh, nonsense. The old machine politics didn't depend on fancy forgery techniques--it depended on corruption of local elections officials, who would create and discard votes to get the machine's result. More senior officials were also corrupted, so that there were no checks on the local officials. The dirty politics that the Republicans are now using were typical of the period, too--people weren't allowed to vote and voters were threatened. In our day, quietly distributing a large number of forged IDs would be very difficult, and it would would be very easy to catch--if a large number of people starting traveling all over the place to vote in districts they didn't belong to, it would be pretty obvious. Mail ballots so far actually seem to work pretty well; attempts at fraud seem to be reliably caught. My concern with the mail ballot is more that it can't reliably be made secret, which can be a problem in some families and very controlling social groups.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Though the one you put on Kip's car, probably not so much.

Uh sometimes my brain wanders down the completely wrong path when I read LJ posts. It's a little "issue" I have. On the positive side, sometimes it leads to music.

But not today.

Nevermind...

[howeird]

staffed mostly by hastily recruited volunteers and poorly paid short term recruits with only a few days (if that) of training for their positions
So you are advocating a piece 'o' crap voter registration drive?

no power to coerce
Nobody has to coerce me to do my best when I volunteer to register voters. I expect you hold yourself to the same high standards when you volunteer that you hold yourself to at work. Maybe higher. Don't make excuses for people who lack your basic integrity.

Are any of these companies required by law to pass every single object produced
Absolutely. And we can get fined and sued big-time if a product fails. There are ISO standards everyone on my team has to meet, and we are inspected quarterly.

It is unrealistic to compare voter registration forms to microchips.
We don't make microchips, we make complete devices. If you have a cable TV box, it is probably made by Motorola. When I worked for them, HP made the best Unix workstations, plotters, printers and scanners on the market. When I worked for Sony I tested laptops, desktops and portable music devices. If there is no comparison, it's because registering voters is orders of magnitude more simple than what electronics companies do.

You wouldn't falsify registration applications, why do you insist on making excuses for those who do?

[howeird]

the time and effort would be better spent on getting voters who already agree with you to the polls.
Yes, I think so too. But ACORN apparently disagrees with us.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

But ACORN apparently disagrees with us

See, *this* pisses me off. ACORN turned in some bad voter registrations--as required by law--they can't just dump them themselves, even though they were the ones taken advantage of. They even flagged a lot of them as suspicious themselves, to make sure the election commissions spotted them.

Yet despite all that, your *first* assumption that it was part of some big plot to get more Democratic votes the hard way--rather than using the easy way of getting out the Democratic votes.

ACORN doesn't disagree with us. ACORN disagrees with people who think poor and minority people don't deserve an equal chance to vote, or decent housing. Neither one of us is like that.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for bringing this up. I know almost nothing about old-style election fraud, so I'm never sure what to say when people try to compare it to registration fraud, and vote suppression in the modern day.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't advocate that voter registration drives be a piece of crap; don't be silly. I recognize the real-world condition that voter registration drives are not run by rich companies that can keep up the effort year round, hire the most expensive talent, and continuously monitor their performance to retrain people who need it and fire people who still don't meet their standards.

Of course I do my best when I register voters. But I have no power (and desire no power) to coerce the people who sign up to actually fill out the correct information on the form. Nor do the people I work with have any power to coerce me or my fellow volunteers if we don't meet their standards. They don't even have the time to tell which of us are good or bad; by the time they've received enough of our work to spot those of us who are taking advantage of them we're gone. That doesn't make the group I volunteer for evil or even careless. It's a fact of the nature of the work.

We don't make microchips, we make complete devices
Fine, then it's unrealistic to compare voter registration forms to cable TV boxes, workstation, plotters, printers or scanners. For all the reasons I put forth before.

And I'm not making excuses for people who falsify voter registration applications. I'm "making excuses" for ACORN. Which didn't. They were taken advantage of by a few short-term employees and volunteers. Who were gone and won't be back.

You know this. What's up with you?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oh. I've been getting so much flack about ACORN I kind of forgot the tire donut.

Which worked, but made me very nervous to drive on. Every time I went over a bump I flinched. I was so glad to have a real tire back on it.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. This send me back to do a bit more homework, and I found that the McCain campaign has been trying to link Obama to the old machine politics of Chicago. It's all over Google. Just put in "Chicago machine" and it pops out. All nonsense--the old machine would never in a million years have supported any black man. But that's the story they're trying to tell. I don't know much more of the history of urban machine politics myself--just the broad outlines. It's matched in rural districts, especially in the Southern states, but in many other states as well, with the suppression of the votes of blacks by law and, when law failed, by terrorism. One of the shocks I have had, since I started paying more attention to US electoral politics, is how far short of democratic ideals it has fallen, throughout our history. Our current system, with all its problems and flaws, is an enormous improvement over what existed in 1950. Still, it's far from perfect, or even very good. Getting everyone who has the right to vote registered, I think, would only be the beginning.

Anyhow, back to lighting & user interface design.

A little factoid

[carolf.livejournal.com]

The real problem is this:

Those 30,000 "bad" (for lack of a better, non-political word)? ACORN flagged them before taking them in (as required.) It was unsympathetic election officials who then publicized them ... without mentioning that ACORN had done quality control on itself.

I think we should be thanking any organization that tried to get the vote out, regardless of which party they support. The real election crisis in this country is that approximately 1/3 of eligible voters are not registered at all -- and the lack of registration is severely skewed to minorities.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

The moment you might most regret not seeing:

In midst of all the "Joe the Plumber" business (of which I am quite sure you have heard much, by now) McCain went after Obama for his tax on small business, both in the form of higher taxes for those earning over $250,000 AND in the form of mandatory health insurance coverage -- the business either pays for health insurance or is fined.

McCain asked "How much, Senator Obama, how much will that fine be?"

Obama: (addressed to the camera as to "Joe the Plumber" -- "If you're out there") I'll tell you exactly how much your fine would be. Your fine would be ... zero.
[continues on with details, but is interrupted}

McCain: Zero?!!?
We often talk about jaws dropping, but this is the first time I've actually watched it happen. McCain dropped his jaw, whipped his head around, wide eyes, to look at Obama. The mouth stayed open throughout the
rest of Obama's explanation.)

Obama: Zero. Here's why ...

To be honest, it was funny. I say that just from the sheer theatricality of it all. But, equally honestly, it was extremely sad. The McCain I used to respect would have done enough boning up on his opposition to be able to frame questions better, and not be surprised by the answer. Whoever is running his campaign and prepping him for debates dropped a huge ball here, but it was McCain left hanging in the wind.

It really wasn't a pretty sight. For anyone, pro or con McCain.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

If you are interested, here is my summary of the debate: (If you are not interested, please pass me up.)

If you read the transcripts, rather than watching or listening to the debate, you find that both candidates offered reasonable logic flowing from their initial premise. You might not agree with one's premise; but the suggestions and proposals from both candidates flowed consistently from the premise.

However, in the transcripts, you will also find that McCain, while offering valid points throughout, was scattered -- jumping from topic to topic, answering something quickly in order to go back to something else he wanted to revisit, and that something else was usually something (to me) icky -- back to Ayres or ACORN or killing live babies on surgical tables ... This simply isn't the McCain we've seen before, and certainly not anyone I want leading this country, particularly now.

If you watched, you saw McCain tight, tense, angry. Most pundits talked about his eyes. To me, it was all the teeth clenching that got to me. He is somewhat jowly to start with, and the muscles in his jaw, when they get working, really stand out. I don't know if he has any molars left, at this point. The anger was palpable.

Obama was simply unflappable. Some pundits even say boring. In the sense of providing grist for the media scandalmongering, he was indeed, very boring.

However, he, too, had a facial mannerism that did not play well on TV, especially in split screen. When Obama is listening to someone, he tips his head back, which directs his eyes down his nose to the speaker. I don't pretend to know what he means by it -- it could be thoughtful, careful listening or it could be snobbery. But it looks like he's looking down his nose at his opponent. I noticed it during the primaries, and it really shows up on TV.

I doubt either candidate convinced anyone already decided to switch. Both had valid points that would play well to those who agreed with their starting premises.

But if there were any truly undecideds watching, my money was on them climbing on the Obama wagon simply because of his calm logic in the face of McCain's angry scatter.

The polls and headlines seem to say I got it right.

Re: A little factoid

[howeird]

Read this Wall Street Journal article from 2006 and tell me if you still buy the story about ACORN's spectacular QA skilz.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009189

I agree totally that voter registration needs to be ramped up, and even more what catsittingstill said about getting registered voters to the polls.

"Factoid" describes it perfectly.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

A humanoid is something that resembles a human, but on closer inspection...isn't. A spheroid resembles a sphere but is... distorted. So yes,"factoid" is the perfect word for this.

The Wall Street Journal, written for the Wall Street executives we just bailed out to the tune of 700 billion tax dollars, doesn't like ACORN, which works for the poor and disenfranchised. This is not much of a surprise. Nor is it any kind of scathing indictment.

The article says that the Justice Department was connecting the dots about ACORN. This would be the same Justice Department that fired Federal Prosecutors for refraining from prosecuting Democratic candidates when there was no evidence of wrongdoing, correct? The Justice Department that the Bush Administration packed with incompetent ideologues under Alberto Gonzales? That "Justice" Department?

So the Justice Department was investigating ACORN in 2006. Maybe they mistook them for Democrats.

Maybe someday we'll have an attorney general who is interested in restoring balance and competence to the Department of Justice. It would be so nice to be able to read/say/think that name without irony. But in the meantime, why should I take DoJ investigations of non-Republicans seriously?

It's also interesting that the WSJ article cites Thor Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights as one of their sources of opinion. The ACVR disappeared without a trace in the middle of 2007, unlike most NGOs with an actual serious cause (can you imagine Planned Parenthood doing this? The NRA?), and Mr Hearne has apparently cleansed his resume of his association with them, according to this article in Slate. (http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/) Apparently, directed by Karl Rove and his allies, the Bush administration made a concerted effort to prosecute vote fraud, only to discover there was virtually no voter fraud at the polls. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?ei=5088&en=277feccfa099c7d0&ex=1334030400&pagewanted=all) However, the second prong of the assault on voting rights was to promote this fake think tank to give "academic cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections. That cachet would be used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities, and the elderly—groups more likely to vote Democratic." (From the Slate article above.)

More information about the American Center for Voting Rights can be found in the corresponding Wikipedia article. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Center_for_Voting_Rights)

I also can't help but notice that article you link to conveniently conflates ACORN with "affiliates." This would be kind of like guilt-by-association, except that the WSJ doesn't even mention the actual name(s) of the real guilty part(ies)--both their actual guilt and the degree, if any, of their association with ACORN would be checkable if we had that information--so the WSJ just elides that inconveniently traceable part. That is a bad sign.

So, yeah, a factoid there. Just let's make sure that people don't mistake it for, you know, a fact.

Re: A little factoid

[carolf.livejournal.com]

The significant bit of this is that it is from 2006.

It was specifically because of these problems that ACORN changed its procedures and policies.

There is no indication from vetted reporting ("vetted" from either side, not by themselves) that 2008 is the same.

Sometimes people do learn from their mistakes.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for telling me about McCain's jaw-drop moment. No, I hadn't heard about it before this. :-)

Yes, you'd think he would have studied up on Obama's proposed policies a little better.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

thanks for this overview.

I hadn't noticed either candidate's physical mannerisms, but then, not having a TV, I've seen very little of them. It's interesting to think about how they looked to people.

I wonder what Obama is thinking inside when he tilts his head back as he listens. I tried doing it myself to see what it feels like from the inside--if I do it one way it feels like I'm thinking very hard about the implications of something; if I do it another way it feels like I'm being snooty. I might have a better idea of which way to do it if I saw Obama actually doing it :-)

It does look from the polls as though Obama garnered more voters to his side than McCain, which I guess is the point.

Re: A little factoid

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The other significant bit is the dependence on the American Center for Voting Rights, a Republican pseudo-"think-tank", which disappeared without a trace in the middle of 2007, its work of sowing doubt in right-wing minds about the integrity of the voting process done. This in spite of the fact that almost no polling-place voter fraud was found during the Department of Justice's 5 year investigation of same.

See also my response to Howeird above.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

This indictment was apparently rushed out for the 2006 election and, as the saying goes, a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. ACORN as a whole appears to be clean as a whistle. It appears they are being targeted largely because they register blacks. Despite enormous hostility from the current administration only a few isolated individuals have been convicted. The cited piece is a WSJ editorial piece, and the WSJ been claiming up is down in those for as long as I can remember--I remember their editorials defending James Watt, Reagan's radical right fundamentalist Secretary of the Interior, in the 1980s. On top of which it's not behind the WSJ's paywall, so its continued distribution at this time is propaganda by the now Murdoch-owned WSJ.

Grrr, growl, snap!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

And that ham sandwich is responsible! J'accuse!

But, yeah, I knew that about the WSJ's editorial page. It wasn't clear to me from the web page it's on that this was an editorial piece, but that makes sense. Of course they'd want readers to think it was some kind of researched article.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Big grin. Snicker.

The URL gives it away. But also, their "Review and Outlook" section is opinion--this week they're defending deregulation. One cannot make these things up.

and now we have...

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

"A former top Department of Justice voting rights official -- who once worked with John McCain in defense of the senator's campaign-finance reform bill -- has added his name to the growing chorus that is denouncing the department's investigation of ACORN as a shameful and inappropriate politicization of Justice along the lines of the US attorney firings." -- over at TPM Muckraker. I think this one's dead, Jim.

ACORN, one more time

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

My dear gods. I wasn't going to post any more of these, but then this came along.

"WASHINGTON — An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group's Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month." At McClatchy, via Hullabaloo.

A more-detailed account

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

We had one of these cases in the Seattle area. It wasn't an organized attempt at changing an election outcome; apparently their workers wanted to keep $8/hour jobs:

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, said last year that the ACORN case in Seattle had nothing to do with manipulating outcomes and everything to do with the workers' efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs. If anyone was defrauded, it was ACORN, an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

They copied names from newspaper stories [...] pulled them from baby-name books and telephone directories or just made them up. [...] But if the identification numbers also required on a registration form -- typically, a driver's license number, or the last four digits of a Social Security number -- fail to match up with the voter names in the appropriate databases, the registration is flagged. [...] It county workers can't clear up the discrepancy, the would-be voter is provisionally registered *

One of ACORN's local offices, in Burien, has recently been burglarized. The police are saying it was not a politically-motivated act. Hunh.

Please, please, please, let's put this to bed. McCain's campaign is behaving incredibly sleazily--there is no need for us to echo them.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

Interesting ... I hadn't thought about miming the head tilt and seeing how it feels.

When I do it as if I'm thinking very hard about what I'm hearing, my eyes go to the ceiling. When I do it as if I'm sticking up my nose at something, my eyes go to the something.

Obama's eyes were directed at McCain, at least most of the time, and at least as I can remember it. That said, however, I still don't know that he meant it as snobbery. Unlike me, he has to be careful that he doesn't get blamed, as McCain did in the first debate, of not being willing to look at his opponent.

However, in politics particularly, perception is reality. Either way he meant it, it can easily be perceived as arrogant/condescending. If that perception is happening, he needs to correct himself.