Will the GOP Ever Recover From 2008?

By Bob Fertik

Democrats.com

I'm going to step out on a limb and predict Obama will win by 7%, which is 1% more than his current lead. (I'm 3% more optimistic than Chris Bowers because McCain has discredited himself and Obama has an awesome ground game.) And I'll predict Democrats end up with 58 Senate seats (a gain of 7) and 258 House seats (a gain of 22).

When the new Congress begins, the Republican Party will be powerless. Yes they will be able to form alliances with conservative Democrats to limit President Obama's reach, but they will not be able to stop Obama from enacting his core agenda. And within a year, the 2010 mid-term campaign will begin.

Republicans hope 2010 will be a repeat of 1994. Republicans started 1993 as a permanent (40 year) minority in the House with a popular Democratic President, but Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay seized on Clinton's health care debacle to take over the House in a rightwing Republican revolution.

In 2009, Democrats won't repeat the mistakes of 1993. A controversial health care bill won't be the first big item on the agenda, but rather an energy/jobs plan that will be immensely popular in the middle of a recession. And as they work their way through other issues, Democrats won't fracture, but will remain united to deliver on as many promises as they can.

As a result, Republicans will have few issues to run on in 2010. But the bigger question is: will they have any decent challengers?

2008 was not a great advertisement for the Republican first string: McCain only won the nomination because he was less awful than Mannikin Mitt, Rudy Mussolini, Mike Wannabee, Fred Gumption, and the rest of an awful field. The second string VP choices were worse; then-unknown Sarah Palin outshone Romney, Lieberman, and Pawlenty.

For the 2010 election, the GOP will have to look beyond its dismal second string and empty out its bench. And the fundamental problem for the GOP is ...they have no bench!...(Click here for remainder).

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A McCain "Win" Will Be Theft, Resistance Is Planned

By David Swanson

Democrats.com

If your television declares John McCain the president elect on the evening of November 4th, your television will be lying. You should immediately pick up your pre-packed bags and head straight to the White House in Washington, D.C., which we will surround and shut down until this attempt at a third illegitimate presidency is reversed.

A McCain "win" will not be illegitimate because I disagree with his policies, but because he himself has rendered it illegitimate. He and his campaign and allied supporters have sought to illegally remove hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, fraudulently registered people as Republicans without their knowledge and against their will, obstructed voter registration drives, falsely warned students against voting where they attend school, falsely accused community groups of voter registration fraud, falsely alleged the widespread existence of voter fraud, and encouraged supporters to falsely believe McCain's opponent is a foreign terrorist through speeches, recorded phone messages, and flyers. Already in early voting in a number of states there have been cases of votes on electronic machines visibly flipping to McCain or McKinney when intended for Obama. We will see McCain supporters on November 4th challenging people's right to vote, seeking to force people to vote on provisional ballots, and seeking to have provisional ballots discarded. And we will see electronic vote counts wildly out of step with the most recent polls, although not with exit polls -- which we will be denied any access to unless they have been "adjusted" to match the official counts.

Inciting your supporters to violence with racist and religious lies about your opponent, effectively alleging treason on absolutely no basis, should be enough, alone, to disqualify a campaign for the presidency of the United States. Working to block voters from registering should be enough on its own. Any of the dozens of creative forms of vote suppression currently being used by the Republicans should be enough. And allowing votes to be counted on completely unverifiable machines owned and controlled by corporations allied with your party should make the results illegitimate even if plausible. If McCain is declared the "winner," it will not be plausible, but at this point he has so disgraced himself and our electoral system that he is no longer a legitimate candidate for president regardless of what the polls (themselves fallible, but all we've got) say just before election day. Too many people have already been denied the opportunity to even push the buttons and have their votes miscounted. Too much incendiary slander has been let loose. Too much visible vote flipping has already been documented....(Click here for remainder).

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Block the Vote

This is an incredibly important article. It is essential that all Americans know and understand what is happening to our right to vote.

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Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr & Greg Palast
Rolling Stone

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."...(Click here for remainder).

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