By David Swanson

I get the impression that a great many people are upset by all the news about McCain-Palin supporters who believe Obama is an Arab, a Muslim, a terrorist, and a baby killer. I find it the most encouraging thing that's happened in eight years.

Why? Because these sorts of lies and fear-mongering are nothing new. What's new is that the U.S. corporate media is covering them. The most unaccountable, antidemocratic communications cartel outside of China has decided to cover in a major way a story it has brushed aside since September 12, 2001.

Of course, we understand why. The victim of these particular lies is a corporate-friendly senator who appears likely to be elected president of the United States. On top of that he isn't actually a Muslim or a foreigner, so you can still be bigoted and defend him on the basis of those boring old leftwing things: facts. But the media's willingness to cover the hate speech and to point out the connections between hateful speech and hateful actions makes Obama more likely to win the election and makes us all safer, wiser, and better informed.

It's not that the media has never covered hateful, racist, and bigoted speech before, but it hasn't done so in a major way with front page stories and saturation chatter on the blab shows. In fact, a lot of U.S. newspapers recently mailed their subscribers a disc called "Obsession" that promoted fear and hatred of Muslims. A couple of columnists mentioned that fact, but it was not made into a STORY, into something that everybody has to have an opinion on and reiterate so many times that people actually hear it. And it's not that the media has never before pointed out contradictions between a candidate's advertisements or flyers and that same candidate's comments, but it hasn't done so in a BIG way. In fact, McCain has been advertising himself as a crusader against corporate power for many months without a peep of hysterical laughter from the recipients of all that advertising money.

This is different. Now we've got talking heads actually thinking through the problem on the air, wondering whether McCain can control the Frankenstein monster he's created out of his racist, ill-informed supporters. Some outlets are focusing on McCain's rebuking of his overly open and honest followers, but even there the reporters are supporting the rebuking. Other outlets are focusing on the cold-blooded electoral calculation: if too many "moderates" are scared off by bloodthirsty loonies, will McCain be able to win? But even there the reporters are supporting the idea that those who do not hate dark-skinned foreigners are on the side of sanity and acceptability. When Joe Klein thinks you've crossed the line, there's nobody in the corporate media with lower standards who could jump up in defense of the McCain-Palin lynch mobs. Even David Frum agrees.

But where was all this interest when we started locking up and deporting people seven years ago, or when every new grotesque truth has slipped out through the bars of Guantanamo's animal cages, or when we slaughtered over a million human beings in Iraq? Can we expand this discussion beyond the slandering of one politician to address the entire idea of racist and religious hatred? Can we move this to the point that it makes no sense to defend someone against the charge of being an Arab by asserting that, on the contrary, he's a decent family man?

Some friends and I are interested in trying, and we'll start at Sarah Palin's rally in Richmond, Virginia, on Monday. If you'd like to come, just go here and print out as many tickets as you feel like. But whatever you do, don't give any tickets out to the wrong sort of people. You know the ones I mean: people who don't want to kill Obama and people who do but talk about it too much.

By Lloyd Hart

You may have noticed over the last week the word acorn or to be more
exact A.C.O.R.N. which stands for the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now. I personally have known about this group
for many years and nearly fell off my couch when I began to hear the
accusations coming out of the McCain campaign that poor black people
(A.C.O.R.N.) held a gun to Congress's head (cause black people, you
know, they can get guns. (wink) ) and forced it to pass a law that
forced rich white guys to stop redlining minority neighborhoods and to
stop predatory lending practices in minority neighborhoods - a
deliberate practice of banks not providing equal access to credit
products like loans and mortgages at the same fare market value in
terms of interest rates that the white folks recieved who were forced
into the terrible exodus of white flight when they had to relocate to
the suburbs when they were afraid their children might have sex with
black folks if they lived next door to them and you know (wink)
listened to their jazz music and smoked their marijuana.

Help! Poor black people are are causing the total collapse of the
Global Economy!

So, according to Senator John McCain and other Republicans, A.C.O.R.N.
ruthlessly lobbied Congress to stop banks from redlining minority
communities which somehow caused Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy bad
loans from mortgage companies and banks who saw the future and were
desperate to get rid of properties that would no longer be profitable
once foreclosed on and because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought all
those bad loans (and have an automatic government rescue program to
their charters), that that somehow linked poor black people
(A.C.O.R.N.) to the bringing down of Wall Street investment giants like
Bear Stearns, A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers which then led to the total
collapse of the global banking system and the single largest one week
drop in the Dow Jones Industrial average in history? Wow, poor black
people sure have come a long way since the time of slavery, to be able
to do that. Now that's something.

So Senator John McCain starts slamming A.C.O.R.N. for causing all the
financial trouble at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then news reports
began to role in that Vegas police had raided an A.C.O.R.N. office this
week looking for evidence of fraudulent voter registration practices.
Then there was another report on Friday from Indiana of a bunch of
voter registration cards were filled out in the same hand writing. It
was then that my intestines began to twist up in a knock which made it
impossible for me to sleep.

You see, what was happening to me was that I was beginning to transcend
what the Jim Crow politicians inside the Republican Party were
attempting to do. They were attempting to accuse poor black people of
doing exactly what the Republican Party has been doing for years since
it was taken over by the crazy crackers from the Jim Crow South who
found themselves completely at home with the rich white guys from the
north who had sold out reconstruction to segregation and Jim Crow ten
years or so after the Civil War when Congress passed the Posse
Comitatus Act which removed federal troops from the streets within the
defeated Southern states allowing the Klu Klux Klan to undo
reconstruction and institute the corrupt and murderous practices of
segregation and Jim Crow which deliberately and systematically took
away the right to vote and the right to economic justice of black folks
living in the affected communities.

So it was nearly brain aneurysm material when I read what Florida
Republican Congressman Tom Feeney had said the following on Friday:

"This is destructive to democracy," he told Fox News Friday. "I believe
Acorn has violated more Americans' civil rights to have their vote
counted than any group since the KKK. It's an outrage."

Along with other Republicans McCain, Feeney, and the party's talking
heads all of a sudden started talking about A.C.O.R.N. at exactly the
same time A.C.O.R.N. is raided in Vegas and the Indiana voter
registration cards are suspect. It's as if they all recieved the same
briefing memo from a single source.

Now, A.C.O.R.N. has had it's own issues like the brother of it's
founder has been accused of embezzling a million dollars from the
organization which is what this group http://rottenacorn.com/ is
attempting to paint the entire organization with. But the accusation
is, that someone did something bad to A.C.O.R.N. not A.C.O.R.N. doing
something bad to voters and besides that, the beneficial work that
A.C.O.R.N. does at the community level far out weighs anything bad a
couple of bad apples may have done or could do. Go to a black or
minority community and ask folks about A.C.O.R.N.. You'll find what I
found , a well like community organization http://www.acorn.org/ . As
for the accusations of voter fraud absolutely nothing has been proven
and the evidence that has surfaced in Indiana looks as though it was
somebody taking advantage of a policy within A.C.O.R.N. itself of
paying voter registration activists for every registration card handed
in. A common practice and ocurrance in all parties running for office
in the U.S..

In reality, it looks to me as though someone is attempting to get news
stories of accusations to rise in the mainstream media perfectly timed
for registration deadlines just weeks before the presidential and
general election that would then justify in the Republican party's and
now Senator John McCain's practice of voter caging where Republican
party operatives have black voters pulled from the voting lines and
then directly challenge their right to vote. This practice was used in
2004 presidential and of course can be attributed to an ongoing
practice of voter disenfranchisement that dates back to the era of Jim
Crow or more recently Electronic Jim Crow.

Electronic Jim Crow if you haven't noticed, is a scandal that won't
completely surface because the rich white guys that own the mainstream
media and the Electronic Jim Crow Voting machine companies don't want
Americans to realize that they have actually been living in a banana
republic their whole lives.

The rich white guys that own the mainstream media want Americans to
continue to believe in American exceptionalism, which is the latest
slogan from the McCain campaign - that America above all other nations
on the earth is the most exceptional and therefore above international
law and especially above international voting standards.

Well, if it is true and America is above international law and
especially above international voting standards,you know God given
(wink) then maybe what the McCain campaign and the Republican Party is
saying about poor black people is true, that only in America could poor
black people by signing for loans and mortgages they must have known
they could not afford, take advantage unsuspecting rich white guys who
stood to radically profit by earning twice as much interest once those
loans and mortgages matured a couple of years down the road, bring down
the global economy. Yes. that must be it. Cause you know, black people
steal things (wink).

The final dirty trick of the McCain campaign was to link Senator
Barrack Obama to A.C.O.R.N. by stating that Obama had something to do
with A.C.O.R.N. in his community organizing days back in South Side of
Chicago in a desperate attempt to create a narrative that because a
black guy is running for president on the Democratic ticket that the
poor black folks at A.C.O.R.N. and Senator Barrack Obama are in league
to steal the election. Cause you know, black people steal things
(wink).

So, there we have it, Senator John McCain is deliberately racially
profiling Senator Barrack Obama and A.C.O.R.N. as both being black. And
lets not forget the link McCain made that Barrack Obama comes "out of
the Chicago political machine" insinuating some naferious criminal
political activity combined with the acusations against A.C.O.R.N. and
you have a black crime wave attempting to steal the White House. Cause
you know, black people steal things (wink).

Fuck, I wonder who dreamt that one up?

By Joel McNally, Capital Times

One Bush administration cover story for going to war in Iraq to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for Halliburton and other corporate cronies was that it was to spread democracy in the Mideast.

Meanwhile, the president's party continues to battle the spread of democracy in the Midwest.

With less than a month to go before the election, the collateral damage from Republican efforts to fight the spread of democracy continues to pile up.

The latest victims are convicted felons who are looking to get jobs to support themselves and their families without resorting to crime.

A Republican National Committee official has attacked voter registration groups in Wisconsin for employing convicted felons. The party's chief lawyer said the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) hired seven convicted felons to register voters.

The natural reaction to such an accusation should be: So what?

Even though Republican legislators are constantly trying to demonize ex-offenders, state law recognizes that it's very much in the public interest for felons to be able to obtain legitimate employment. In fact, it's against the law to discriminate against a job applicant solely on the basis of a criminal record unless the crime has some possible connection with the job responsibilities.

Banks don't have to hire convicted embezzlers, day care centers don't have to hire convicted sex offenders and so on. But unless there is some direct connection that would bar hiring a convicted felon, we all benefit when ex-offenders get jobs and become solid citizens.

In fact, that was the first reaction from ACORN when the organization was attacked for employing felons.

"We have a lot of folks with felony records (in this state)," said Carolyn Castore, state political director for ACORN, "and, frankly, they need jobs."

It's unlikely any of those employees were ever convicted of vote fraud because, despite the exaggerated claims of Republicans, the U.S. Attorney's Office for southeastern Wisconsin and the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office have found organized vote fraud to be virtually nonexistent.

The fact that someone may have been convicted on drug charges or other unrelated offenses has nothing to do with registering voters.

In the absence of any disqualifying connection, ACORN as well as the Milwaukee Election Commission considered employment discrimination against felons as voter registration workers to be illegal under state law.

Republicans are citing an opinion back in April by a staff member of the Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections, claiming that convicted felons were not allowed to serve as registration workers. That was news to both ACORN and the Milwaukee Election Commission. None of the materials provided by the state to local election officials say felons are barred from registering voters.

Although Republicans enjoy trashing ex-offenders, their primary aim this time was not to stir up hatred against felons. It was to try to thwart efforts to spread democracy by registering more voters.

Republicans have another underlying motive for attacking ACORN. It is an organization that engages in that dreaded community organizing. It actually tries to give a voice to the poor and most vulnerable among us.

Not only that, but the most dangerous community organizer of all, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, actually did some legal work for ACORN earlier in his career.

Before Republicans began demonizing community organizing, do you remember what the first President George Bush used to call community organizations? He called them "a thousand points of light." Father Bush's ulterior motive for praising the work of such organizations was that he wanted community volunteers to take over all the government's responsibilities so Republicans could continue slashing programs for the poor.

Community organizations can't do everything, but, clearly, organizations like ACORN are on the front lines of promoting democracy in this country while Republicans are trying to stop its spread.

Republicans are particularly opposed to increasing participation in democracy in Milwaukee with its large African-American and Latino populations.

The Republicans' concept of democracy goes back to the original idea of our Founding Fathers to limit voting to white, male property owners.

That was glaringly obvious when Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen formed a joint task force to investigate allegations of vote fraud on Election Day with Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and the Milwaukee Police Department.

Let's see. There are 72 counties in Wisconsin. Within Milwaukee County, there are 19 municipalities. In only one of those 72 counties and in only one of the 19 municipalities within that county is the state attorney general setting up a task force to fight vote fraud on Nov. 4.

As they say on Sesame Street, what makes the city of Milwaukee not like the others? There's just something about that Gordon on Sesame Street that makes him seem like the kind of person who would commit vote fraud.

Joel McNally of Milwaukee writes a regular column for The Capital Times.

By David Swanson

According to an Associated Press story on Friday, more than a half-million people have toured the creationism museum in Kentucky since it opened in May 2007. However, at least one of those people was there to make fun of it with a video camera.

In fact, a lot of what Bill Maher's new film, "Religulous", does is make fun of people. But by no means does Maher single out fringe religious believers. He interviews one of the few top scientists in the world who believes, a priest at the Vatican who believes, and plenty of random typical believers in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Maher's conclusion: these people (including the vast majority of Americans) are all enablers of neurologically disordered killers who are going to destroy the planet.

It takes a two part argument to get to that conclusion. The first part runs like this. A lot of religious believers want the world to end or are indifferent to its ending or are less opposed to it than they would be as atheists. As evidence, Maher interviews a bunch of cranks who think the end of the world, even if brought about by nuclear war or global warming, wouldn't be all that bad, and some who think it would be fantastic. Disturbingly, these cranks include people like U.S. Senator Mark Pryor who comes off looking dumber than a sea sponge but a lot more dangerous. Maher also interviews people who say they don't know anything about politics but voted for Bush because he's religious. Cute but deadly.

The film was clearly made before Sarah Palin came on the national scene. If you don't buy this first part of the argument after watching the movie, Palin should clinch it for you. The Associated Press reported on Saturday on her use of public money, in the Bush-Cheney tradition, to fund religious causes. Bloggers have reported on the belief of some of Palin's supporters that she has been chosen by God. Palin has taken intentional steps to facilitate global warming rather than curtailing it. She has, like Bush, said she believes God wanted war in Iraq.

The second part of the argument is that by failing to denounce religion, hundreds of millions of relatively secular religious people are enabling the lunacies of the religious fanatics, which -- according to Maher -- we must outgrow or all die together. We risk, he says, perishing as a species because we've invented the means of self-annihilation (nuclear and environmental) before managing to overcome the mental disease that makes us wish for self-annihilation. It is indisputable that at least some people tend to be more religious if others around them are religious, and that the opposite is true as well. And it is indisputable that humans commit mass murder in the name of religion. I think it's nearly beyond dispute, as well, that the attacks of 9-11 would not have occurred had Americans all been Muslims, and that the attacks on the Middle East by Americans before and after 9-11 would not have happened, at least in the same vicious way, had all the people there been Christian. Of course, without religion people can invent other justifications for slaughtering each other, but not for martyrdom, not for holy suicide, and not for blissful acceptance of environmental or nuclear catastrophe.

I think Maher's case is solid, and I think his movie tells his story in a compelling and often very funny way. But it has some shortcomings. For one thing, Maher is hardly ever nice to anyone in the movie, except as a pretense to get them to look stupider on film. He's a comedian, and he sees his job as mocking people. The cruelty of this is more apparent than usual, because the people he's being cruel to are there on film being humiliated before the world. It would have been helpful, for example, to include a serious conversation with someone who had recently overcome religion and who was able to explain how they'd done it. Maher does include snippets of a conversation with a scientist who's studied the brain activity of people praying and meditating, but he's only there as a straightman for Maher's jokes; we never learn whether he has anything useful to say. It might have made sense to include, as well, a relatively rational believer arguing against Maher that religion benefits the world. But that wouldn't have been funny.

Perhaps it was the way Maher made the film. Perhaps it was just the fact that he made the film. But for some reason, according to the Desert Sun newspaper a theater in California just shut down after receiving a death threat for Maher. One of the topics addressed in the film is, in fact, the insanity and cruelty of religiously motivated death threats. But Maher shies away from nothing, and asks why it should be that atheists (OK, he does shy away quite wimpishly from the word atheist, but that's what he means) should not feel safe expressing their views in public.

According to a survey Maher cites, and according to quite a few polls, atheists and non-believers are a sizable group in America -- smaller than in many countries, but still sizable. Other minorities, Maher points out, including African-Americans, gays and lesbians, gun owners, Jews, etc., all have organizations and spokespeople and at least sometimes get what they want or manage to be part of the debate. Why not atheists? But Maher stops short of pointing out any of the fledgling groups that do exist, most of which -- like Maher -- tend to avoid the word atheist. There's the Secular Coalition for America, The Brights, the Council for Secular Humanism, the American Humanist Association, the American Atheists, and more.

Either Maher is wrong, or our lives depend on joining and promoting the work of these groups. Watch his movie and decide for yourself. Think for yourself.

ACORN President Maude Hurd released the following statement today in response to the McCain campaign's new ad claiming that, among other things, ACORN is responsible for the mortgage crisis:

?For almost a decade, ACORN, a community organization of 400,000 families in neighborhoods across the country, has been fighting against the predatory lending practices that have robbed our members of their homes, destabilized neighborhoods, and roiled the global economy.?

?In his newest ad, John McCain?s campaign bizarrely claims, ?ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.? Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, ACORN has worked successfully to help working class families get good home loans on fair terms from legitimate banks and has fought vigorously against predatory lenders who have ripped off families in our communities. These predatory loans caused the crisis.?

?For more than a decade, ACORN members have held protests, released reports, and advocated for regulations to protect homeowners from predatory lenders. ACORN organizers and volunteers have been working day and night to help victims of the GOP economic meltdown to save their homes from foreclosure. In fact, ACORN has brought class action lawsuits against several predatory lenders, and has lobbied the Federal Reserve and Congress in support of regulations against predatory lending. ACORN has even been successful in convincing many lenders to treat homeowners more fairly and help families be able to make their mortgage payments and save their homes.?

?Unfortunately, the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans like John McCain have blocked the sensible regulations that ACORN and others proposed that would have averted the mortgage meltdown. If John McCain thinks that community organizers caused the foreclosure crisis, he knows even less about the economy than previously thought.?

?John McCain and the Republicans are desperately trying to shift the blame for the economic crisis they caused with a philosophy of deregulation and indifference to homeowners. All the grainy footage and creepy music in the world can't cancel out some simple, basic facts, and the facts about the economy are not on John McCain's side.?

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Bogus "Voter Fraud Charges" Aim to Camouflage Voter Suppression

ACORN has just completed the largest, most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in US history. We helped 1.3 million low-income, minority and young voters across the country register to vote.

Unfortunately, just as in 2006, that success in bringing people into the democratic process, have been greeted with unfounded accusations to disparage our work and help maintain the status quo of an unbalanced electorate.

After a similar spate of charges against ACORN in 2006, we learned that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had fired Republican US Attorneys because they refused to prosecute ACORN and other voter assistance groups on trumped up fraud charges. This was the heart of the US Attorney-gate scandal that led Karl Rove, Gonzales and other top Department of Justice officials to resign. Because the press didn?t catch on until long after the election, it was part of a successful strategy to create an unfounded specter of voter fraud and to suppress voting.

Key Facts:

1. In order to help 1.3 million people register to vote, we hired more than 13,000 registration assistance workers r. As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift.

2. Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms, Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote. It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud ? not the perpetrator.

3. In nearly every case that has been reported , it was ACORN that discovered the bad forms, and called them to the attention of election authorities, putting the forms in a package that identified them in writing as suspicious, encouraging election officials to investigate, and offering to help with prosecutions. We are required by law to turn in all forms, but instead of just turning them in and figuring that it is the responsibility of the board of elections to figure out which are valid, we spend millions of dollars verifying that forms are valid, and then separate out those that are suspicious.

4. This has nothing to do with ?voter fraud? ? nothing at all to do with anyone trying to cast an extra vote. There has never been a single reported instance in which bogus registration forms have led to anyone voting improperly. To do that, they would have to show up at the polls, prove their identity as all first-time registrants must, and risk jail. The people who turned in these forms did so not because they wanted an extra vote, but because they didn?t care enough to make sure eligible people got to vote at all.

5. When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of ?voter fraud.? This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.

6. Similar attacks were launched against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. The bogus charges were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led to the resignations of Karl Rove, Attorney General Ablerto Gonzales and other top Justice Department Officials. It turned out that it was the charges that were fraudulent, and that they were part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression. Republican US Attorneys David Iglesias (NM), Todd Graves (MO), and John McKay (WA) all were fired primarily because they refused to prosecute similar bogus charges of ?voter fraud.? Another US Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who did politicize prosecutions against former ACORN canvassers, was forced to acknowledge under cross examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee that ACORN was the victim of fraud by its employees and ACORN had caught the employees and had identified them to law enforcement.

7. The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That?s the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people?s right to vote in broad daylight. They have already tried to prevent Ohio from registering voters at its early voting sites. In Michigan, they planned to use foreclosure notices to challenge thousands of voters. And if this year is like past years, they are preparing to use this so-called voter fraud to justify massive challenges to voters in minority precincts on Election Day.

The Details:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in,. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card . ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No criminal charges related to voter registration have ever been brought against ACORN or partner organizations. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes ? evidence which in most cases WE called to the attention of authorities

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN?s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered

ACORN will not be intimidated, we will not be provoked, and in this important moment in history we will not allow anyone to distract us from these vital efforts to empower our constituencies and our communities to speak for themselves.

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