The Angry Liberal Left Slams McCain

By chen

VoteVets has a new ad out against John McCain.

Here's the text:

John McCain says it's okay with him if the U.S. spends the next 1,000 years in Iraq. That's some commitment to the Iraqi people, Senator McCain...This is my little boy. He was born a year after I came home from Iraq. What kind of commitment are you making to him? How about 1,000 years of afforable healthcare? Or 1,000 years of keeping America safe? Could we afford that for my child, Senator McCain? Or have you already promised to spend trillions in Baghdad?

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February 26, 2008

Free Ride for the Straight-Talk Express

By chen

When Obama scooted away from his previous pledge (yes, it was a pledge) to take public financing last week, naturally and deservedly, the news media pounced. With a bright-eyed Obama campaign seeming to wilt on its previous reformist promises, the headlines practically wrote themselves.

But how the hell did those same reporters let McCain walk brazenly away with his 'reformer' mantle still intact?

It wasn't just his flagrant machinations to exploit the public financing system in the primary election, which received no reference in the latest snafu's coverage from the Associated Press or New York Times (which, as recently as Feb. 13, had reported that McCain's advisors indicated the candidate wouldn't opt into the general -- a fact elided in their subsequent reporting on Obama's hesitance).

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February 20, 2008

Fighting Voter Suppression in Texas

By chen

Long notorious for its checkered history of voter suppression, Waller County, Texas's degree of racial division approaches the level of myth.

In Waller County, for example, a person calling a funeral parlor is asked: what color is the body? There are black and white funeral homes, says Christina Sanders, who directs the Black Youth Vote! effort in Texas, and the two don't ever mix.

With the Texas primary approaching, tensions flared again this month over one of the county's sorest racial issues--the color of the vote.

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February 15, 2008

The Right Change

By chen

Newt Gingrich has a plan.

With Bush presiding over the sagging Republican helm, the original architect of the 1994 "Contract with America" told party faithful this afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference that without change, the GOP ticket may be a fast ride to nowhere.

And so before a thunderous crowd (peppered with "I Like Mike" and "Stop McCain's Amnesty" signs) evidently divided from the presumptive Republican nominee, Gingrich called for a conservative declaration of independence from the Republican Party.

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February 9, 2008

Super-Complicated Tuesday

By chen

In some ways, the Democrats' presidential nomination system seems the most obtuse and hierarchical of processes.

It starts with a bizarre pyramid structure, in which the two early-nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire--which together represent barely 1.5 percent of the US population--monopolize billions in advertising and the bulk of candidate time, while the rest of the nation waits with (what must seem to an outsider's eye) absurdly bated breath.

Even this year, with nineteen states in a desperate scramble for better primary positions, the front-loading strictures have stayed rigid. When Florida and Michigan moved up their primaries, the Democratic National Committee responded by coolly threatening to withhold their delegates' seats at the party convention.

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February 4, 2008

Curbing the Immigrant Vote

By chen

The traditional litany of Americans who don't count in the US presidential election--people with felony records, those of us living in so-called "safe states," et cetera--just got longer.

Add legal residents currently applying for U.S. citizenship to that list.

Though the number of applicants tends to spike in an election year, with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services hiking application fees by 66 percent last June, the number of people applying for citizenship surged by an unprecedented 1.4 million.

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January 30, 2008