The 2012 "Election" thread

[Julia W]

Join Up!
.....Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.

Loved this, he writes so well.

[Nordic]

I am amazed, once again, at the power of the media. Just tonight, Facebook was ablaze with people I know who are of above average intelligence and who are reasonably well informed, going apeshit over Obama. "My vote's with him!"

This in response to the week-long mind-fuck that is the DNC. Don't people realize this is nothing but corporate-style branding? Pure propaganda? And they're watching it voluntarily? And falling for it?

Hello!

I should probably just avoid Facebook until this whole thing settles down. I can't help but respond to this crap. I'm being the turd in people's punchbowls tonight.

And the "but you can't possibly vote for Romney!" response is just ...... gob-smackingly unreal. Like that's the only choice. Nobody even looks around to see if anybody else is running. And they ALL think that their vote actually counts, that the Powers That Be would actually leave something like this UP TO CHANCE ......

Ugh.

[StarmanSkye]

Ditto on the 'ugh'.

Sometimes its SUCH a good thing we can't reach to kick our own heads.

The sheer inability of the so-called electorate to grasp how effectively they've been made gullible is gobsmackingly pitiful to behold. Is it possible they are incapable of even wondering what's behind the curtain?

[lupercal]

^ Maybe they're just better informed? People who vote generally are, and you're not going to learn much by wallowing in porcine screeds like the one above by TED favorite James Howard Kunstler, which I couldn't help but notice is entirely free of information about Obama's actual accomplishments, makes one random mention of Afghanistan and no mention whatosevery about Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, the ACA or any other actual policy. Funny for a guy pining for "reality," but come to think of it, Romney didn't mention Iraq at the GOP convention either. I think I might know why.

On the other hand Kunstler seems to know an awful lot about investment banking generally and the Koch brothers particularly, possibly because he works for them. The term of art is "negative advertising" and it works especially well with an under-informed electorate that doesn't see the sucker punch.

[8bitagent]

I am amazed, once again, at the power of the media. Just tonight, Facebook was ablaze with people I know who are of above average intelligence and who are reasonably well informed, going apeshit over Obama. "My vote's with him!"

This in response to the week-long mind-fuck that is the DNC. Don't people realize this is nothing but corporate-style branding? Pure propaganda? And they're watching it voluntarily? And falling for it?

Hello!

I should probably just avoid Facebook until this whole thing settles down. I can't help but respond to this crap. I'm being the turd in people's punchbowls tonight.

And the "but you can't possibly vote for Romney!" response is just ...... gob-smackingly unreal. Like that's the only choice. Nobody even looks around to see if anybody else is running. And they ALL think that their vote actually counts, that the Powers That Be would actually leave something like this UP TO CHANCE ......

Ugh.

Yep. I don't want to step on any toes so I am just keeping quiet. I fully understand and respect my gay friends for their enthusiasm for Obama. I get some of my feminist activist friends support.
So I just keep quiet, don't want to step on any toes. I did post one picture showing a predator drone shooting off a missile that said "FORWARD"

[ninakat]

In the category of what should be the bleedin' obvious.... and just for completion's sake.... not expecting minds to be changed.... I give you:

The US Election and the Men who Rule the World

By Colin Todhunter

September 17, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - The gleaming poster girl smile to go with the gleaming poster girl products and the whitewashed perfect teeth to match the whitewashed perfect lies. In a world of broken-tooth smiles and deadbeat reality, the advertising industry knows that selling a half-baked dream of ‘happiness through hedonism’ to the masses is not too hard to achieve. And that dream-world comprises products designed for obsolescence in a use and throw culture in a use and throw world of expendable countries with expendable populations that sit on top of oil and the various other mineral resources required to swell corporate coffers and keep consumerism afloat.

Is it blood, not lipstick, smeared on the lips of the pouting billboard woman? The blood spilled by those unfortunate enough to have been born in a certain part of the world on behalf of people in other parts of the world who deem the price of petrol at the pump or some other consumer item to be more worthy than the lives destroyed in order to grab the minerals required to make them. A drone attack here, some ‘collateral damage’ there and those boys in the US control centres are happy with a hard days killing.

How did things get this bad? Answer: via the duplicity and deceit of politicians and their backers.

Remember Barack Obama’s election campaign? A lot of slick talk about ‘change’ and ‘yes we can’. It turned out to be ‘no we can’t’. It turned out to be business as usual as Obama carried on from where Bush left off.

Bear that in mind as the media builds itself up for the US presidential campaign. Bear it in mind because, while the politicians appear to be at the driving wheel, the vehicle is ultimately being driven by General Electric, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Rothchilds and any other number of financial and corporate entities that profit from selling the dream, or imposing the nightmare, depending on which side of the drone attack or bombing campaign you happen to be on.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the upcoming US election later this year has anything to do with democracy. It doesn’t. Don’t be fooled into thinking there is a genuine choice between candidates and parties. There isn’t. Don’t be fooled into thinking the mainstream media will go out of its way to expose the lobbyists, the financial backers, the oilmen, the bankers, the arms manufacturers and the rich who have turned elections into a complete charade. It won’t.

It was Mayer Amschel Rothchild, from the wealthy Rothchild dynasty, who over 200 years ago said:

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.”

While the oilmen and other corporate types may think they control the world, the money men know they control the world. It was the financiers on Wall Street who largely shelled out their money to get Obama elected last time around – not the ‘man in the street’ as the media stated time and again. Payback has been trillions of ‘bailout’ tax dollars handed to over to the financial sector. ‘Bailout’ is theft by any other name.

And as you consider that, why not also consider this:

“Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of this country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

Those words were taken from a letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1864.

Lincoln also said that the banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light on their crimes.

Abraham Lincoln could see a world that would be. It is the world we now have.

The great banking dynasties for hundreds of years have funded revolutions, changed the course of history, helped instigate wars and bullied governments. Through controlling the money supply, they have also conspired to produce booms and busts that have made or broken governments and nations.

We refer to this controlling of the money supply today as a ‘credit crunch’. It’s a benign term, stripped of any political connotation, stripped of any inkling that, notwithstanding the nature and inherent crises of capitalism itself, behind the scenes the hidden hand of the financiers have restricted credit to avoid potential losses and boost profit – profit in the form of taxpayer bailouts and by repossessing or buying up the assets and resources of individuals, companies and countries on the cheap. It’s been a win-win situation for the financiers.

If being gripped by fear and paranoia about those awful terrorists in far away places can’t take your mind off such things, there’s always the happy smiling faces on the billboards to produce a warm and comforting feeling. No better way for the glove puppet politicians to focus your attention away from their fraudster masters who are shafting ordinary folk every which way they can. ‘Democracy’ – be nice if we had it.

Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Deccan Herald (the Bangalore-based broadsheet), New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in various other publications. His East by Northwest website is at: http://colintodhunter.blogspot.com

Copyright © Colin Todhunter, Global Research, 2012

[ninakat]

Published on Wednesday, September 26, 2012 by Common Dreams
A Crucible of Political Disenchantment: 'Dismiss Whatever Insults Your Own Soul'
by Phil Rockstroh

Weltschmerz [from German; from Welt (world) + Schmerz (pain)] delineates the type of sadness experienced when the world revealed does not reflect the image of the world that one believes, or has been led to believe, should exist. The corporate/consumer state (as well as, its scion, the present day presidential election cycle) has brought us, as a people, into a wilderness of weltschmerz.

Confronting the stark contrast between life imagined and life revealed can prove to be a daunting task. It is an endeavor that has proven particularly difficult for political partisans, both professional and rank and file, who seem unwilling or unable to grasp the sense of futility experienced by significant numbers of their fellow citizens regarding political participation, on any level, including the act of voting under the corrupted to the core structure of the current system.

Such reactions are understandable. Exercises in futility prove enervating. Disenchanted, sizable and increasing numbers of voters have tuned out and walked away from the process, due to the abject refusal of the political class to be responsive to the needs of the populace beyond the elitist-ridden New York/DC nexus of privilege and power.

Yet, rank and file political partisans, all too often, resist gaining awareness of the extent of their powerlessness. This is understandable as well. Feelings of powerlessness can engender despair. To avoid despair, one feels as though one must remain active in order to avoid sinking into the muck and mire borne of chronic hopelessness. True enough. But activity towards what end? Does the activity, such as voting along partisan lines, reinforce states of powerlessness by serving the forces of one's oppression?

Despite all the cultural cues that we have internalized, one cannot consume, medicate, buy on credit, receive a promotion, vacation, vote, hope, affect a pose of hipster irony, tithe to the church of your choice, receive a hundred FaceBook friendship requests, hit the winning lottery number, support the troops, nor be the recipient of a VIP swag bag in order to stumble your way back to possessing a sense of control and power.

All too often, we incarcerate ourselves in a prison of expectation—expectation forged and constructed by the material of past events, both traumatic and triumphant. We mistake this prison for the whole of ourselves and for the sweep and detail of the world. We go through life convinced our agendas are our own, rarely pondering what circumstances and experiences formed our perceptions. Are my goals and convictions my own, or have those notions been foisted on me by forces of dehumanizing power?

Daily, power kicks us in the gut, and demands our gratitude for having done so, even terms us deviant when we cry out in pain or we rage from within the confines of our powerlessness.

There exist billions of us who feel this way. Multitudes feeling alone among lonely multitudes.

What keeps us from grasping our common plight?

Often, the obsession for gaining and possessing happiness itself, as marketed to us by the propagandist of the consumer state, leads us away from the realm of common communion.

Paradoxically, most unhappy people are simply striving to be happy. Their days are comprised of wrongheaded, self-perpetuating actions in the desperate pursuit of chimerical goals towards that end. They lie, self-medicate, exploit, steamroll over others. They merely hold notions of what life should be—as opposed to having a life.

Rarely, do our agendas reflect our true nature. Yet, such pursuits devour our days. The same phenomenon comes into play between the monstrous acts of an empire and its people in the homeland. After a time, tragically, the two forces merge. One cannot honestly claim one's life as being one's own. Where does my complicity with the actions of the state end and where do I begin? How do I sort things out? Making a start of it is imperative, for devoid of the inclination, I have lost my soul.

No one can maintain a lie over an extended length of time—not even empires are that powerful. Empires are maintained by illusions; the noxious fiction that the greater good is served by codes of dominance and plunder. Towards empire's end the populace suffers escalating levels of unease, as the fabric of the collaboratively woven lie begins to unravel.

Embrace, hold close, and dance to the exquisite music of grief that arrives at the end of things. This is an honest, piercing sound. The pain that grief brings to the heart can serve as a compass, set to aid in navigating a wasteland of weltschmerz.

Because we mourn the loss of those things we love, we should never stop grieving over the follies of humankind and the sorrows of the earth. To cease grieving is too give up on love.

By a refusal to grieve, by lapsing into a host of manic evasions, one risks becoming a monster—a being devoid of empathy that, in an attempt to avoid experiencing suffering, will wound, demean, and exploit the things of the world.

In collective terms, we know this state as the agendas of empire. Conversely, to embrace one's humanity, one must accept being shattered by grief, yet restored by love, simultaneously. Being in unashamed possession of a heart, both broken and whole, serves to mitigate the compulsion to act in the manner of a monster.

The price of self-deception (e.g., political partisanship, monomaniacal careerist striving, compulsive consumerist distractions) is not worth the palliative relief provided. To endure the undoing of illusion, one is tempted to retreat from life into a bubble of isolation or partisan group-think.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, one can become convinced the life that, as imagined in one’s entitlement-addicted mind not the byproduct of an ongoing, humility-shepherding dialog with the world, must be made manifest by relentless deed and actions, no matter how dishonest and ruthless. In this way, an individual is prone to becoming an exploitation maintained empire of one, a walking analog of the state that sired, weaned, and socialized him. How could it not be so?

Of course, by his callous disregard of the humanity of others, he makes miserable all that he touches. By his hollow ambitions, he demeans himself, and the happiness that he seeks becomes ever more elusive, and, caught in a self-resonating circuitry of self-defeating actions, he will eventually bring to ruin all near him.

This is how empires fall, and this is the means, on an individual basis, how its citizens move it along towards the precipice.

Conversely, it proves propitious to face the twilight of treasured convictions, to survive the collapse of the empire within, a decision that can provide practice in surviving the collapse of its collectively constructed, outward analog.

Often, events in life can play out badly. Painful as it is, we must not flee from reality. When one becomes prone to acts of habitual evasion, there is little chance to exist with one's dignity intact; it becomes impossible to live with a sense of grace.

Rationalizations are by nature ugly: They are the disingenuous face of desperate souls who have come to fear others and hold a contemptuous dread of life itself. In this way, you can mistake your defense mechanisms deployed against grief and dread as comprising a large portion of your personality.

Take a moment to contemplate what an awful circumstance it is to incessantly pass by your true self, sans recognition, in a similar fashion to the manner one regards an anonymous stranger passed on a teeming boulevard.

The dilemma involves, to paraphrase Rilke, how will you spend the days of this finite life? Will you give into the compulsion to build a construction of ghostly artifice—life lived as a self-perpetuating lie that you are in control, that the caprice you conjure to ward off feelings of despair, regarding your powerlessness over the coursing flow of events, is an accurate description of your true nature? Will you create a bristling fortification of convenient cynicism, allowing you to remain ensconced within a dead womb of bile and ashes?

Or will you risk being the midwife of your own tale, grasping that there exist forces within you, when in dialog with the soul of existence, that are greater than the sum of your assumptions, that exist deeper and beyond life-negating banalities, such as winner and loser, shame and pride, and grief and happiness?

“So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

Slightly more than eleven years ago, on September 11, 2001, my wife and I awoke to the blaring of sirens, one following the next. Our air conditioning unit was broken and our windows were open. The air carried an acrid odor.

I checked my email and stacked in my inbox was an avalanche of messages, all inquiries bearing a unifying theme…"Are you alright?"

I called out to my wife… to plug in an old black and white television set, because something terrible, it seems, was happening here in New York.

The television roused itself to life just at the moment of the collapse of the North Tower.

This was before the image was fetishized in the American imagination, was exploited by two U.S. presidential administrations to justify thousands of acts of military aggression on people of distant lands who only share one trait in common—they were born of the Islamic faith.

This was before George W. Bush played dress-up in military costumes and pranced about at military bases and the decks of naval vessels. This was before President Obama’s brandishing of kill lists, his normalization and codification into law of Bush era war crimes and constitutional and human rights violations.

This was when the archetypal image of a collapsing tower seized the mind, engendering an analogous collapse of one's mooring and verities. The quotidian touchstones of daily life had vanished, as did alienation.

We needed each other. Empathy and generosity replaced self-absorption and the illusionary urgency of urban life... vanished were, monomaniacal commercial agendas and compulsive distractions. The streets were gauzy with veils of smoke; the veils had been removed from our hearts.

A feeling akin to love allowed us to face horror, and take ambulatory refuge in compassion and beauty.

Cell phones and bottled water were proffered to strangers. As night fell, candles flickered in public squares; there was the sound of sobbing and impromptu singing. The scene seemed like a cross between the London Blitz and Woodstock. One was fully alive in the realm of death.

It would have been lovely if that had been the lesson we carried forth from that day, a decade and a year ago. Alas, the political agendas of militarist imperium carried the day. Tribalism trumped the universal exigencies of our common humanity.

Our leaders behaved despicably, and continue to, and we allow it to happen e.g., Democrats boast of Obama "getting Bin Laden" in a reprehensible attempt to gain political leverage from the tragedy… actions that Democratic partisans would have, rightly, shamed a Republican president for attempting to exploit.

Yet the sublime of that day is available to us still. Providentially, there is no need for actual towers to fall… only one forlorn, interior tower to which we have exiled our humanity. No one needs to die… other than the entity within who induces us into habitual denial and exclusively self-serving pursuit.

“[R]eexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency […]”
—Walt Whitman, from the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass

_________________________________

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website or at FaceBook.

[Forgetting2]

For some reason this little video has been lighting up my Facebook page today. Samuel L Jackson "Wake the Fuck Up." Desperately trying to get people to think there's a big difference.





Cute.

[Hammer of Los]

...

Yeah, wake the f**k up.

No one needs to die… other than the entity within who induces us into habitual denial and exclusively self-serving pursuit.

Already died man, already died.

Now I'm telling you.

Don't be a pussy.

Vote Obama.

Vote no to thermonuclear world war.

I've already immanentised the eschaton.

What form yours takes is entirely up to you.

Philosopher Bard?

What grand titles he takes.

Doesn't he know the Harpers hail from Lyra?

I'm givin' secrets away again.

...

[seemslikeadream]

Florida GOP Fired Romney Consultant's Voter Registration Firm After Fraudulent Forms Reported in Palm Beach
Thursday, 27 September 2012 10:45
By Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog | Report

The Republican Party of Florida's top recipient of 2012 expenditures, a firm by the name of Strategic Allied Consulting, was just fired on Tuesday night, after more than 100 apparently fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in by the group to the Palm Beach County, FL Supervisor of Elections.
The firm appears to be another shell company of Nathan Sproul, a longtime, notorious Republican operative, hired year after year by GOP Presidential campaigns, despite being accused of shredding Democratic voter registration forms in a number of states over several past elections.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Strategic Allied Consulting has been paid some $667,000 this year by the FL GOP, presumably to run its voter registration campaigns in the state. That number, however, does not account for another identical payment made in August. The Palm Beach Post is reporting tonight that the firm received "more than $1.3 million" from the Republican Party of Florida "to register new voters."
The firm is not only tied to the FL GOP, but also to the Mitt Romney Campaign, which hired Sproul as a political consultant late last year, despite years of fraud allegations against his organizations in multiple states.
Moreover, the firm is also reportedly operating similar voter registration operations on behalf of the Republican Party, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a number of key battleground states this year, including North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado. Strategic Allied has recently taken steps to hide their ownership by Sproul's notorious firm, Sproul & Associates.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Election Susan Bucher confirmed to The BRAD BLOG late this evening that she turned over 106 suspicious voter registration applications to the Florida State Attorney during a meeting yesterday afternoon in Palm Beach, after the "questionable" applications were submitted to her office by a worker for Strategic Allied.
The forms were said to all have similar signatures, changed addresses and party affiliations, and other defects which appear to have all been done by the same hand.
The case emerging in Florida tonight mirrors a similar incident reported earlier this year when more than a thousand fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in to the Sacramento County, CA Registrar of Voters by a group hired by that state's Republican Party.
But that's not the only similar case, as a massive GOP voter registration scheme, which appears to involve the upper-echelons of the national party, begins to emerge...
'Questionable' registrations in Palm Beach
The Palm Beach Post reports tonight that Bucher turned the "questionable" applications over to FL State Attorney Peter Antonacci and Chief Assistant State Attorney Paul Zacks during a meeting on Monday in "an abundance of caution" after her staff "had questions about similar-looking signatures, missing information and wrong addresses on the forms."
The paper reports that "some of the applications she questioned were for new voter registrations while others were for address or party affiliation changes or requests for new voter cards."
According to the FL Election Code, the alteration of a "voter registration application...without the other person's knowledge and consent" is a third degree felony, punishable by a $5,000 fine and up to five years in jail.
Similarly, the willful submission of "any false voter registration information" is also a third degree felony. (Though don't tell fading GOP superstar Ann Coulter that, since she submitted fraudulent information on her own voter registration form --- in Palm Beach County, FL, coincidentally --- back in 2005, before knowingly voting at the wrong precinct illegally, as we have covered in great detail here over the years. See BradBlog.com/CoulterFraud for full documentation.)
The Post reports that "The 106 applications flagged by Bucher were part of a batch of 304 turned in Sept. 5 by the contractor, using the Republican Party of Florida's identification number."
As of tonight, the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) says they have fired the firm, which they claim they had hired at the request of the Republican National Party.
"When we learned today about the instances of potential voter registration fraud that occurred in Palm Beach County," RPOF Director Mike Grissom said, "we immediately informed the Republican National Committee that we were terminating the contract with the voter registration vendor we hired at their request because there is no place for voter registration fraud in Florida."
Palm Beach Post reports that Strategic Allied Consulting was given "identical payments of $667,598 in July and August" by the RPOF.
Strategic Allied Consulting
Strategic Allied Consulting, which has only a single-page, generic website (including typos, as seen above) has been advertising for paid registration workers on "Craigslist, Monster Jobs, Jobs Indeed, Conservative Jobs, etc.," according to a source who has been researching them over the past several days.
Late last month, Greg Flynn at the North Carolina blog BlueNC reported on some of their job listings seeking workers in that swing-state, which Obama narrowly won in 2008, offering to pay anywhere from $11 to $13 per hour.
"WANT TO HELP REPUBLICANS WIN IN NC?," reads one ad, "We are currently hiring self-motivated people to contact voters for the election. No experience needed! We are paying $13/per hour for this program."
"Are you interested in helping Mitt Romney win North Carolina?," reads another, "I am with the North Carolina Republican Party working with Voter Registration Projects and am looking for team members to help expand Republican voter registration."
"Republican Voter Registration Captains Needed," begins another, requesting applicants submit resumes to John Bria of Strategic Allied Consulting. "Help GOP candidates win in November and become an integral part a [sic] presidential campaign."
"Employees will go to high traffic areas, identify conservative voters, ensure that their voter registration is up to date, and then report back at night with their data and the voter registration forms that they collected."
Curiously, that's exactly what is seen in a rather breathtaking viral video we reported on this morning revealing a young voter registration worker in Colorado Springs, CO (El Paso County), asking a potential registrant, "Would you vote for Romney or Obama?" before she would offer a voter registration form. While the worker, when pressed, reluctantly admitted, "we're out here in support of Romney," she then claimed to be working for the El Paso County Clerk's office.
In fact, as we reported, the El Paso County Republican Party Chairman has since admitted the young lady was working for the party. Following publication of our story, we were informed by a tipster that the young lady was actually hired by a third-party contractor, though we have not yet been able to either confirm that point, or identify the name of the contractor.
BlueNC reports, however, that, in addition to FEC campaign filings showing the NC Republican Party paid some $333,000 to Strategic Allied Consulting for services in that state in July, "There is evidence that similar operations are being conducted in Colorado, Florida and Virginia on behalf of the Republican Party."
Was the young worker in Colorado Springs hired by Strategic Allied Consulting for her work with the local GOP? The techniques described in the NC help wanted ads sound very familiar to what was seen on video tape in CO.
At BlueNC, Flynn reports "The company was set up in Virginia in June 2012 and filings with the Virginia Secretary of State reveal no identifying information other than that of a corporate filing service." He adds: "There is no evidence of business registration in either North Carolina, Colorado, or Florida (or Arizona)," where Sproul's Sproul & Associates is based.
At the time of BlueNC's report, the domain StrategicAlliedConsulting.com was registered to Sproul & Associates in Tempe, Arizona. The day after they published their report, the domain name registration was quickly changed to "private", but not before Flynn was able to grab a screen shot confirming the ownership of the domain:

The notorious Nathan Sproul
We've reported on Sproul many times over the years, as the GOP operative, and former chair of the Arizona GOP and the state's Christian Coalition, pops up again and again in each Presidential Election year. He is hired over and over by the Republican Party, despite years of fraud allegations in multiple states against his organizations, which are said to have routinely changed or entirely destroyed Democratic voter registrations.
He operates as Sproul & Associates as well as Lincoln Strategy Group, among other names, including now, apparently, Strategic Allied Consulting.
And this year, after being hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in '04 and the McCain/Palin campaign in '08, Sproul was "quietly" hired by the Romney campaign as a political consultant late last year, according to a June report from Lee Fang at the non-partisan Republic Report:
Late last year, Mitt Romney's presidential campaign began paying Nathan Sproul, a political consultant with a long history of destroying Democratic voter registration forms and manipulating ballot initiatives. Sproul, who changed his firm's name from Sproul and Associates to Lincoln Strategies, has received over $70,000 from Romney's campaign
...
Republic Report reviewed disclosures from the Federal Elections Commission. Sproul's Lincoln Strategy Group has received about $71,391 in payments for "field consulting" and "rent & utilities" by the Romney for President Inc. committee from November 30th through March 2nd of this year.
Fang then goes on to highlight what he describes as some of Sproul's "greatest hits" as detailed by ThinkProgress while reporting on Sproul's Lincoln Strategies astroturf work for a so-called "Clean Coal" industry campaign in 2009:
- In Oregon and Nevada, Lincoln Strategies - then known as Sproul and Associates - was investigated for destroying Democratic voter registration forms. The Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign paid Sproul $7.4 million for campaign work. [CNN, 10/14/04; KGW News, 10/13/04; East Valley Tribune, 09/07/06]
- In Nevada, people who registered as Democrats with Lincoln Strategies - then known as Sproul and Associates - found their names absent from the voter registration rolls. [Reno Gazette-Journal, 10/29/04]
- During the 2006 midterm elections, Wal-Mart banned Lincoln Strategies for partisan voter registration efforts in Tennessee. The Republican National Committee had hired the firm. [Associated Press, 08/24/06]
- In Arizona, Lincoln Strategies employed a variety of deceptive tactics - including systematically lying about the bill - to push a ballot initiative to eviscerate the state's clean elections law. [Salon, 10/21/04]
- Lincoln Strategies, then employed by the Republican Party, was behind efforts to place Ralph Nader on the ballot in states such as Arizona. [American Prospect, 06/25/04]
Despite all of those years of allegations, the McCain campaign went on to hire Sproul in 2008, according to Sam Stein at Huffington Post, who reported at the time:
John McCain's campaign has directed $175,000 to the firm of a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states.
According to campaign finance records, a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the RNC and the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy in June for purposes of "registering voters." The managing partner of that firm is Nathan Sproul, a renowned GOP operative who has been investigated on multiple occasions for suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms and even spearheading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to hinder the Democratic ticket.
...
That Sproul would come under the employment umbrella of the McCain campaign --- the Republican National Committee has also separately paid Lincoln Strategy at least $37,000 for voter registration efforts this cycle --- is not terribly surprising. Sproul, who has donated nearly $30,000 to McCain's campaign, has been in the good graces of GOP officials for the past decade despite charges of ethical and potentially legal wrongdoing.
In Fang's report, he goes on to note that "Even former Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), during a hearing on voter fraud, admitted that 'the difference between ACORN and Sproul is that ACORN doesn't throw away or change registration documents after they have been filled out.'"
GOP voter registration fraud epidemic continues
As we described earlier today, in our story on the disturbing Colorado GOP voter registration worker video, while Republicans had long been critical of fraudulent voter registration efforts they inaccurately attributed to ACORN, the non-partisan, four-decade old community organizing group (which has since been forced into bankruptcy as a result of the years-long GOP effort to mischaracterize them and their work) there is no evidence, to our knowledge, that any of its tens of thousands of registration workers ever screened out potential registrants from one party or another before allowing them to register, as seen in CO.
Neither is there evidence that any of their workers ever changed party affiliations on registration forms, as is being alleged tonight in Palm Beach County, or destroyed Democratic forms, as has been alleged over the years, as noted by Republican Rep. Cannon.
Moreover, it should be noted that of the handful of ACORN registration workers who submitted fraudulent applications over the years, almost all of those workers were turned into officials by ACORN themselves. The group checked all applications for validity before turning them in, flagged those which appeared to be fraudulent, and then turned them in to officials, along with the names of the workers who had defrauded them.
Contrast that with the disturbing activities of Sproul & Associates, Lincoln Strategies and now Sproul's Strategic Allied Consulting, along with what was admitted to by the Republican Party today in Colorado, and revealed by a number of recent cases of massive registration fraud by the Republican Party in California. (For the record, ACORN was never hired to do registration work by the Democratic Party, despite inaccurate Republican claims to the contrary.)
In 2006, GOP voter registration firms in California were reported by the LA Times to have turned in thousands of invalid registration forms, as well as fraudulent signatures on petitions in San Bernardino County. In once instance, "About 4,800 of more than 5,600 signatures submitted [by John Burkett Petition Management] were found to be invalid and were tossed out by election officials," the paper reported.
In 2008, at the height of that year's GOP/Fox "News" ACORN "voter fraud" scam, a group calling itself Young Political Majors (YPM) was hired by the CA Republican Party to do voter registration. The firm was reportedly paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP. YPM was subsequently found to have been changing thousands of voter registration forms from Democratic to Republican. The group's CEO, Mark Anthony Jacoby, was eventually arrested (see video of my appearance announcing the news on Fox in a live "Fox News Alert" that year) before he later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.
And, earlier this year, in 2012, the Sacramento Republican Party was found to have hired Momentum Political Services, a firm headed up by a woman described as a "professional con-artist". The group allegedly turned in thousands of fraudulent voter registrations as part of a $50,000 bounty scheme seeking Republican registrations, as paid for by the GOP in the district of Republican Congressman Dan Lungren.
All the while, Republicans were loudly accusing Democrats of committing "voter fraud" requiring polling place Photo ID restrictions to stop it, even though there are just 10 known cases of in-person impersonation --- the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by Photo ID --- out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to a recent exhaustive report by the non-partisan investigative news consortium, News21.
Perhaps it's a case of projection. Perhaps the GOP knows about the fraud that they are carrying out, so they presume that Democrats must be doing something similar. Nonetheless, when it comes to voter registration fraud, Republicans are the champs, hands down. And it remains to be seen how wide and how high this story will go. This one may have legs.
As to actual voter fraud, it's Republicans --- and very high profile ones at that, including Mitt Romney himself --- who are winning that contest as well. See our recent report detailing 10+ recent cases of voter fraud and other related election fraud crimes by very high profile Republicans right here.

[barracuda]

Taibbi:

This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... miA1llpThe press everywhere is buzzing this week with premature obituaries of the Romney campaign. New polls are out suggesting that Mitt Romney's electoral path to the presidency is all but blocked. Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama's widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

That's left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an incompetent challenger. Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn't come down to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we've all missed out somehow.

Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote a thoughtful, insightful editorial today that blames the painful, repetitive and vacuous campaign process for thinning the electoral herd and leaving us with only automatons and demented narcissists willing to climb the mountain:

Romney's bleeding has plenty to do with his intrinsic shortcomings and his shortsightedness: how does a man who has harbored presidential ambitions almost since he was a zygote create a paper trail of offshore accounts and tax returns like his?

But I wonder if we're not seeing the worst possible version of him, and if it isn't the ugly flower of the process itself. I wonder, too, what the politicians mulling 2016 make of it, and whether, God help us, we'll be looking at an even worse crop of candidates then.

The Times, meanwhile, ran a house editorial blaming Romney's general obliqueness, his willingness to stretch the truth and his inability to connect with ordinary people for his fall. David Brooks ran a column suggesting that Romney's overreliance on a message of strict market conservatism, ignoring the values message of "traditional" conservatism, was what killed him in the end.

All of these points of view have merit, I guess, but to me they're mostly irrelevant. The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.

Think about it. Four years ago, we had an economic crash that wiped out somewhere between a quarter to 40% of the world's wealth, depending on whom you believe. The crash was caused by an utterly disgusting and irresponsible class of Wall Street paper-pushers who loaded the world up with deadly leverage in pursuit of their own bonuses, then ran screaming to the government for a handout (and got it) the instant it all went south.

These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don't oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, financing the construction of new factories in places like China and India.

They've relentlessly lobbied the government to give themselves tax holidays and shelters, and have succeeded at turning the graduated income tax idea on its head by getting the IRS to accept a sprawling buffet of absurd semantic precepts, like the notions that "capital gains" and "carried interest" are somehow not the same as "income."

The people in this group inevitably support every war that America has even the slimmest chance of involving itself in, but neither they nor their children ever fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of criminal penalty for their behavior.

That last thing I would say is probably appropriate, except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor (and mostly black and Hispanic) kids get tossed by cops every year (would you believe 684,000 street stops in New York alone in 2011?) in the same city where Wall Street's finest work, and those kids do real time for possession of anything from a marijuana stem to an empty vial. How many Wall Street guys would you think would fill the jails if the police spent even one day doing aggressive, no-leniency stop-and-frisk checks outside the bars in lower Manhattan? How many Lortabs and Adderalls and little foil-wraps of coke or E would pop out of those briefcases?

For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life – he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The number of lost souls was astounding").

He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of this system. Bruni of the Times is right that the process scares away qualified candidates who could have given Obama a better run for all that money. But what he misses is that the brutal campaign process, with its two years of nearly constant media abuse and "gotcha" watch-dogging, serves mainly to select out any candidate who is considered anything like a threat to the corrupt political establishment – and that selection process is the only thing that has kept this race close.

Barack Obama is hardly a complete Wall Street stooge. The country's most powerful bankers seem genuinely to hate his guts, mainly because they're delusional and are sincerely offended by anyone who dares to even generally criticize them for being greedy or ethically suspect, as Obama has with his occasional broadsides against "fat cat bankers" and so on.

On the other hand, Obama's policy choices in the last four years have made it impossible for him to run aggressively against the corruption and greed and generally self-obsessed, almost cinematic douchiness that Romney represents.

With 300 million possible entrants in the race, how did we end up with two guys who would both refuse to bring a single case against a Wall Street bank during a period of epic corruption? How did we end up with two guys who refuse to repeal the carried-interest tax break? How did we end with two guys who supported a vast program of bailouts with virtually no conditions attached to them? Citigroup has had so many people running policy in the Obama White House, they should open a branch in the Roosevelt Room. It's not as bad as it would be in a Romney presidency, but it comes close.

If this race had even one guy running in it who didn't take money from all the usual quarters and actually represented the economic interests of ordinary people, it wouldn't be close. It shouldn't be close. If one percent of the country controls forty percent of the country's wealth – and that trend is moving rapidly in the direction of more inequality with each successive year – what kind of split should we have, given that at least one of the candidates enthusiastically and unapologetically represents the interests of that one percent?

To me the biggest reason the split isn't bigger is the news media, which wants a close race mainly for selfish commercial reasons – it's better theater and sells more ads. Most people in the news business have been conditioned to believe that national elections should be close.

This conditioning leads to all sorts of problems and journalistic mischief, like a tendency of pundits to give equal weight to opposing views in situations where one of those views is actually completely moronic and illegitimate, a similar tendency to overlook or downplay glaring flaws in a candidate just because one of the two major parties has blessed him or her with its support (Sarah Palin is a classic example), and the more subtly dangerous tendency to describe races as "hotly contested" or "neck and neck" in nearly all situations regardless of reality, which not only has the effect of legitimizing both candidates but leaves people with the mistaken impression that the candidates are fierce ideological opposites, when in fact they aren't, or at least aren't always. This last media habit is the biggest reason that we don't hear about the areas where candidates like Romney and Obama agree, which come mostly in the hardcore economic issues.

It's obviously simplistic to say that in a country where the wealth divide is as big as it is in America, elections should always be landslide victories for the candidate who represents the broke-and-struggling sector of the population. All sorts of non-economic factors, from social issues to the personal magnetism of the candidates, can tighten the races. And just because someone happens to represent the very rich, well, that doesn't automatically disqualify him or her from higher office; he or she might have a vision for the whole country that is captivating (such a candidacy, however, would be more feasible during a time when the very rich were less completely besotted with corruption).

But when one of the candidates is Mitt Romney, the race shouldn't be close. You'll hear differently in the coming weeks from the news media, which will spend a lot of time scratching its figurative beard while it argues that a 54-46 split, or however this thing ends up (and they'll call anything above 53% for Obama a rout, I would guess), is evidence that the system is broken. But what we probably should be wondering is why it was ever close at all.

[lupercal]

^ good read, though it's a little early to be counting the chickens. Yes the polls the last two weeks look terrible for Romney, but on the off chance he'd picked a better veep and BO had stumbled in his mini-missile crisis with Israel and Carterized himself, which was clearly the intended effect, things could be very different in which case Taibi would be writing the same damn article wondering why Obama doesn't just resign now as he never had a ghost of a chance against the mighty Mitt.

But to be honest, Mitt would have had to have been a hell of a lot more devious than he is to have pulled it off, as his biggest problem is simply being the Gordon Gekko that Taibi admits he is. Also he'd need to be smarter as picking Ryan was the kiss of death as I said at the time. But it's always been about the down-ticket races. Dems lost the House in 2010 and nobody was particularly shocked, and until last week it didn't look like they'd get it back in November but things have indeed changed. What it boils down to though is that BO is (a) a good candidate and (b) like it or not, a very good president. Not FDR maybe, but IMHO better than Clinton, Carter, and LBJ.

PSA: don't forget to register to vote! Deadlines vary by state but generally they need to RECEIVE your registration form 14-30 days before the election, so the deadlines are fast approaching. Election day is Nov. 6.

Find your state's deadlines and download a registration form here: http://www.longdistancevoter.org/voter_ ... GX82Oxcyq0

p.s. as of last week California has online registration (deadline Oct. 22), link and info here: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vr.htm

[Nordic]

The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of
winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank
incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every
other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less
money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents

Taibbi's good but he needs to figure put that the dems aren't incompetent, but complicit. Occam's Razor and all that.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It was Mayer Amschel Rothchild, from the wealthy Rothchild dynasty, who over 200 years ago said:

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes her laws.”

...

And as you consider that, why not also consider this:

“Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of this country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

Those words were taken from a letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1864.

It bugs the fuck out of me that Global Research would run a piece of shit like that. Quality control. Lost artform.

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

I think 'complicit' explains some of what happened in Wisconsin recently.
I mean really --you always want to run the dude that lost to the other dude (walker) if you get a chance to go again ya know! sheesh -no wonder Rob Zerban cant get much traction (at least as far as I have heard ) -having a traitorous leadership behind him!